12-September-2020 Newsletter

Merchandise — Children Of Desire

There are some songs and albums that go with certain memories like peanuts in plastic white cups used to go with Friday nights back in the day. I had just graduated from college and had just begun life as a rent-paying adult. White men crooning soulfully over fuzzy, reverb-drenched, jangly guitars had become a large part of what indie rock sounded like. My Friday nights were peanuts in plastic cups with friends listening to, among other songs, Merchandise’s Become What You Are. My Saturday mornings were glasses of water alone in my room listening to, among other albums, Merchandise’s Children Of Desire.
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My experiments with Sonic Pi: 2. Are Microwaves Friends?

With this Sonic Pi experiment, the idea was to a. see if I could compose an entire track on Sonic Pi, and b. see how easy or difficult such composition was. I set out to compose a minimal house track, now tentatively called Are Microwaves Friends? I used 808 and 909 samples to build the percussive spine of the track. For the bass and melodies, I used the preloaded synths.
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Otis Redding — Otis Blue

You might see my recommending Otis Redding's 1965 classic Otis Blue as an act of unconscionable lethargy. You might well ask: what's your next recommendation going to be, the Beatles? Rahman? But my purpose has never been to talk solely about some obscure post neo strangecore nutters. I mean, I will often talk about obscure post neo strangecore nutters, but not always. With these Chits, I only intend on sharing a paragraph on the Good Music I’m enjoying. And what I've been enjoying this week is this heartfelt Soul staple all week. It’s absolutely accurate to say that in this case, the genre label Soul is perfectly apt. Listening to this album is listening to a supremely talented person bare his soul on tape. Hard to believe he was only 24 when this album was released and only 26 when he passed. If there’s only one Soul album you can listen to, maybe this one?
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My experiments with Sonic Pi: 1. No Surprises.

To see how easy it was to arrange No Surprises by Radiohead on Sonic Pi. Every exploration has to start somewhere and my exploration of Sonic Pi has started with what I would classify as a successful attempt at coding a cover of No Surprises. Why No Surprises? Because I like it. And Sonic Pi’s default keys reminded me of the keys on the intro of the song.
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Sonic Pi: a short introduction

Ever since I've known about live coding music, I've wanted to do it. And ever since I’ve wanted to do it, I’ve wanted to do it on Sonic Pi. But fact is, ‘ever since’ has been three laptops, eight years, zero code. Until now, that is. The prospects, I must say, are really exciting.
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Treble Puns — Sounds Like Treble

The other day, this guy asked me, ‘so you support local artists and all, huh?’ I said yes I do, then for some reason felt the need to justify that I support good art no matter where it’s from; it just so happens that a fair bit of it is from India. The justification’s purpose: to give due respect to the likes of this Bengaluru-based instrumental rock band, Treble Puns, whose debut EP, Sound Like Treble, I’ve really enjoyed. It’s loud/soft/loud instru-rock that stands out from other post-rock acts because of Abhimanyu Roy’s Indian-folk-inspired scales and Sohini Bhattacharya’s hard-hitting robotic drums.
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