Joshua Van Tassel

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It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve ben able to sit down and do anything new really, and today it finally came together. Spent some time on a short thing that I’ve been trying to make longer, then realized today it should be exactly as long as it is. Took me a while but that’s ok. Here’s how it’s sounding so far. I miss you, sorry I’ve been so out of the internet loop.

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I’ve been preoccuopied the past week with a new friend in my life named Samwise who is insanely cute and demanding of most of my attention musical and otherwise.

The ladyfriend and myself have pretty much done nothing except chase her around, hug her, scold her, cleanm up her “eliminations”, love her some more, and hope she sleeps at night. This week should be better, and I”ll be jumping back in where I left off with some new music. Sometimes time away is good for the ears and I’m hearing some things I wasn’t before, so lets see if we can take advantage of it.

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BJÖRK UNVEILS LIVE RESIDENCY
PUBLISHED 6 HOURS AGO

The innovative Icelandic icon unveils her new music and multimedia residency at Manchester International Festival
TEXT BY DAZED DIGITAL
This summer, Björk introduces Biophilia, an extraordinary immersive project and her most ambitious work to date. The multi-media endeavour encompasses her music, installations and live shows, and celebrating the use of modern technology by utilising the internet. The project aims to explore ideas like how sound works, the infinite expanse of the universe, from planetary systems to atomic structures.

The world premiere of Björk’s Biophilia live show will be held at Manchester International Festival for a three-week residency – across six intimate shows in the Campfield Market Hall for audiences of 1800, as her first UK dates in over three years. For these six special shows, Björk will be performing new tracks from the forthcoming Biophilia studio album as well as with a small group of unique musical collaborators. The show will feature a range of specially conceived and crafted instruments, among them a bespoke digitally-controlled pipe organ; a 30 foot pendulum that harnesses the earth’s gravitational pull to create musical patterns – creating a unique bridge between the ancient and the modern; a bespoke gamelan-celeste hybrid; and a one-off extraordinary pin barrel harp.

In a special collaboration with MIF, the Biophilia live show will travel to major cities around the world following the Manchester premiere. MIF will also be working with young people in Manchester to explore the musicological, scientific and technological ideas behind the project. In a series of educational workshops schoolchildren will be given the unique opportunity to experience the world of Biophilia first hand, and to immerse themselves in the endlessly rich and inspiring place where cutting edge technology, music and nature meet.

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Just finished another remix off for my good friends The I love You Toos. The process of a remix is so totally different for everyone, and I’ve been finding it varies even from piece to piece for me. Sometimes I’ll hear a direction I want to go in immediately and it’ll all happen really fast, other times it takes days of listening and experimenting before anything worth per-suing really comes out. This one fell kind of in the middle. It took a little while to wrap my head around what I wanted to do, but once I started it came together fairly fast.

Here’s the original -

and here’s the remix -

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ps, if you use the completely awesome CBC3 webpage to listen to music through the glory of the internet, I’ve set up a page there and can’t remember if I told you about it. If not here it is -

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From the UK Guardian a while back, really interesting article about literally scary sounds.

by: Mark Pilkington    

 Have you ever wondered what a ghost sounds like? Engineer Vic Tandy may already know. In the early 1980s, Tandy was working in a laboratory designing medical equipment. Word began to spread among the staff that the labs might be haunted, something Tandy put down to the constant wheeze of life-support machines operating in the building. One evening he was working on his own in the lab when he began to feel distinctly uncomfortable, breaking into a cold sweat as the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. He was convinced that he was being watched. Then, out of the corner of his eye, Tandy noticed an ominous grey shape drifting slowly into view, but when he turned around to face it, it was gone. Terrified, he went straight home. The next day Tandy, a keen fencer, noticed that a foil blade clamped in a vice was vibrating up and down very fast. He found that the vibrations were caused by a standing sound wave that was bouncing between the end walls of the laboratory and reached a peak of intensity in the centre of the room. He calculated that the frequency of the standing wave was about 19hz (cycles per second) and soon discovered that it was produced by a newly installed extractor fan. When the fan was turned off, the sound wave disappeared. The key here is frequency: 19hz is in the range known as infrasound, below the range of human hearing, which begins at 20hz. Tandy learned that low frequencies in this region can affect humans and animals in several ways, causing discomfort, dizziness, blurred vision (by vibrating your eyeballs), hyperventilation and fear, possibly leading to panic attacks. A more recent investigation took place in an allegedly haunted 14th-century pub cellar in Coventry, where people have reported terrifying experiences for many years, including seeing a spectral grey lady. Here Tandy also uncovered a 19hz standing wave, adding further evidential weight to his theory. In an interesting parallel, researchers have recorded that, prior to an attack, a tiger’s roar contains frequencies of about 18hz, which might disorientate and paralyse their intended victim. Is this the sound of fear itself?

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you may be doing something interesting and it’s the sound you wanted and it may be original even? Then hear some stuff that sounds exactly like what you were doing but better? yeah that just happened. I love Bibio but his sounds are better then mine dammnit and we should all buy his new album this month. Grudgingly of course.

Such a great website – http://www.southernsouls.ca

THE OLYMPIC SYMPHONIUM – No Bad Habits from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

SNOWBLINK – “Jolene” by Dolly Parton from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

BEN GUNNING – High Road from Mitch Fillion (southernsouls.ca) on Vimeo.

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My favorite dog Dunjia came over to hang out yesterday and help me in rehearsal, and then some tracking later. She’s not much of a bass player but she can lay down a mean keyboard part. I started a new tune yesterday and played it through the monitors for her, and I think she told me she really likes it. I can’t quite tell, maybe she had to pee? Maybe both. Here’s something to start with at least, hopefully I’ll get deeper in today -

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