The Ship Of Dreams

Hours upon hours spent traveling in the VW, sitting next to my dad, we drove the back roads of Washington and persistently persuaded Mother Earth to offer up her hidden mineral delights. Carnelian agate, thunder eggs, obsidian, jasper, garnet, fossils and even chunks of jade. My dad is absent this year but the stones remain.

This is why I love living on the Puget Sound

Click on the picture for a much larger version:

16 mm,   f/11,   0.8 sec

The Leica X2

I had been looking for a fun/elegant/simple camera for when I didn't feel the love of lugging my large and heavy DSLR kit around. The decision finally came down to a choice between the Leica X2 and the Fuji X100. I chose the X2 for the color balance, image sharpness and overall quality build...I wasn't really convinced by the X100.

A fixed lens combined with simple, elegant aperture and shutter speed controls make for an engaging and compelling connection with the photo-making process reminiscent of a 35mm film camera.

Having used it for almost a week now, I'm honestly blown away by the quality of the experience...and the pictures! The images require almost no post-processing at all. Gorgeous right out of the camera!

Please click on the images for larger views:

Roland Kuit's "Soundlab II" is stunning!

http://rolandkuitsoundlab.blogspot.com/

Another amazing offering from Roland Kuit.

Roland has probably taught me more about sound synthesis than just about anybody! Back in the day, I used to spend hours deciphering the patches he made for the original Nord Modular synth. Years later, and not much has changed. Roland has been sharpening his genius programming skills and is now offering a mind-blowing package of innumerable patches that open for listening with a single click in the included Nord Modular demo software.

 I've been slowly working my way through these beautiful aural constructs and am enthralled again as I was a decade ago, inspired to create fabulous monstrosities of my own! Equal parts tutorial, demonstration and resource, Roland's Soundlab II is a fantastic project.

 Highly recommended even if, like myself, you don't have a Nord Modular G2. :)

Universe

My Universe is a sentient thing. (Though, not by any definition, a deity). It just is what it is, something like a "mind", though this mind is beyond ours, contains ours and is contained by ours in a fractal embedding/repetition. So-called "religious experiences" of universal oneness or equivalence (or even more mundane epiphanies) are merely junctures when these fractal curls of Mind momentarily align and the illusory mind/self we cling to is temporarily eclipsed.

Some Recent DSLR Shots...

Circumstances...

Sorry for the silence everybody...

It's just hard to "step back" from everything sometimes.

As some of you know, my dad's health has been extremely poor recently - he had a fall early December and suffered a terrible brain injury. For now I'm managing all his affairs. :(

My own health is decent enough but I have chronic pain from a number of conditions and am now battling bursitis and tendinitis in my shoulder.

...it's just a bit much at times.

...things at work are nuts now too as I'm doing someone else's job now in addition to my own as they broke their leg.

In the meantime I haven't been able to do any promotion for Stealing The Sun because of circumstances. It's on the back burner for now but I hope to get to it later this year...STS is the best thing I've ever done and I think it deserves a chance.

Stealing The Sun - finally here!

Well, it's been a long road from March 2009 when I started this project but Stealing The Sun is finally released. Cheers!

Stealing The Sun is the album I've been wanting to make for the last ten years. Filled with a wide spectrum of synth textures and embellished by my voice, it's an exploration of epiphany and change viewed through the lens of modern electronic pop.

Diverse elements like the mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, Native American traditions and Greek mythology combine into something strange, personally engaging, and hopefully "greater than the sum of its parts"

The CD and Digital Album is currently available through Bandcamp.com though CD Baby, iTunes and Amazon will soon follow.



The above streams don't really do it justice as they are only 128k mp3s - higher quality MP3s as well as FLAC downloads are available in addition to the CDs: http://carbon111.bandcamp.com/. Please note all CD purchases get a free instant download in the medium of their choice so you can enjoy the album while waiting for the CD to hit your mailbox.

Stealing The Sun is packaged in a four panel digipack. All the artwork is by yours truly.




