Homemade Napalm Part II

Polystyrene + Benzene + Gasoline = ?

The fifth track in our RPM2010 submission Demons of Gyrophonia & the Rotatable Tremulant All-Stars. This one features all of our guest musicians.

Maĵor Tom - Viola, Styrofoam, Tubulon
Cur'thulhu - Electric Bass Guitar, Super Collider Effects
Dextröse - Stylophone

HD video available on the YouTube. _{Disregard the cheese table footage.}

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posted by man vs sun (5 comments total)

Once again I have to say, watching the video really adds to the experience of this music. Without the visual I lazily drifted toward the mental image one dude, alone at his computer, throwing shit on the desktop to see if it stuck. But the video tells such a different story, that of three human beings collaborating in real time, making beautiful noise for everyone to hear (and possibly enjoy!). It gives the piece a lot more weight, if that's fair to say. There's probably something in here about my bias towards process vs. product, but I'm not really fit to discuss it at this time.

The styrofoam on the viola (styrola?) was my favorite part (especially that 'pop!' at the end), and I'm embarrassed to ask, but did the gentleman on the computer ever get his bass working? I couldn't quite figure out what sounds he was generating otherwise.
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 8:55 AM on March 19, 2010

One bit that was left out in the description was that the goal here (other than featuring just the three guest musicians) was an emphasis/experiment on noise. We'd already done low and high. We wanted as many different sonic combinations as we could think of, and I think we were pretty successful.

His bass was actually working the whole time. The weird, non-viola and non-stylophone sounds were bass, through the computer. The computer was running SuperCollider; a command-line interface for real-time effects/synthesis. It's like an even more elite version of Max/MSP. It's hard to tell because of sync issues with the youtube video, but his bass was working perfectly.

There's also some extra audio picked up by the oktavas that I had to cut out in the mix. Curtis's effects can really easily overpower everything else that's happening, sonically (which makes it a very good thing that it wasn't amplified, just direct). A couple of times, his effects took over, and he just started laughing maniacally. Trey (man vs sun) then gave him a dirty look and said "Are you proud of yourself? You bastard."

The styrofoam on viola was my favorite part, too. It's the kind of thing that, without seeing it, you'd never know what it is. It looks so innocuous, but I also gained the crap out of it, so it would be extra intense.

(in case you couldn't tell, I'm the one that did the mix on this album)
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 9:12 AM on March 19, 2010

nice sonic experimentation! It has moments of tension and release, and a great diversity of textures. You guys do a good job of leaving space so it has room to breathe and move around. I like it.
posted by archivist at 4:53 PM on March 19, 2010

It's hard to tell because of sync issues with the youtube video, but his bass was working perfectly.

Ok I got it now, I heard all that crazy shit but I guess I thought it was coming from the other instrument, because I've never seen a stylophone neither. Neat toys!
posted by abc123xyzinfinity at 1:53 PM on March 21, 2010

I heard all that crazy shit

There's no other way to describe it.
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 7:26 PM on March 21, 2010