YES! I’m playing at a rad place with some of my favorite old friends and some awesome new friends. This will be a bonkers night for sure. From the Free Techno of David B. Applegate to the straight weirdness of Bubblegum Octopus and Mysterious House to the true rocking of Xrin Arms, and of course some shattered rhythms from your #1 boss of drum’n'noise, the party will NOT BE STOPPING FOR ANYTHING. You’ve been warned.
Bubblegum Octopus
David B. Applegate
Mysterious House
Speak Onion
Port d’Or, 841 Sterling Place, Brooklyn, NY
Friday, August 27, 2010, 9PM
$5 donation
EDIT: Xrin Arms, sadly, won’t be able to make it up to NYC due to some rough times out on tour, so the GBM show is cancelled, and there will be only 4 bands at this show at Port d’Or. Still mad freshness guaranteed, though. Pour one out on the curb for XA, though.
I’ll be bringing the drum’n'noise furor to Goodbye Blue Monday this coming weekend for the ExperiMENTAL Fest. It’ll be the Sunday afternoon, Noise BBQ portion of the fest, so that rules. I think I’ll even be playing outside. There’s a lot of other cool acts on the bill as well, including long-time home-girl, Joy Through Noise. New beats and bonks, some sunshine and intense volume. Sounds like a plan, right?
Note: Venue has been changed to SILENT BARN instead of Party Expo.
Holy hell am I excited about this show. Realicide and DJ Tacopunch are bringing the crazed electronic hardness from out of town, and of course we’ve got local industrial noise genius, Insect Deli, lighting the place up as well. That would be enough to make this show worth attending, but Digit216 and I are doing a BATTLE SET of breaks, noise, and general clusterfuckery to top it all off.
Digit216 and Speak Onion have shared a lot of bills before, and we’ve always enjoyed and respected each other’s music, so we decided to step it up a notch and play together/against each other. Who will be victorious? Everyone who’s there to see NYC’s 2 most devestating breakcore artists collide, that’s who. Don’t sleep on this.
Immigrant Breast Nest presents:
Realicide
DJ Tacopunch
Speak Onion vs. Digit216 (special battle set!)
Insect Deli
Sunday, August 15, 2010, 8:30 PM
Silent Barn, 915 Wyckoff Avenue, Ridgewood
L to Halsey
$5
The brilliant Solipsistic Nation podcast has featured Speak Onion in their recent show about people who use iphones/ipads/ipods to make electronic music. I am a fan of this podcast, so it’s pretty awesome to be included in this. The last 10 minutes or so of the show are devoted are an interview with me and my live set from last January, Speak Onion at Brecht Forum, January 19, 2009. Listen to Solipsistic Nation No. 193 right here.
I talk on the show about my love/not-so-much-love relationship with the app I use on the iphone, Intua’s Beatmaker. In my live setup, I use that app to run beats and loops and anything that comes from my recorded tracks, and then I mix those with synth noises from the Nord G2 and process them with the G2 and with pedals. Beatmaker has a lot of great features, but also some limitations that can drive me up a wall from time to time. I’m eagerly (EAGERLY) awaiting Version 2 of Beatmaker. I am hoping for a lot of new features and capabilities. I know they’ve implemented choke groups on it, and that alone will be really helpful to me. I have no idea when it will be available, though. . .
So go grab the new episode of Solipsistic Nation, and subscribe to their podcast while you’re there, because there’s plenty of new and awesome electronic music coming out of there every week. And stay tuned for future Speak Onion shows and new music. I’m hard at work in the laboratory over here. . .
IBN has released a series of remixes of Decanting The Bloodwhore’s Enveloped In The Dreaded Anguish Of Ancients, and it is totally amazing. Really inventive and unexpected reworkingss of the tracks. None of the add-a-backbeat-for-the-club type remixes. Anyone who has seen me play out in the last few months has heard me drop snippets of of my remix, and knows that it’s designed to kill. Anyway, grab this release, because it’s equal parts necro grymness and hot fire.