A complete set of lyrics is available here: Stealing The Sun

For seven people who buy the CD, I've got a little surprise in store - I'm doing a random drawing from the first batch of CD sales for some swag, including a shoulder bag, a clock and five t-shirts:



For the gear-interested, the instrumentation is as follows:

Silver Thread - Ensoniq Fizmo and Waldorf Q provide backing pads, Korg Oasys is bass and string sounds while Digidesign's "Boom" provides percussion.

Breathing Machinery - Korg Oasys does Piano and Wave Sequencing, Weird Pads are NI's Absynth and, except for some clickety bits from Digidesign's "Boom", all the Drum Sounds and Rhythm Beds were done in NI's Absynth.

Subterranean Bathers - Ensoniq VFX is the voxy pad, Korg Oasys is piano, drums and everything else.

The Initiation - Lead Drones are from the SCI Prophet 600, Piano is Nord Stage, Pads are provided by Nord Wave, and Metallic Stabs and Drums are Korg Oasys.

Luna - The Nord Stage is on "distorted lead", Nord Wave on "grungy Santur" and Oasys on drums and "ambiance".

Walden - Waldorf Microwave XT is synth lead, Nord Stage is all pianos, Absynth4 and Alchemy provide ambient beds and Korg Electribe ES-1 is drums.

Stealing The Sun - All pianos and synth sounds are Nord Stage, drums are Korg Electribe ES-1.

The Big Room - Sync lead is Nord Wave, Grungy synth organ is Nord Stage, Pads are Korg Oasys and Drums are Digidesign's Boom.

Strangeness - Drums are provided by Korg Electribe ES-1, everything else is Waldorf Q.

No Time - All sounds provided by the Korg Oasys.

Final cover art for Stealing the Sun...

...Dealing with prepress issues now but the album should be out before too long. I'll let everyone know (as soon as I do) when it will be available as CDs and as downloads.

I Feel Fine

Working on a new song. This is a rough mix.

Most of the noise is Serge Modular with the exception of one Alchemy patch and the drums, which are Digi's "Boom" thru a bit reducer.

I'm going to diversify the drums more between chorus and verse while fixing their stereo image, add some hand percussion and stick a bridge in (that I've already recorded). A couple more Serge lines and two vocal tracks and I'll be done...probably.

http://carbon111.com/music/i_feel_fine.mp3

Song for a lost friend...

Some days are better than others...
Loss is such a hard thing to deal with as there is nothing to "get over". The Lost remain lost. The empty spot in your life remains... :(

http://www.carbon111.com/music/you_were_so_loved.mp3

Parents

My respect and awe for those of you who are parents is profound.

Married at a late age with health concerns and a problematic gene pool, it was never really a realistic choice for me.

My music and my art take what little "extra" time I do have and are, for all intents, my "children". Pale shadows in comparison to real children...but it's all I have to offer other than myself.

What an amazing journey on a beautiful yet uncertain road.

Welcome to Walden

Finished another song this afternoon: Walden. A little ditty about a certain naturalist's take on epiphany. :)

A little stranger than I was originally intending...

Synths used:
Waldorf Microwave XT, Nord Stage, Absynth4, Alchemy and Korg Electribe ES-1

Lost soul running over the ice so wide
Hearing the voice

"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"

Tiny log cabin by water so bright
Blinded by nature

"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"

Walk in the forest, day and night
Life in the woods

"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"

Transcendental in your daily life
It's only Walden

"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"
"You will come to us"...

Stealing the Sun - nearly finished now

My work-in-progress, "Stealing the Sun" is nearly ready. I'll add tracks to this set as they get mastered in preparation for CD production:

Stealing the Sun - preview by Carbon111

In the meantime unfinished tracks will be removed from this blog. I'll replace them later as they get polished and prepped for the CD and Digital Download release.

Goodbye my little pal.

In Memoriam Taliesin 1998 - 2010
...my constant studio companion.

Finally, A Burger Worth Dying For.

Due to the high mortality rates, the famous Kanoobang™ burger chain has decided to change their marketing slogan to "A burger worth dying for" a spokesperson said today.

