Uwe Schmidt's ultra-funky set (as ATOM™) at Mutek using only an Akai MPC-2500 and a Tenori-on inspired me to write this.

This version uses only my Tenori-on and one of Kaosspad 3's. (There are some resident Kaossilator samples in the KP3.)

http://vimeo.com/4840732

Longest Night was inspired by an all night rave(?) sponsored by Crudessence the night before the solstice. A friend was one of the DJs, and I lent my projector to the VJ.Adham & Catherine is the newest piece, inspired by the particular tracks on Adham Shaikh's Fusion CD on which he collaborated with bansuri player Catherine Potter. The percussion that starts with the bansuri loop is an Irish bodhran, kinda apropos since she mentioned to me that her Potter lineage is Scots-Irish. (I'm a Potter as well, traced my ancestor to SE of Belfast.)

Added some Irish fiddle (the similarities to Nordic fiddling are obvious), tweaked some levels.

A new one in the player - drawing upon Nordic and Indian styles to celebrate the winter solstice.

A Norwegian keyed fiddle (yes, I know they're usually Swedish) loop from AppleLoops, santoor, percussion, a vocal sample from my friend Riffat Sultana, and my Godin fretless.

Constructed using only the Yamaha Tenori-on (synthesizer/grid sequencer) and Korg Kaoss Pad 3 (effects.)

Eleventy-first (Godin preliminary mix) - replaces All From Africa in the player. More Godin guitar to appear (solos etc.) in time. For now it makes its appearance first doubling the bansuri line, using the Roland VG-88 patch Raga, and then doubling another line played by my "congaflute" sample (more on that in a moment), this time using a straight "acoustic" tone, using my stick-on contact mic, the Schertler Basik (a variety of piezo), in preference to the Godin's own built-in piezos, which I find "quacky", like a lot of under-bridge/saddle piezos.

The congaflute sample is one that began life back in '89 when I had an Akai S612 sampler. (Still have it in storage. Bulky rackmount thing, though.) My cousin Alice had lent me her conga (a gift from her saxophonist brother Tom: a nice custom job made by a guy in Central Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where I was living at the time) for 6 months while she went of to the Middle East. I sampled its nice round open tone and then with a little Nepalese flute (bought at the Tibetan store Prem-la in Cambridge in the early 80s, from the woman of the same name) overlaid the same note. The resultant sound I find useful for bass lines in its lower range and melodies in its upper. It's used in both capacities here.

Removed Lost It and Trance Restoration to make room for two new things in process. Plage et Forêt is reggae/dubbish, Second Half is pulse-psychedelic, I suppose.

I can't call the latter one 'trance' as that has now been officially reserved for dance music of 140 BPM (this one's only 120) or more with the de rigeur basic house beat (massive kick drum every downbeat), from the entertaining but incorrect notion many rave hippies have: that all traditional shamanistic trance/chant musics always have that BAM BAM BAM BAM down beat. Actually, they don't. More like house DJs didn't have to change much to segue into 'trance' music. (Take away the massive kick on every downbeat and your music will inevitably be categorized as 'ambient'. Translation: Without the kick making the pulse of the music incredibly obvious, rhythmically-challenged white kids can't find the beat, so it must be 'ambient'. Watch any dance floor when the kick drops out for 8 bars or so - the kids suddenly move a lot less, may start to get a little panicky... Big relief when it comes back in.)

Some guitar early on in Second Half, partly doubled by "sitar" (patch in MOTU Ethno.) Some of the shimmery and bell-like synth washes later on this piece were done with the Yamaha Tenori-on, some with its own voices and some triggering softsynths.

Based on the afternoon raga Brindavani (or Brindabani) Sarang, which my teacher (Uwe Neumann) started teaching me last fall, and which I've now resumed studying since he got back from his winter in India.

Briefly (and oversimplified):

Arohi: Sa - Re - Ma - Pa - Ni komal - Pa - Ni (shuddh) - Sa

(root, second, fourth, fifth, flat seventh, fifth, major seventh, octave)

Avarohi: Sa - Ni komal - Pa - Ma - Re - Ma - Re - Sa

(octave, flat 7th, fifth, fourth, second, fourth, second, root)

You'll note there's no third (ga) or sixth (dha) anywhere in the raag. This causes a slight illusion that the key is centered on the pa rather than the sa (which I exploit in the synth accompaniment here.) But the constant presence of the sa in the tanpura, tabla, and chikari strings keeps it anchored to the actual root key in standard practice. Here I've had to include a low pedal C sharp and a tanpura drone chord which comes in just before the guitar to assert the C sharp sa and keep it balanced.

One uses the major seventh when ascending to a sa (and I use it as a quickly passing ornament/grace note in conjunction with the second above it thus: re sa ni sa), but when descending one always plays the flat seventh.

A meend (glide) between the fourth and second is very characteristic of this raag, and is often echoed by a similar meend between the komal ni and pa and between the sa and komal ni and between the pa and ma.


------

I removed Ana b'Shoof - sa fee? to make room for this. You can find that piece in the Reverb Nation player on this page.

Since MySpaz now allows up to six pieces in the player rather than the previous four (an improvement no doubt trumpeted by Marketing as only slightly less momentous than than world peace), I put back two of my favorite compositions from 2006, Leur Message Tranquille ("their quiet message" in French) and Ana b'shoof - sa fee? ("I see - is that so?" in Levantine Arabic).

The latter features vocal samples of brothers Shafqat Ali Khan and Sukhawat Ali Khan, from the Worldpop sample CD by Shiraz Ali Khan. Message is, I think, my most successful emulation of my fave electronica jam band, Ozric Tentacles (of whom Eat Static's Joie and Merv used to be members.)

The result of two sets of music I heard at this year's Montréal Jazz Fest percolating around my subconscious for the last couple of weeks: West African music with a heavy dose of Afrobeat - both Femi Kuti and Seun Kuti's bands plus other Fela tribute bands - and some excellent ambient groove jazz (Nik Bärtsch's Ronin, Bugge Wesseltoft's Jazzland Community.)

I removed "femme fâché part" to make room for this.

Not a "trance" genre piece; just a reference to the effect extended periods of playing and working out new music has on me. Centering.


Guitar not yet on this as well.


I removed Leur Message Tranquille to make room for this. (It had been up since last July....)

("Angry Woman Leaves")

Middle-Eastern Swamp Funk Blues, I suppose.

No guitar on it yet.

I removed Lost It to make room for this.

Longer version with (sampled) tabla solo, harmonium playing Azanian-style accordion riff.

Update. May 17th: had to delete and re-upload the file, as it appears a glitch (a sudden leap in volume at the beginning), which isn't there in the original file, was introduced in the process of conversion by MySpaz for its player. This of course means that the play counter gets reset to zero once again. A shame one cannot aggregate counts from different versions of a tune put up in rapid succession, as I sometimes do. All it would take is an additional field tagged as something like "version of single song -X-" and a few lines of code to do the concatenation of play counts for files thus tagged.