Music of Michael Upton (Jet Jaguar)
Here’s five recommendations from the …66? releases I’ve picked up since last December.
I can’t believe I haven’t done one of these posts the whole year! (I’m still listening to all of those releases from last December btw.) But I’m trying to be the opposite of just linking to the latest thing I’ve heard.
Continue reading “Recent listens October 24”So, a couple of weeks back Adrien hit me up to contribute to a compilation of hit em tracks. I contributed 3 tracks in 3 nights, during a stressful work week, and holy shit it was a good time. The original tweet being about a rave, I focused on dancefloor sounds that I’ve always loved: give me disco ahead of the entire history of rock, in a heartbeat, says the troll in me.
Continue reading “Dreaming up hit em songs”This is a bit of a random one, but I wanted to just do a bit of a link dump. There’s been an absolute shed load of noise about generative AI and LLMs in the last year or so and here’s some of the writing I’ve found most interesting.
Continue reading “Writing about generative AI”It was really fun to do this mix for Ivo who runs the Mahorka label that released my band Takamu about 18 months back. Here’s some words about my selections.
Continue reading “Planck Tone mix”I’ve been thinking about music in shops. It’s a cliche surely that people, if asked, would never say they wanted more or louder music to play in a shop. But I had an experience that got me thinking about the alternatives.
Continue reading “Sound shopping experience”It’s been 8 months since I’ve done one of these. It’s not an end of year list – I would be more interested to know your top 10 of 2018 right now, tbh.
Anyway, some things I reckon I’ve fully digested and really rate. I’ve been picking up a few things lately that I’m pretty buzzy about, so I might write again in another few months. See if the buzz remains.
Good old Isolée made one of my favourite house (-adjacent ?) tracks 25 years ago now. His releases since then, especially the albums, have been pretty patchy, but Beau Mot Plage was so good I kept on checking in. He’s had this thing over the years where he’s dancy but it’s weird and the results are often uncomfortable – in particular he does weird things harmonically, which I think usually put me off. Not like “I’m jazz!” but “I dgaf about tuning!” This album is much friendlier than usual and I happily play it start to finish anytime. It’s even quite lush compared to older stuff. Good times.
I was faintly amazed some Newsroom quiz mentioned The Japanese House recently, but my partner says her music has been on various TV shows and such. It’s indie pop, I guess, and she used to get compared a lot to The 1975. This album is much, much more mellow and gentle than those times. Like the first single, Boyhood: “Lets build some hype with something so chill it verges on nondescript!” 😅 OK then. But the whole thing has sunk in and now I love it.
This is the next release on the same label that put out my Epiphytes, and I can’t tell you honestly whether that influences my opinion of it. It’s a really intriguing mix of often quite glitchy noisy stuff and lushness: most tracks involve some mix of guitar, flutes and vibraphone and some cheerful and exotica-leaning harmonies and melodies, but stuttery processing, distortions and pinging electronic sounds make it spiky, occasionally bordering on abrasive. At least you can’t really relax into it, and in this case I like that about it.
The closest thing I can think of is Autechre remixing those chilled out Tortoise instrumentals, and it’s not that close.
Another combo of electronic processing and acoustic instruments, but in this case piano-led jazz cut up and looped to create a way more sedate and laid back feel than the Utz record. Chill, but with plenty of substance.
I did another walkthrough of one of my tracks, this one for ‘Spiralling’ off Also. It went pretty long, (really) just shy half an hour, so here’s some text if you’d prefer that. But you do miss out on understanding the joy of the high rising terminal in New Zealand English.
Here’s an embed of the track if you want to listen and read along instead of the video.
First up in the video I talk about the field recording that underpins the track, which is a phone recording from a ski field. I describe this as a poma lift. I talk through various subtle fx to give a mono recording space and a bit of variation.
Here’s a pic of where I made that recording. So the “clank” is people letting go of the platter or poma or whatever at it pinging upwards towards the overhead cable and hitting the end of the track.
Next, I talk about the main “plonkiness” melodic sound you hear throughout, which is 3 layers of marimbas spread in stereo space. I’m using what Bitwig calls “note fx” to push the original pattern around in time in various ways. I use modulation to bend the tuning of each of the 3 parts in different ways towards the end of every phrase. The track is in G Dorian mode, and I use a trick to moosh everything back into that scale.
Then, I talk about the chords and how I had spent far too much time on a technique that listens for any note on the “plonkiness” track and bumps up the cutoff frequency of the synth every time. This is definitely a technique I learnt from a YouTube video, but I have no idea how to find that video.
That’s the first half of the video!
Next up, the bassline is a series of sustained notes that are sent into an arpeggiator that is never changing the pitch but just shuffles the timing. Different modulation sources affect the speed of the arpeggiator steps, so it becomes faster and slower, sometimes straight and sometimes dotted.
I describe an arpeggio that comes in later, which is a vocoder as a cheap way to create a vowel-shape filter. The harmonic content is the same chord progression as the rest of the track, arpeggiated. The carrier is just a sawtooth synth, and then the modulator source is me trying to hold one note while changing the shape of my mouth to mess with the formants. I use modulation of a sample start point so that each vocoder note in effect has a different vowel shape.
About 22 minutes in, I explain that I took a field recording of me tapping a telecoms antenna with contact mics taped to it, and chopped it up to trigger each tap as a drum machine. Each sound in the drum machine is triggered by a different note pitch. I sequence a pattern on one note, then modulate the pitch so although the rhythmic pattern is constant, the particular sounds that are triggered are constantly changing in an unpredictable way.
Second-to-last, there’s a little synth hi-hat sound near the end of the track that is sent through a delay fx chain to give it interest and the delay length is modulated by a step sequencer that is not in sync with the time signature. So the delays on the hi-hat are shifting around. This sound is faded into the track by bringing down the cutoff frequency of a high-pass filter, rather than fading in the volume.
Finally, I describe some dishwasher sounds, how I chopped them and then made a sequence that alternates between forwards and backwards. This goes into a series of delay fx, then I used a sidechain modulation on the volume of the whole thing so that when the poma lift recording is at its loudest, the processed dishwasher sound is also at its loudest.
Mildly overwhelming review tbh, I’ve been rabbiting on recently online about how what I like about the Crucial Listening podcast is how the host really seems to engage with what he listens to, and here goes Tony Stamp doing the same with my own music.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thesampler/audio/2018908933/epiphytes-by-jet-jaguar
I’ll be honest it’s super gratifying when these days releasing music sometimes feels a bit like throwing pebbles down an empty well. You kind of wonder if you’ll hear something, some kind of response. I certainly only make music for me, but I’m still human, a social animal, and still hope that someone somewhere is into it! There might be some music makers not like that, but that’s not me. Too old to pretend otherwise too, ha.
I made another video breaking down how I made one of my tracks. It’s a kind of low-key marketing or promotion that I don’t feel gross about – and previous times have actually stimulated some good chat with fellow electronic music makers.
I thought I’d share my feed subs. Some of them are very much inactive, some sporadic, some very active.
Tim Prebble recently wrote some good stuff about blogging and following blogs in 2023, and he made reference to Marc Weidenbaum‘s thoughts on blogging in the mix… Coincidentally, Tim and Marc are both folks whose blogs I follow via RSS. And, you know, I really like RSS feeds still. I use a plugin to Firefox called Feedbro.
What I like about RSS feeds is they’re really low distraction and unmediated. Email newsletters are pretty close, but they still arrive amongst other emails (to state the obvious). I like going to my reader when I want to and find there’s not much of that stressful vibe I associate with most contemporary online stuff.