Clutching the short straw

I am pleased to announce that the next issue of “Böse Geschichten” will feature a full-page spread of one of my shots. “Böse Geschichten” is published by Charon Verlag, whose main product, “Schlagzeilen”, is Germany’s best selling BDSM magazine and is partnered with Sklavenzentrale, the largest “alternative lifestyle” community in DACH with almost 145.000 registered users.

On another note, I just realized there’s a project I’ve never plugged here and it’s a damned shame, so let’s fix that…

Since some three years ago I’ve been working on an automated radio station using Last.fm, painstakingly adding tracks to it one by one in order to create something like the online equivalent of my live DJ sessions: a moody, atmospheric, slow and/or melancholic mixture of dark ambient, jazz, torch songs, oldies, trip hop, french chanson, southern gothic, soundtracks and any other stuff that conveys those moods for me regardless of genre.

Now, the thing is that you have control over the contents of the library but not over the order in which they are played, which has the advantage of giving the listener a different selection every time instead of making them listen to the same playlist over and over, but also has the risk of making everything sound like an inconsistent mess. To avoid this I’ve been fine tuning the song database constantly during all this time, not only by adding new tracks regularly (there are around 1000 at this time) but also by removing the ones that I believed didn’t fit so well on second thought.

Of course, there will always be times that the very randomness of the station’s nature makes for some weird transitions (say, like Bobby Vinton following Atrium Carceri or Massive Attack playing right after a Johnny Cash track; those things can happen!), but all in all I believe I’ve really managed to create a very fluid listening experience, with no nasty surprises or runs for the “skip” button.

The bad news is you’ll only be able to listen to it if you’re in Germany, the UK or the USA, as Last.fm decided to make listening to radio stations a “subscriber only” feature in the rest of the world. They really screwed my homies back over in Spain with this one.

If you want to try it out, dim the lights, grab yourself a pack of smokes, fill a glass with ice and your poison of choice, click the link below, sit back and enjoy:

Seeing as everyone and their mother has a Facebook page for their stuff, I figured it was about time to create one for mine. Support the cause, become a fan and please suggest it to those people in your contacts whom you think might be interested!

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Chaospiral-Studios/109367249090103

Guess who’s back! Anybody left out there?

It’s been three years since I last recorded anything, but ever since I left photography aside I had been feeling the need to go back to making music. It always works like that: I stop doing something and I have to do something else to keep my sanity. So some months ago I started getting my act back together, experimenting, writing new stuff and exploring new directions from where I had left off. Now I can proudly say that the first step has been taken and I have something real and solid in my hands again:

Trip hop, ambient, audio collage, nicotine, some hip hop, lots of samples and a few words: that is basically “The night watch”, the debut demo album from my new solo project, Winter Trees Stand Naked. It was written and recorded in only three weeks for the 2010 RPM Challenge, so if you’re going to bitch about sound quality (it’s not even properly mastered, just a bit compressed and maximized) or about the songs being too short, put your talent where your mouth is and prove you can do better ;P Now seriously, I think what really matters more here is the fact that this challenge has accomplished what it was meant to: to give me that kick in the ass I needed to get moving and get something done again.

Although this may appear quite different from almost anything I’ve done before, there is still of course some relation to my previous projects: the atmospheres and sample collages of the late Morpheus can definitively be heard in some places, I’ve used trip hop rhythms before in some Chaos Condensed tracks and, of course, in some ways spoken word is not so different from hip hop… In fact, I don’t see it at all as a rupture with my past, but simply as the continuation of that path I set foot on years ago: the one less travelled by. And I must say I’m really excited about what I’m seeing ahead!

But enough with the chatter: click here or on the cover above to download the album (35MB, 256kbps mp3, 10 tracks, 19 minutes). Of course, as per the rules of the RPM Challenge, none of the stuff I had been working on before February has been included here, so I still have a bunch of tracks that will probably find their way to the second record, whenever that may happen.

The future is now. Looks like it’s time to add another section to Chaospiral Studios!

Some news for a change… Since a couple of days ago, my albums “Babylon” and “Elohim” and Chaos Condensed’s “Cantus Post Machina” can be downloaded for free under a NC-BY-SA Creative Commons license. Of course, physical CDs are still available if you want to own the object itself, but I think releasing these works into the open is something that I should have done a long time ago.

The artwork for “Babylon” and “Elohim” is not free for distribution as I don’t own the rights to it, but you can check it out at Ricardo Marichal’s site, http://www.hablagarmin.com.

I know, I know, MySpace sucks. But then again so do I, so…

http://www.myspace.com/fraterchaovsky

David Eugene Edwards at the 09.06.07 Woven Hand concert in Madrid.

Shot on HP5 with a Konica EE-Matic Deluxe F.

Don’t expect “Swordfishtrombones” here… The sound is as lo-fi crap as it gets (I must admit that I made it even dirtier on purpose), I haven’t worried too much about EQ or noise removal, the playing is sub-par and there are a lot of mistakes, but hey, I like it. It’s raw, it’s spontaneous and, above all, it was a lot of fun.

If you want to spread the word, use this URL to link to this post:

http://www.chaospiral-studios.net/blog/?p=56

Thanks for your interest and support and I hope you enjoy it half as much as I did!

My failure is now official: it’s March the 1st and I only have 7 tracks, one of which sucks so much it’s not even funny. But heck, the rest is pretty good stuff, and it should make a decent demo once I polish a couple of details during the weekend, because right now I’m gonna take a well deserved couple of days’ rest.

I was also thinking of including a cover or two to round things up… RPM’s rules allowed only for original material to be sent in, but now it’s MY album and my rules, and I really wanted to try covering Nick Cave’s own cover of Johnny Cash’s “The Singer”, so that one will go on the album for sure. Maybe if I have enough time I’ll do another one… “The streets of Laredo”, or Lee Hazelwood’s “My autumn’s done come” would be cool, but that will depend on how long everything takes me, because I want to wrap this up in five days maximum. After that I’ll upload the whole demo to the Internet Archive and spend two weeks detoxing :)

There’s been a bit of blood, a lot of sweat and some tears, specially in the last days, but it has been one of the most gratifying experiences in my life. Going back to my everyday “routine” is surely going to feel very strange after all this!

And, of course… There’s always next year. RPM ’08 is going to be SUCH fun.

I will not be going to Barcelona this weekend after all, which means that I have 3 more days than I had expected to work on the album. There’s still hope! I will be missing 4 probably great concerts, but who cares? I can’t stop now.

Bring it on.