stobiepole

A quickie...prepared piano and a recording of a 1943 3DB wartime public service announcement kindly given to me by Maurice Austin, from his collection.

I think the first record I ever owned was a K-Tel record called Looney Tunes, which was a collection of old novelty songs, including Charlie Drake's 'My Boomerang Won't Come Back'. I met Rolf Harris on my seventh birthday, when he performed at the Odeon Theatre in my home town Mt Gambier, and since it was my birthday I got to go up on stage and meet the man himself. Weren't they innocent times?

They say never go full Alan Parsons...Masque of the Red Death(COVID-19 Dub) is a musical adaptation of an old recording of Basil Rathbone reading Edgar Allan Poe's story of the same name. It just seemed sort of relevant right now...with special guest Tim Catlin ( http://timcatlin.net/ )on guitar and spooky noises. Listen to it with headphones on...in the dark!

We picked Toki up ten years ago to the day, on January 1, 2010, from an ad in the local Trading Post. If there's something he does most of all, it's sleeping. I think it's natural to wonder what he dreams about so much of the time...

Been working on this for a while...just a dumb joke taken to ridiculous lengths...made in Renoise with an old R-8 Roland drum machine and some obvious samples...

Live dub mix on my new Allen & Heath GL2200 mixer...just some drum and instrument loops in Ableton and some flute that Kate played, run out of the computer then through the mixer and back again. The effects were a Boss RX-100 spring reverb through an Acetone Stereo Phasor, a Boss RE-20 Space Echo and a Moogerfooger ring modulator on the flute. This wasn't my best performance (there were some technical difficulties) but it's all live and unedited, so there you go.

Just screwing around with some new plugins.

The Takaqrua-gumi ( http://takaquragumi.com/ ) are a legal yakuza talent agency mainly composed of ex-yakuza members who use their experience to socially beneficial ends. I read about them in an article in the Japan Times (here: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2018/08/15/entertainment-news/made-men-tokyo-based-yakuza-talent-agency-delivers-real-deal/ ). When Kate and I went to Japan in March, we met up with the Takaqura-gumi and went out for karaoke (which I recorded; some of the results can be heard here: https://soundcloud.com/stobiepole/japan-2019-master-mix ). Anyway, I thought it would be good for them to have a proper theme song, so here it is...

This is a proof-of-concept piece made in the spirit of a gift to the various kind people who let me record them singing while I was in Japan in March of 2019. In most cases I was (and am) unfamiliar with the original versions and my Japanese is still too poor to understand most of the lyrics. But the idea was to mimic the imperfect processes by which culture is communicated, by making new works from the fragments I collected.

I hope that this is amusing for people from Japan who are familiar with the original works or their standard interpretations. For non-Japanese, I have tried to preserve a sense of time and place to convey the experiences we had in Japan.

Thanks (in order of appearance) to Steph Doran, Yoshitaka Tsuji, Kaname K, Kitabeppu Madca, the Takaqura-gumi: Musashino "TAKE" Takeshi, Quramoto "QUMICHO" So and MUSAKO; and Ian F Martin for their contributions. Special thanks to Zoe Holmes, Alex Martin, Ian F Martin and Chris Carlier for their advice and for helping me make connections in Japan.

Voices recorded at Kushikatsu Izakaya Daiyoshi in Tennoji, Osaka; Bamii in Koenji, Tokyo; and Karaoke Kan in Koganei, Tokyo. Instrumentation recorded in Pascoe Vale, Melbourne.

The movie Patrick was a pretty big thing for me when I was a kid. To start with, it starred Sir Robert Helpmann, who had also grown up in Mount Gambier. While he was great in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, seeing him in Patrick was like discovering Vincent Price had once lived next door...Much later on I got to know Everett De Roche, who wrote Patrick. He was a really wonderful fellow and I miss him.