This has come just three weeks after the media furor over the leaked revelation that Kanoobang™ burgers were made entirely with fossil beef, strip-mined from ancient bovine deposits in environmentally sensitive Wyoming and Oregon watersheds.

Environmentalists are still picketing Kanoobang locations in many states. The FDA and EPA have taken no stance as of yet.

Kanoobang™ sales have soared.

More on this as the story unfolds.

My new general-purpose PC

In addition to my music DAW and Softsynth PC, I have an all-purpose PC I use for Photoshop, Gaming, web browsing, DVD burning and what-have-you. The old machine I was using was getting pretty long-in-the-tooth so it was that time again...time to piece together a new computer! I love doing this!!! ^_^

This was also the perfect opportunity to finally upgrade to a 64 bit OS and now that the specter of Vista was behind us, Win7 was looking pretty good.

The sheer amount of power you can get these days for $1225.00 boggles my mind - this relatively modest machine replaced a five year old pentium D machine that cost me twice as much to build and was an absolute slug by comparison.

Here's the specs:

• Intel Core i5-750 Lynnfield 2.66GHz Quad-Core CPU (clocked cool and stable @ 3.6 GHz)
• Intel DP55WG LGA 1156 P55 ATX Intel Motherboard
• ZALMAN 120mm 2 Ball Low-noise Copper CPU Cooler
• Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB Solid State Drive (OS/boot)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (apps, storage)
• Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 7200 RPM SATA II Hard Drive (backup)
  
• G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR3 1600 SDRAM
• Asus DVD-RW
  
• PNY GeForce GTS 250 - 1 Gigabyte GDDR3
  
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
  

...and I already had a nice 4U rackmount case & PS from my earlier build...though, because it was an older PS, I needed to spend about three bucks on an adapter for secondary power to the video card. The D-400-6 rack cases from IStarUSA are fantastic BTW!

The DP55WG is a basic board but with some surprising extras like SPDIF audio, onboard diagnostic LED readout and external bios reset button. I've been building my own PCs for a couple of decades now and have found that pairing an Intel board with an Intel processor and decent cooling makes for a very stable system, even in this case with the quad-core CPU clocked to 3.6 GHz.

Been using this machine for about a month now and, so far, it tears through every app I've thrown at it. DVD encoding takes minutes instead of hours now. Some of the most demanding photoshop filters take only moments and I'm getting very high frame rates (at 1920 x 1080) for Fallout 3 and TES4! Haven't had a single crash, lockup or bluescreen either - this has been absolutely rock-solid! I give Intel and G.Skill high praise for this.

The only thing I'm still not happy with is my keyboard...so I've ordered something special. I'll blog about it soon. ;)

A Lot Can Happen In A Decade...

Just for fun, this is me in my studio ten years ago. Tali was one year old.



The Waldorf Micro-Q had just been released. It and the Microwave XT were the centerpiece of my studio. I was using a couple of Bose patio speakers for monitors.

Messing about with Win7's Movie app...

"Silver Thread" from my forthcoming album was used as a Guinea Pig, trying out the free video software in Win7. It's basically a slideshow of a number of my CG images.

Monitor mayhem...

To my profound disgust, one of my beloved ADAM P11a monitors died over the weekend. The internal amps were both distorting and crackling horribly, rendering it completely useless. I was so furious at first as this was the last thing I needed while in the midst of mixing the new album. In the end, I suppose I figure I did okay, getting almost seven years out of the ADAMs. I'll most probably get the faulty one repaired if I can find a decent tech in the area without a months-long waiting list but, in the meantime, I desperately needed new monitors.

I spent most of Saturday at my local Banjo Shack inflicting an entire CD's worth of my rough mixes on two very patient sales guys. Unfortunately, my budget was only about half of what it was when I got my ADAMs so I had to be extremely thrifty as well as critical.

