Handmade Music L.A. 3.0 is happening on Saturday May 29th at CRASH Space, 10526 Venice Blvd., Culver City 90232.
Handmade music is all about people making music with hand-made instruments (hardware or software). We will have performances with monomes, and Pd patches, and chess boards. And demonstrations of instruments people have made and that you can make yourself.
Starts at 8 PM, open to everyone, a $5 donation to CRASH Space is recommended.
(via CRASH Space)
I have had trouble uploading my (unusually) long tracks tracks to the RPM Challenge Jukebox. Instead of putting this year’s in the download store, I set up my Bandcamp account.
You would think that Detroit music buddies (and Raconteurs bandmates) Jack White and Brendan Benson could coordinate their new album release dates a little better, but they both released their new solo albums (“Blunderbuss” and “What Kind Of World,” respectively) on Tuesday. To pack the day even more, Portland indie rock favorites The Dandy Warhols released their new album, “This Machine,” as well.
All three artists have done roughly the same thing: they started their own labels and are selling music directly to their fans (well, mostly). Which is the new reality for working bands. But in this brave new world, everyone has to find their own way outside the confines of the polished, uniform studio system. Unfortunately, just because everyone can sell their music directly to fans doesn’t mean they know how to do it well.
These three albums coming out the same day made for a nice contrast in what works and what doesn’t.
Obstacles
Don’t put obstacles in the way of your fans giving you money.
This seems like a no-brainer, but those obstacles take many forms.
I popped the CD of 2012 RPM Challenge album, Aponeurotic Scleroskeleton, in the mail today.
This is my fifth RPM challenge, and I had forgotten that it was supposed to be postmarked by March 1. I promise that it was completed during the month of February!
In theory, it should be available for listening in the RPM Jukebox soon. But I never got last year’s entry uploaded because they have a 20 MB file size upload limit, and my entries are generally one single track, too large to upload.
***
The album is a little sparse, as I ran out of time. It’s a recording of a MakerBot printing a 3D object – a poker chip with the CRASHspace logo, stretched four times. The recording was made with a contact mic made at the CMKT workshop at CRASHspace last year.
The MakerBot is mesmerizing to watch, and hear, print. Circles are particularly musical, as two of the stepper motors are moving at once, at constantly changing speeds.
I recorded much more of the MakerBot’s stepper motors. They sound fantastic through the contact microphone. My original plans were much more elaborate, but were curtailed by time.
The idea of using stepper motor sounds was inspired by my adventures in healthcare during the month of February, especially by the noises made by the MRI machines I spent a fair amount of time in. MRI machines are loud, and they make you put in earplugs during the scan. I wished I could have recorded the sounds, as they were marvelous. It sounded like they were playing my own personal Music Of The Spheres, just for me.
The really noisy sounds of the MRI sound like giant stepper motors. It reminded me of the midi2cnc script that was written to make a CNC mill play music. This was adapted for the MakerBot, and during the first Handmade Music L.A., we had a concerto for three MakerBots. So the MakerBot was a perfect platform for stepper motor music.
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