Lucky Dog Audio Post

Image by Will Amato

"By the time I found myself delivered to the lobby of Le Parker Meridien, I felt bullied, bruited about by staff and handlers, like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth, an incomprehensible film Perkus had weeks before insisted I watch, a treatise on luxuriant self-pity that now felt terrifically relevant" (page 188).

Here's another book-mixtape, this one with songs culled from Jonathan Lethem's incredible new novel Chronic City. Lethem himself has posted a couple of playlists pertaining to the book but none feature Sandy Bull or Captain Beefheart or Crispy Ambulance or Souled America or any of the more obscure songs that made it into these pages. Oh well, that task is for obsessive music geeks. Music geek admission: I spent a couple of days trying to track down a song from Zeroville. Fred Mills ended up helping me out with that search. Thanks Fred!

With these book mixes, I always try to bring another audio theme into the track listing. This book is chock full of cultural references both real and imagined - the Criterion Collection, Gnuppets, Marlon Brando, Morrison Groom, Florian Ib, etc. I made a couple of inside jokes with SFX - I introduce the Richard Hell track with a cell phone ring (Richard Abneg's ringtone is "Blank Generation") and end-tagged the Sandy Bull track with this marvelous modem sample from freesound (Perkus Tooth is on dial up). But primarily I used audio snippets from The Man Who Fell To Earth for my song transitions. Yeah, it's quite a reach. The movie is mentioned just once in passing but it seems like blowing up a reference like that for its audio goodies is just the thing Lethem's artist/critic/stoner character Perkus Tooth would enjoy. So here ya go Perkus. Merry Christmas, wherever you are.

TRACKLIST:

1. ROLLING STONES - Miss You
2. RICHARD HELL & THE VOIDOIDS - Blank Generation
3. PETER BLEGVAD - (Something Else Is) Working Harder
4. SANDY BULL - Carmina Burana Fantasy
5. CRISPY AMBULANCE - Chill
6. VAN MORRISON - Who Was That Masked Man
7. SOULED AMERICA - Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends
8. CAPTAIN BEEFHEART & THE MAGIC BAND - I Love You, Big Dummy
9. WARREN ZEVON - Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner
10. ROLLING STONES - Shattered

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Lucky Dog Charles Wyrick runs up to NYC with local songwriter James Scott Cook to play with Julian Lennon on the CBS Early Show. I know! Check out Charles' vest-less performance (above) and the interview. Proceeds to benefit Lupus research. We're pleased to present one of Charles' many brushes with fame.

The Pedals of Martin Courtney, IV:

•MXR Phase 90

•Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man

The Pedals of Matthew Mondanile, III:

•Boss DD-7 Digital Delay

•Roland Space Echo

•Small Stone

Yesterday New Jersey's Real Estate stopped by the studio for our second installment of Pedal Talk, our new podcast devoted to guitar effects pedals. Matthew (left channel) and Martin (right channel) are doing some really cool, subtle stuff with delays and phasers. No distortion boxes here. These two are devoted to clean sounds modulated, at times, by wide and slow phaser washes provided by either their MXR Phase 90 or Electro-Harmonix Small Stone. Aside from the occasional Roland Space Echo feedback whoosh AKA "the hurricane sound" (well-documented in this episode), their delay pedal settings feature quick and close echo returns more akin to reverb. Interestingly Matthew uses his Boss DD-7 Digital delay for a volume boost more than for a delay. It's also cool to learn that they used their guitar effects for filtering their vocals on their new cd (buy it here, here, or here). All in all we had a great conversation. Plus they graced us with an in-studio performance of "Fake Blues." Dig it. Here's Vol. 2:

Oh yeah, we've got an iTunes channel now, it's here if you wanna subscribe.

Or you can download the full episode here.

UPDATE

DOWNLOAD "Fake Blues" Live on Pedal Talk*

*link expires in 7 days

Yeah. We cast and recorded these elves. The biggest challenge was finding an elf with a Spanish accent. It's hard enough to get elves in the booth this time of year but finding a Spanish elf who also had time for a VO session! Dang. That took a couple of calls. A Red Deluxe production, animation from Miracle Studios.

