These two nightmarish images were created for a 2 disc mix cd a few years back. There was no real reason for the mix except that I wanted to make one (usually the incentive is something like “impress a girl!” or “make my friends like this music by force!”) I tossed this together with a theme, as one might be able to tell from the artwork: Piano music. Not exclusively pianos, but every song on both discs featured a piano in some form or another. I know, that’s not hard to pull off, but I thought it was a nice effort. A lot of the music turned out to be spooky and weird, so I put together the spookiest, weirdest covers I could think of.

The cover to Nurse With Wound’s “Thunder Perfect Mind” had been stuck in my head, and the “Sharps” cover (top image) took heavy influence from that image. I compiled these elements in Photoshop and took used my wacom tablet to draw the “branches” gripping her hands, growing as her seat, and so on.

The other (bottom image) was derived, I believe, from some sort of nightmare I’d had a few nights prior. The shiny blurry bits that seem to fly toward the front of the image and fade behind the kid playing piano are actually CDs. My CD collection had been damaged in a recent beach-sand accident and one day I decided to dig through them and pull out all the ones that weren’t worth saving, systematically snapping them in half and throwing them in a trash can. Rather than throw them out, I thought, on this hot autumn day in Savannah, it might be interesting to solder them together into a collage. I took out a soldering iron and found that when I held 2 CDs next to each other and punched through them with the hot iron, they stuck together almost immediately. Awesome! I proceeded to make a canvas out of CDs, with the intent of later sticking on a bunch of different colored ones in a way that made an image. I snapped some pictures, one of which was used for this image, and then put the thing against my wall. Unfortunately, it proved too fragile when returning home from work the next day, closing the door behind me caused it to crumble apart before my eyes. Oh well. They ended up in the dumpster moments later. Such is life. At least they made it into SOME sort of artwork.

This Twitter experiment is already yielding me some fruit, I slacked off preparing my show last night (uh, cuz I was setting up PJ at Che’s Lounge with his own twitter). So, since I have very little music selected, I was flying by the seat of my pants. However, my sudden influx of new listeners (thanks in part to twitter itself) blasted me with a barrage of eclectic requests. I couldn’t fill all of them, but I did my best to try, and during the show I got followed by another 5 or 6 people, and turned a few people on to making accounts themselves. This is my second day using the thing, my first day REALLY using it. It’s pretty incredible. Anyway, I took advantage of the requests and did my best to fill the gaps with my own selections. I also played that Clark EP, split up over the course of the show.

So anyway, the tracklist is as follows:

1. Clark – Growls Garden
2. Animal Collective – Banshee Beat
3. Fever Ray – Keep the Streets Empty for Me (by request for Brian)
4. Clark – The Magnet Mine
5. Flight of the Conchords – The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room (Sort of by request for Paul)
6. Sufjan Stevens – The Dress Looks Nice On You (by request for deckhands)
7. Boards of Canada – Oscar See Through Red Eye
8. Justice – Dance
9. Patrick Wolf – Get Lost
10. Zeigeist – The Lake
11. Clark – Seaweed
12. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – Young Adult Friction
13. Clark – Gonk Roughage
14. Tim Exile – Don’t Think We’re One
15. Bonnie Prince Billy – I Won’t Ask Again (by request for “humanity” from PJ at Che’s)
16. Dodos – Chickens
17. The Mountain Goats – So Desperate
18. Bob Dylan – Not Dark Yet (by request from My Mom)
19. Akron/Family – Dylan Pt. 2
20. Billy Idol – White Wedding (by request from Chrysal)
21. Clark – Distant Father Torch
22. Clark – Farewell Mining Town
23. Antony and the Johnsons – Kiss My Name
24. Metric – Help I’m Alive (by request from Katherine via Facebook)
25. Plaid – TAK 5

Note that I linked all those who made requests (or something resembling a request). I will try to do that from now on if I’m doing the Twitter thing, although if I have a lot of new music I might be less likely to take requests.

Oh and without further ado: Here’s the link to the episode for download/stream (64 kbps mp3 – i know i know, it’s recorded from the stream)

Okay I suppose this post doesn’t work if you’re looking at an RSS feed, but anyway, my pride:

Just tossed the twitter feed on my blog. And hey, it works, how bout that!

Hooray technology.

As some may know, I work at Edu Comp and I am going to be showing some web design and home networking equipment off this saturday at the tech fair at the Oak Bluffs library. Come on by if you are a nerd and have free time (do those two things still go together anymore?) I may post from the event, or at least twitter it.

This was drawn in the midst of a panic attack, and it shows a certain amount of mania, I think. Lots of squiggly lines and tangential oddity, very short attention span. The baby looks sort of ridiculous, there are a lot of things I still, to be honest, don’t know how to draw, but that’s okay. My personal interpretation of this image is that it’s about a bit of a father and son disconnect. In Savannah I had little contact with either of my parents for years, and I had reconnected with my mother when I drew this, but my father was still out there in the unknown.

