structures in inky blackness rise 'gainst a light taking shape below saturnian fields exquisite lace Casinos in torchlight Great stones forest and swamp Rise from the muck
Racing digital criminals urban ninjas Chaos Ghosts paying Dues overcome play the game dont lose
Barren waste lands, hope seems lost loved ones mismanagement step by step to carry on
Crying out no one is answering the calls it settles in the size of the moment lingering watchers pick at what is left return once again to see barks of a dragon like peels of laughter
echo function muted yelling squawk of a scavenger a march of rubble
Strippers, insects, and zombie dogs mashed in
old time film against a back drop of experimental pop await those brave enough to face garbage dump wonderlands of collected media scrambled and reassembled
under monochrome names like Pop Poubelism.
Some time around 2006 an
adventure of growing pains was undertaken and attributed to a childish
alter ego, Bram Urban. OddBlossom became a public archive of audio works discarded in inevitable growth and way past their
expiration date. Eventually explorations
in video led back to old musical exploration and once again the child has room
to play once again.
In the process of overhauling multiple websites for compatibility with Mobile devices, I've spent the last two days, and all my background processing, pooling together samples from my disparate audio projects, making in essence a "Greatest Hits" record. It's a little western(Mesquite Treason), a little technopop(OddBlossom), a little ambient(SynaFleur), A little noisy(Mouth of Ash), a little cutesy(kinda sorta like me). You can listen or download it here. I call it "Nature Of Being."
More Flashbacks to the Flora studio, this time for a demonstration and documentation of a recent change in the ImprovMachina version who knows what. It is a view of part of my process, program a little, play a little, the only thing missing is the edit a little. So here you get raw and untapped from The Flora Studio circa 2013.
Using a telescope and a handycam I've created an abstract documenting of
the Joshua Tree Studio and the stick art I'm building on the side.
This is a Return to Etudes In Construction Of Timbre, The second album Released as Mesquite Treason.
This is a short abstract video cut to a very old track off of my first official album.
"Dream Travel" was originally released as Kyle Blanton Ross in 2009 and has recently fallen under the SynaFleur categorization. The footage was shot on an iPhone shortly after my migration out to the desert. Wait for the ending and you can get up close and personal with the desert's favorite dog, Lobo Borealis.
Mesquite Treason is my solo side project most closely relating to my collaborative efforts in Tears of the Moosechaser. Beyond searching for Pioneering Techniques in the acoustic world of folk music, this project also plays heavily on my electronic and noise background.
I have drawn from a number of sources, from Scandinavian Folk, Irish folk to Tuvan throat singing, and the pulsing trance world of the Navajo nation distorted by drifting in and out of range as you drive across the Mojave Desert late at night. I have also leaned close to Harry Partch in the construction of my own instruments both acoustic and electronic, though I primarily use the electronics for the manipulation of acoustic sound.
Ride that Raven is so far one of the most commercial pieces I have released under the moniker Mesquite Treason, and I have yet to find it suitable companions to accompany the track on the Album "Shadows Of The Wind". So it currently exists as a stand alone.
I cut the video using archive footage from D.W. Griffith's "Battle of Elderbush Gulch" against footage I shot out by Joshua Tree and Processed using Jitter. In my version though, the natives win.
Whether representative of the whole or not, Ride That Raven Flies as Mesquite Treason's flag for the masses. Enjoy.
Making animations with Dave Quion is one of my most rewarding undertakings. The following has pretty much been our routine since we were Suite mates at CalArts and worked on our first short "Lobster Shmobster" together.
Day 1.
He comes to me with some absurd script and we spend hours in my studio recording voice overs and Improvising around the theme, laughing at our own silliness.
2 Months later.
I get the animatic and seeing the characters shape and form start to lump together a sonic landscape.
8 Months Later.
Receive Dave's meticulous one man hand drawn animations and starting cutting in sound effects. The overall process and collaborative element of our projects together is truly one of the most rewarding working relationships I have.
The fruit of that love and labor has resulted in one of our most polished and sleek shorts to date. "Duckhammer and Beavkid Get Buckets", Is the story of two roommates, a slacker Duck, and an average Beaver. In their Universe all problems are solved with Basketball. In this first Episode Duckhammer Learns how to dunk and Beavkid coerces him into face off against Rhino and Iguana for a futon.
Dave's rendering of 2D into 3D camera moves is particularly of note. We intend to continue this as a web series, or get a deal with one of the networks. If you like it, help spread it around. We are all grassroots here, doing this Independently as a labor of love. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did.
Etudes in Construction of Timbre is a study in layering recordings of
building and experimenting with a series of new instruments, including a
guitar turned cello, aluminum pipes turned chimes and bowed children's
toys and a microtonically tuned Autoharp.