“. . .a raucous form of extreme soundwork that is equal parts hardcore techno, drum’n'bass and noise. This is the sound of the U.S. underground Breakcore scene, a quickly evolving genre, and Speak Onion is one of it’s masters.”
and. . .
“It is that aspect of ‘Metabolor’, the small touches that flux under and through the rhythms, that adds a complexity and makes the listening experience all the richer. The idea, of course, is that this is not really dancefloor music at all, but ‘mind-music’. . .”
Everyone’s sets were killer. Maruosa whipped up so much energy I thought I was going to die in that basement, and I was ok with it. Digit216 and David B. Applegate also were really at the top of their respective games. It was like, “this is exactly the type of show I would want to see if I wasn’t putting it together myself.” Amazing.
Oh yeah, about the Nord, uh, I know I said I wasn’t going to use it, but then at the last minute I got a bigger box and reorganized and rewired and repatched everything. Heh. I was a little shaky on a completley new setup with only 1 day’s practice, but it was all good. Pretty glad with how everything is going with that. I’ll probably expound on it later. . .
So, thanks a million to everyone who showed up and thanks a b-b-b-billion to Maruosa and Miyagi for coming all that way, and thanks to the Charleston for the wet basement and the free pizza. Best.
Oh, and check out all the pics here. I dont’ have any of Digit216 or Maruosa yet, because I fucked up with the camera, but I’ll be some.
So here it is. The much-delayed, repeatedly-changed, widely-anticipated(?) split release from Xrin Arms and myself. I’m glad we waited, becasue it really became something pretty amazing. If you think you know Xrin Arms, think again and download this record, because he flips the script here. The tracks are so completely blown out and weird. He’s tapped into some psychadelic vibes that are really pretty exciting. His half of the release really makes you feel high on drugs.
And then my track comes in like a terrible hangover. Deep Cover is a track I’ve actually been working on for a long time, and it took me a while to get it right. I think I’ve even been playing versions of it live since June of 09. But I finally recorded something that captures the wildness of the live versions, and here it is.
Lastly, I’m really glad I got to do a split with Xrin Arms. We’ve played a ton of shows together and toured together and he’s really always helped get the word out about Speak Onion and shown me the ropes a bit, and we’ve become like brothers over the couple of years that we’ve known each other. The man DJ’d my wedding, you dig? So finally we get down together on record, and it’s a thing of beauty.
This article is out. I have to shout out Ray Cummings, who did a great job on the article, and who was a blast to chat with via telephone. You may remember Ray writing a blurb about me previously in his Friday Night Noise column. This article devotes more time to the background of SO, and also reviews the “Trigger Pusher” release. Overall, I’m really pumped, as this is pretty much the best press I’m likely to get. Unless there’s a magazine called Breakcore Illustrated out there somewhere that I just haven’t seen yet. . . Anyway, I’m hoping this leads to some people checking out the record and coming out to shows. I have so much noise to give!
That leads me to my other big announcement today. . .
Saturday night at Coco66 was amazing. What an awesome show. Everyone really nailed it, and dang that Coco66 PA is no joke. Thanks to everyone who came out. My first show on the new set-up went really great. I was nervous without my familiar Numark DJ mixer and Echo Park delay, but the Nord G2 really killed it. My favorite quote form the night was when some girl came up to David B. Applegate during my set asking, “WTF is that stuff he’s playing it looks like he’s got nothing up there!!!” That’s right. Just an IKEA Gorm shelf packed with synth-y goodness.
Anyway, here’s videos. The first one is based on “Many Fewer Branches” from Metabolor, and the second one is from an as-yet unreleased remix. More about that soon. Don’t miss my awesome post-set dance moves in part 2. I hope the sound is halfway decent on these, but the PA was sooooo loud and soooo bassy, and my darling WIFE, while videotaping, was sitting on one of the sub-woofers, so the camera’s microphone really couldn’t hang. It sounded awesome in the room. Trust me.