I had almost settled on a pair of KRK VXT 8s but every one of the four units I tested had some weird flaw - a silent tweeter, a fluttery woofer, an intermittent high-pitched whine, etc. It has completely soured me on KRK as a brand. Shame, because the VXT 8s looked to be a perfect fit.

The M-audios I tested colored the midrange too much, the JBLs had too many "bells and whistles" adding much to the cost and little to their functionality, the Events were too colored, the Mackies weren't in stock, etc...

My final choice was a bit of a revelation for me. After hours of listening and re-listening, I finally ended up settling on a pair of Yamaha HS80M monitors. I had been prepared not to like these as Yamaha modeled their aesthetics on their famous NS10 grotboxes, white woofers and all. Sound-wise though, they were a welcome surprise with a very flat response and nicely revealing of the subtle flaws in my test mixes. At less than $400 a piece, the price was seriously too good to be true - especially considering the sound quality. Suffice to say, I left with two largish boxes on a hand truck.

So far these HS80Ms have been perfectly lovely in the studio, much better than I had hoped in fact! The HS80Ms have a slightly more "forward" or "aggressive" sound than the ADAMs but, so far, haven't been fatiguing, even during long mixing sessions. Working with them has been an absolutely painless transition so far. They're not overbright and the response seems very flat all the way down into the lower bass regions though there is a noticeable rolloff around 50hz or so. I hate to admit it but, in some ways, these are more helpful to me than the ADAMs have been. Placement of instruments in the stereo field seems more accurate and the bass extension seems more detailed, allowing me to fit "bassy" instruments together better with less overlap. The "sweet spot" is a lot wider than what I've grown used to as well. I've had a chance the last few days to remix a number of my tracks and check their translation on other systems and have been getting great results!

I should mention that despite my exuberance, the new monitors aren't perfect - nothing is. The HS80Ms' tone is a trifle agressive as I mentioned before. They're not razor-flat either...but no monitor I've ever tried has been. You just have to decide if it's good enough for you and will the mixes translate? If the answer is "no", there's plenty of other monitor choices. So far neither of these things has been an issue...but I'll be sure to say something if it becomes one. But, for now, the honeymoon ain't over yet. ;)

We'll see how these "budget" monitors hold up but, so far, I'm completely floored by the quality/price ratio on these things. I'm even starting to get used to the ugly white woofers.

Working on another song...

This one is tentatively called "In the Big Room". Vocals aren't finished yet:

In the Big Room - rough mix

Tali approves:

Halou

Another wonderful band that's been around for more than a decade...that I've never heard of.

Beautifully dark, with coarse as well as silky timbres. I find this kind of indie stuff charming as hell and impossible to resist.

Recommended if you like Bel Canto, Massive Attack or Cocteau Twins.

Relaxing

I hope everyone is having a relaxing weekend. I can highly recommend the application of a cold beer and a warm cat. Cheers!

Complete album, Shadow, free to listen...

As some of you probably noticed, I got myself a Soundcloud account. It's made managing my online music much easier. One upshot is I can make entire albums of work available now.

Last year's instrumental chill album "Shadow" can now be listened to in its entirety:



If you like it, pick up the CD at CD Baby.

Enjoy!

Silver Thread

Another busy weekend in the studio...for me anyway. I can't speak for Tali:



I've been on a bit of a roll - yet another new song is completed!

Silver thread  by  Carbon111

Silver Thread was composed with Ensoniq Fizmo, Waldorf Q, Korg Oasys and Digidesign's Boom softsynth. The vocals are all me again.

Past the hour when little girls should dream
The road is silent, the hills are steep
Your wings are heavy with dust and sleep
You're miles afar from places you should be

Follow my voice along this silver thread
Follow my voice along this silver thread

Incense trees grow along dim lanes
A shadow city full of candle flames
Fly on and on my Abyssinian maid
Leave Kubla Khan to history"s fate

Follow my voice along this silver thread
Follow my voice along this silver thread

My house is warm and the time is late
Dip your wing and find this path safe
Little bird flies down to a sunless sea
What draws you on to set your heart free?

Follow my voice along this silver thread
Follow my voice along this silver thread