My dad also used to be notorious for drawing trees. Big elaborate trees with no leaves, just a bunch of scraggly tiny branches. It must have been some sort of meditation for him. I never got into tht, but I did a sort of cartoon tree growing from the belly of this skinny beast.

The man in this image strongly resembles my oldest known childhood drawing, which my mother insisted was very much like a Picasso. I was never so sure about that, but it was flattering.

Yeah, I got in there. Busy day. Maybe an older works update at lunch time.

twitter.com/maurydegeofroy

Wolfie – Strange Ways in 4D – 03-18-09

No time to go into more detail now, but here’s Wolfie’s latest radio show. I haven’t even had time to listen to it yet myself. Enjoy.

Went to an informative seminar by Julie Roads of Writing Roads this morning and, despite my familiarity with Facebook, Blogs, Myspace, and other such sites beyond the scope of the lesson, and those taking it, I was glad to learn a little bit more about Twitter and gain an understanding of why it is catching on with more force than the rest of such networking sites. I won’t bore you with the details, as there are plenty of pro-twitter propaganda sites to go around, I only intended to say that I will be getting more involved with it. I have a twitter username (maurydegeofroy) that, currently, has only one post: questioning why I signed up in the first place. Now that I have discovered why, I will be working toward integrating it more into this site (most likely as a blog widget), and expanding twitter base, or whatever it’s called, to reach and be reached by more people. Yeah. More to come.

I’ve always liked Clark, ever since he was known as “Chris Clark” and releasing tracks that the naysayers were writing off as sub-aphex slag. I saw huge gems in Clarence Park and I eagerly anticipated his next release, which, for many years I was certain would never arrive. When it finally did, it was met with a mixture of excitement and disappointment. The thrill of the new bleeps and blops and scrapes and grinds and that deep, echoey bass that feels like it’s surrounding you, they were all present, but the depth of melody felt lacking. The EPs and LPs kept coming and with each one, that newfound excitement returned, but there have always been tracks that left me aching for something more, while others blew my mind entirely.

Turning Dragon, despite lacking for a softer, quieter side, felt like a solid fix to this problem: he had finally created an album that just tore my ass up with every track. Yes!

Here, Clark is trying something new: vocals, and I feel like it works for him. The title track is an absolutely amazing piece of work, with echoes of “Wicked Life” from the Throttle Clarence EP, it is rare that a song can start strong and then just continue to get stronger and stronger, but this one does. The repeated vocal line, well, honestly it doesn’t add much, but it’s not taking anything away, and it makes it feel like a song, rather than just another electronic track from just another electronic musician. It manages to have the epic powerhouse feel of the best-ever nine inch nails songs but without the angsty teenage livejournal drivel of Reznor’s lyrics.

The Magnet Mine takes a while to find its stride but it has moments of greatness, and the spazzy, high-pitched intro eventually settles into a groove that is captivating.

Seaweed feels designed to disorient, I can picture Clark sitting at a synth with his hand on the volume knob, watching someone in a tiny white room listening to the track, feeling the groove and bobbing their head, and just when the test subject gets comfortable with the beat, he turns the knob, sending blasts of noise into the chamber and upsetting the mood, sending the subject into fits of terror and confusion. It’s an interesting accomplishment, but not one I’m certain I can consistently tolerate.

Gonk Roughage brings back the vocals, this time playing with another style: the chopped up hip-hop spoken word. The song is driven and it makes heads bob, and as usual, Clark throws in so many maddeningly variable effects that it never kills your attention span, but it’s not as visceral and moving as Growls Garden.

“Distant Father Torch” is the second highlight of this record, feeling like the dance club sequel (or prequel) to “Cremation Drones.” If “drones” was the sound of being locked in a coffin and pushed into the flames, this is the funeral service in the giant menacing church, tall stained glass windows towering above, the sound of the organ fuzzing in and fuzzing out, building the tension as you walk toward the open casket for that look inside.

The EP ends on the usual Clark note, with the ambient, droney number “Farewell Mining Town.” The track itself is gorgeous, but the predictability left me a bit cold: it’s like the twist on an M. Night Shyamalan movie, you don’t know exactly what it will be, but you know it will be there. Clark puts himself on par with any track from Belong with this ambient piece, but I am dying for him to do something like this with a more melody oriented side, something I can hum, not just be numbed by.

I won’t call it a disappointment by any means. As usual, I found myself driving around and being blown away by the sounds I heard, but the title track built a tower that could not be climbed by the rest of the EP. However, if that song is any indication of what’s to come, there’s a lot more to look forward to from Clark.

Listen to a sample of the title track at Warp Records

The cover to a mix CD I made for a girlfriend, back in… 2002? I think? The “Breaking the Water” reference was to a misnomer in speech I made while speaking to her, I meant to say “break the ice” and I said “break the water” – which is just silly.

The paint background was from a scanned in disposable palette. The detailing on the letters was some of my first work with a wacom tablet, same with the color on the little guy. I love that thing (although I haven’t made use of it in awhile, I think I’m going to use it for some retouching on this site.

Again, I was sort of ripping off the “Zim” style at the time but I am still fairly happy with the way this piece looks.