This past month we did the sound design for this bumpin' ASU promo that ran on ESPN2 during the ASU / ULM game on October 19. Scott did some really rad sfx work to create the ratcheting sounds that mark the Transformers-ish action early in this video. Without giving too much away I'll just mention that guns were involved and leave it at that.

Speaking of sports and sound design, have you seen the Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No video produced by No Mas???!!! Yowza! First off, it's an amazing story. But this video is the stuff! Great animation, killer song and some supa-clever sound design. The phone sounds are brilliant. Dig it! Wish I could say this was one of ours. Envy, thy name is Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No.

At long last we've launched Pedal Talk, our new podcast devoted to talking about magic and mischievous guitar effects pedals. In this installment we focus on a quartet of stomp boxes currently residing in the esteemed pedal-board of Chris Michaels. Check it, in this episode we demo:

• MXR Carbon Copy Analog Delay

• Electro-Harmonix Holy Grail Reverb

• Fulltone Supa-Trem

• Seymour Duncan Twin Tone Classic

These are some wicked boxes. It was a blast talking to Chris about how he uses them and what he likes/dislikes about each one. Which reminds me, if you wanna hear more from Chris, his new album Morning and Night is now available on iTunes and at the Max Recordings Store. Or you can catch him and his band, The Cranks, at 9pm this Saturday 11/14/09 at the Oyster Bar.

So, enough with the shameless plugs. I could go on and on about what a great guitar player Chris is but it's best to let the audio speak for itself. Without further ado, heeeerrrre's...

PEDAL TALK

TRACKLIST:

1. COLDPLAY - Viva La Vida
2. LUDACRIS - Money Maker
3. RAY LAMONTAGNE - Saved By A Woman
4. iiO - Rapture (Armin Van Buuren Remix)
5. HARRY NILSSON - Zombie Jamboree (Back to Back)
6. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS - Dani California
7. ROOT BOY SLIM - Boogie 'Til You Puke
8. SLAID CLEAVES - Sinner's Prayer
9. SINEAD O'CONNOR - She Moved Through The Fair
10. THE DAMNWELLS - I Will Keep The Bad Things From You

So what rhyming poems do is they take all these nearby sound curves and remind you that they first existed that way in your brain... We like to visit the parallel sound-studio universe with all these mixing boards and XLR patch cables going here and there, independent of the other part of our head, which is the conscious part that has spent a long time sweating the books and trying to make sense of objects and ideas and meanings. Trying to be a responsible citizen. Rhyme taught us to talk (111-112).

Though Paul Chowder, the narrator of Nicholson Baker's new novel The Anthologist, spends most of his time thinking about poems and poets, he references a handfull of surprising songs within the pages of this beguiling novel. The music mentioned comes to the forefront of Chowder's mind primarily through rhymes he likes. On page 164 Chowder scans Ludacris lyrics along with poems by A.A. Milne, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Vachel Lindsay, T. S. Eliot, and Edgar Allen Poe. Elsewhere songs by Coldplay and the Red Hot Chili Peppers appear after ruminations on Sara Teasdale and Edna St. Vincent Millay. It's a postmodern poetry feast with pop culture references served on the side.

From a mixing standpoint, I dropped some samples of poets reading their own work to use for transitions between songs. And since "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop figures so prominently in this book I cracked open MAX/MSP and tried mashing up a recording of Bishop with the iiO song Chowder mentions on page 82. There are some other audio surprises in this mix as well. For instance, who would have thought Edna St. Vincent Millay had such rocking inflections in her voice? Enjoy.

UPDATE:

I've been fascinated by the idea of annotated audio ever since I read about this BBC project back in 2005. It's cool to see that Soundcloud has set up a way to do this via their comments tool. Basically you can tag audio segments with footnotes. It's for other listeners to point out things they like in your mix. Here I have used it to tag the poet samples I've used for my transitions. Check it out:

The Anthologist by redchuck

The assignment: write and record a school song/national anthem for a sports team that sounds like a huge men's chorus. Demo it up in less than a week.

We really had fun doing it. We listened to a lot of school songs. Sellout came up with the composition. Singers were hired. We had a concert band standing by to replace the demo instruments. But as is often the case, now it's dead. And while we can't share the whole thing with you, here's a little taste.

Stay with it. Behind-the-scenes with singers can be a little scary. And yes, that hat I'm wearing makes me look like a itinerant NASCAR fan.

Via Me-Fi