Because of the last 14 years of country artists with bleached or high lit hair playing disney type pop songs, it was only matter of time before the creative youth began to rebel and return to roots. Which means, if you are looking for a better type of country music, the kind that hearkens back to the good old days, modern reproductions of olden style are popping up across the Great States and even being imported from the outside. Less common, however, is the forwarding of the genre especially in radical new ways. In some parallel universe, County evolved naturally from the 60s picking
up along the way a portion of what Coltrane contributed to Free Jazz and dabbling in the forward thinking of the British Invasion groups like Led Zepplin and Pink Floyd's influence on
America's popular rock, eventually allowing rock to step away from
itself and bring something like Radiohead into the mainstream creating something all together new. Country
Western Roots music now offers the intellectual and yet approachable Tears of the Moosechaser.
Tears of the Moosechaser has embraced the Wild West fiber of anarchy in Outlaw Country lost in the days since country turned sterile and cross pollinated it with the chaos propelling 20th Century Classical, Free Jazz and Industrial Music for the last 50 years. They define themselves as Avant-Americana. It is not clear whether they are trying to salvage or obliterate the splinters of country western music, but It is nice to see a group of classically trained musicians knock at the door of something so home grown. It holds no irony that a band like this would form in the west. Los Angeles has been budding for some time now with both alternative country and experimental. TotM holds a cast covering a huge demographic of the US. The primary songwriters Blanton Ross and Antony DiGenarro hail from Texas and Connecticut. Other members of the band bring with them the character of Kentucky, Alaska, California, and Missouri. They also have a token German, Ulrich Krieger who holds some notoriety playing with Lou Reed, and his Metal Machine Music trio.
For Country music with a modern blending old with something forward thinking here are a few videos From their debut album "Songs for a Sinister Woman" to introduce Tears of the Moosechaser
I have been on an all acoustic tangent for the last little while. Partially due to Tears of the Moosechaser and partially due to a failing Macintosh Powerbook G4. The G4 has been replaced by an all new Macbook monster which has meant all new software or at least all those updates I couldn't get because of antiquity of my tools. I usually hold to the idea that tools are just a means to an end and it is the user that creates but I am not going to lie the toys really open up new doors.
So here is a little experiment with Max6 which has completely swallowed MSP and Jitter into one behemoth which after using a while has become quite a delightful change from the old version.
The idea was to create a custom controller using the Circle of Fifths. Of course it was inevitable to build an autopilot to play it with and the first and easiest was random chord and scale variations of the chord playing into perpetuity.
I used an object called urn to hold all the possible keys major and minor (24 total) and output them randomly with out repeating. Using the same object I built a melody engine to play notes of the scale selected. Some kind of autonomous 12 tone cycling music that is not 12 tone at all rather 24 tone. I had to cut out 7th notes because they made the transitions from chord to cord funny about half the time.
Basically all the program outputs is midi information. I connected it to a synth for a sound source like Bladerunner or some other Vangelis 1980s sci-fi movie so thus the name. The bug in the code though is the really interesting part, If Miles Davis says there are no mistakes in music just happy accidents this is definitely no exception. I haven't yet figured out what causes the notes to stick but it is in the MIDI send out to the synthesizer somewhere. Irrelevant to the chord playing or how long the cycle goes on.
Funny thing though was my computers almost aware willingness to play along I have the screen saver set to dictionary(considering myself the occasional wordsmith) and the computer went to sleep while I was filming the patch with my phone. Just after I got up to deal with the glitch. The word it chose was:
INJUNCTION
Happy to have this captured pretty much makes an entire conceptual performance piece out of an experiment.
I'll share with you a sad sort of Valentine, off the album Gray. The Visuals are blamed on T.S.Nestor as a front for LogicalCurl, but I could say its my very first attempt at frame by frame animation.
The first Release by the Apocalyptic Country project Mesquite Treason is a tribute to poetic violence of Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West". It is a sonic atmosphere of folk instruments winding their way into landscapes of horror and endless brooding night.
Lifeline is a beautiful animated short film about an aging scientist using a machine to allow him to search time and space for his deceased wife. This winner of a Student Academy award, written and animated by Andres Salaff, details the lengths that love will drive a person too. The CalArts Character animation short film has no dialogue and is accompanied by a haunting score by Blanton Ross. The source material used to create the ambient soundscapes of Lifeline have been collected into an album called Dream Travel.
I would like to share the work of a friend and collaborator I met traveling in Europe. I have used a few of his Images before but will be turning to him for whatever custom art this blog needs.
Ladies and Germs, May I present Tripp Nestor.
"A good portion of my friends are visual artists... I have been watching and admiring them for some time. Sound is an excellent medium, but my jealousy of the eyes became too great. So I got a Wacom tablet, and tried my hand at the whole Photoshop digital painting thing... I haven't gone back since" - Tripp Nestor
To do it justice, Andres Salaff has released his CalArts animation "The Deadline" in high definition. This is a excellent envisioning of a man coping with the difficulties of overbearing expectations. Ripping through time and taking a few twists and turns along the way. This film tackles tough issues like substance abuse and suicide. And Features a score by Blanton Ross
