On the off chance that anyone reads this often enough to notice, the spastar will be making its debut appearance this wednesday at the dual plover nightmare that is club consolador de dos caras.
Don’t be put off by the fact that the flyer says 28th May, it really is this week, the 4th of June. Honest.
Here’s what i sent them for the website.
lieutenant colonel spastic howitzer
2003 phase 1: fit inducing post breakcore plunderphonic mess
2004 phase 2: heavily treated saxophone added for additional mirth and pain
2008 phase 3: enter the spastar
Woke up xmas morning to discover that jazz legend Oscar Peterson had died. Bummer.
But it does mean i can run this great picture…….
Here it is. Completed.
After inital testing i discovered that the springs needed to be much, much closer to a pickup and so i had to relocate the central pickup. By using the central pickup i still have the option of including the springs in both the 2 and 4 positions on the 5 way selector, which is nice.
So now i have to learn to play the thing. It seems very good at generating extreme noise (surprise, surprise) but is also capable of some really tasty slide styles where the amount of metal things involved is lending a resonator-ish quality to the sound.
There has also been significant progress with the other instrument as well.
This is a real protoprototype, it’s currently an ergonomic disgrace and made me feel quite light headed after playing only a few notes. It is exactly what it seems: a clarinet missing a bunch of keys with a few metres of extra tubing inserted along the way. It still sounds like a clarinet, just a very, very low one. As in lower than a contrabass. As in you can almost count the wave form oscillations. Of course the extension of the overall body without a proportional redistribution of the keys means it only really has quartertones (or closer) at each keyed section with overblowing only really working on the lower segment. When amplified it sounds somewhat terrifying.
After a sudden blur of activity it’s almost finished. My fingers are covered in cuts and scratches and my hands are uncharacteristically bruised and calloused, but here it is.
I still need to complete the keywork where the three spikes hit the strings, but it’s almost completed and yes, it does sound as wrong as it looks.
The only major job left is to name it. So far the list of possibilities includes:
The Degenetron
The Spastar
The Howitztar
The Guitzer
About a month ago i had a strange and unusually vivid (possibly lucid) dream in which i was constructing a bizarre sort of guitar hybrid. Unusually i managed to retain almost all of the detail regarding the construction and mechanics of the design and so now i’m going to build the as yet unnamed thing. In essence it remains a normal electric guitar, but with the addition of a three keyed system of levers or pins to strike the strings instead of normal right hand techniques, and a keyed damper system to function in the style of a sustain pedal on a piano.The original also had a pair of long drone strings constructed from springs running from a bolt running out of the headstock down to the body itself which were played with a separate key system to be thumb operated. However whilst this idea provided great opportunities for getting some serious strangeness and the ability to tune said springs, the tension placed on the truss rod and neck would be so extreme as to make tuning the regular strings redundant, and there’s also the small matter of getting smacked in the face by a spring stretched out far beyond it’s intended limits, and having to reposition a pickup. Instead i’ve decided on a pair of smaller springs running across the body from the upper horn, still to be played by a system of thumb keys.
Of course the instrument in the dream was a beautifully machined, fully realized production model that will bear scant resemblance to the brutally ugly prototype i’m planning on assembling. So far i’ve bought myself a cheap guitar and am about to buy a cheap clarinet for the key system (and hopefully have enough bits left over for some sort of weird Roland Kirk drone instrument/brown noise generator). I’ve pretty much completed my planning/thinking stage - i’ve got an acceptable plan for the main keys, a good plan for the springs and associated keys, and a rough idea of how to implement the damper - so it’s almost time to get going.
First step will be cutting some bits off the scratchplate for better access and then attaching the springs. Then once i have the clarinet i can add the key systems and prepare for mayhem.
Pictures and updates will follow once the carnage begins.
Once again with all the unpredictability of sunrise, a major company has indulged in some very lazy sampling of a lesser known musician for the shilling of their dispicable wares. This time around aware but not alarmed listeners can hear lengthy unadorned loops of Manu Chao being used to sell Domino’s pizzas, and whilst obviously at this level the samples are either cleared or have wormed their way through a legal loophole, the contempt shown is nothing short of staggering.
This is the sort of thing that gives sampling and appropriation a bad name - cheap, lazy and not very interesting.
Behold the mighty slide soprano saxophone, quite possibly the strangest thing i have ever seen.
I want one.
Yes it’s the last ever show at Lanfranchis, be there.
Has anyone actually tried to make it through a prime time commerical tv broadcast lately, without finding some method of disposing of the ads? Maybe i’m just slowly becoming more and more curmudgeonly, but it seems like the amount of advertising has been steadily increasing for years now. Oh for the good old days before deregulation when channels would broadcast four thirty second commercials and then kindly return to the matter at hand. Channel 7 seems to be a prime offender, and after suffering through yet another completely fractured episode of Lost, I thought it might be time to have a look at the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice.
Buried deep within section 5 are the actual guidelines for the amount of ‘non-program matter’ that is allowed and quite frankly it’s more than a little disturbing. It’s not only the fact that broadcasters can air up to 16 minutes of npm per hour (reduced to a maximum of 15 minutes from 6-10pm - replete with a mind bending set of conditions), nor is it the fact that all times are based on scheduled material as opposed to material actually broadcast. No, the thing which has really got to me is the baffling list of exemptions. It’s not just the good old fashioned ‘community service announcements’ that avoid being counted towards the npm total. Political broadcasts, infomercials or ’shopping guides’ and the despicable practice of superimposing text or images over part of the screen all escape the shame of being npm, as does any ad for a network which contains no reference to actual broadcast times.
Ahhhh, sweet nourishing loopholes.
It would probably be less galling if the npm in question was more like the Honda - impossible dream ad or the sensational Tooheys Extra Dry ad but more often than not it’s the dreaded ‘Stiff and Stiffer’, truly the worst ad in the history of human existence.
So Paul Wolfowitz has finally fallen on his sword……
Yes, the man once described by the Economist as a velociraptor, has become the latest of the Bush vanguard to fall from grace. After decades of being on the inside of US politics from the Nixon administration onwards, serving both Bushes, being Rummy’s number two and of course his most recent stint as chief of the World Bank, it looks like it’s all over.
However, the thing that i think will stay with me the longest will not be to do with any of his dubious political influence or even his three year stint as ambassador to Indonesia (supporting and then subsequently turning on Suharto who left office in 1988, 23 years after a US backed coup brought him to power - sound familiar?). No, for me the enduring memorial for Wolfowitz will be the word which his World Bank infamy brought to the world:
Neoconcubine
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