Category: Blog

XCITING 2021. Presents again this year an international, variable PROGRAM. These artists definitely confirmed:
From Poland the legendary KSIĘŻYC, Slavic folk meets psychedelia. / A borderless Audio Visual performance of THE LAPPETITES (international). / One woman noise KIKIRIKI (Slovenia). / First appearances in Germany from the transnational artistic collective MÈCANOSPHÈRE (Portugal/France). / And also for the first time on a German stage the new Russian project PONOMAREV/OBRAZEENA MASSACRE. Also from Poland; restlest sound textures of PURGIST. / The Ukrainian avant-garde singer-songwriter SVITLANA NIANIO. / JEROME NOETINGER, a tape recorder wizzard from France. / From Norway AVANT JOIK creating contemplative atmospheres of the North. / + Pilot world premiere of the very first CORTEX movie by ALEX BUESS and ROGER GRAF (Switserland).
….. more will be added. Detailed info soon.
Xciting Festival. 24/25/26 September 2021. Stuttgart Germany.

Found in news media:

Considerable part of Portuguese population ‘presenting light symptoms of depression’

A considerable part of the Portuguese population are presenting “light symptoms of depression” due to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is one of the conclusions of an international study in which Portugal’s institute of investigation and innovation in health (i3s) at Porto University took part. The ‘Life with Corona’ study aims to “continue to evaluate the social and economic impact of the pandemic on a global scale”. Light symoptoms sounds reaonable given the cataclysmic effects on everyday life: it is only further down in reports published today that investigators admit “around 50% of people quizzed in Portugal, Argentina, Indonesia, the UK and US, as well as 40% of Germans “showed more serious symptoms of depression”.

Interview in The Quietes:

http://tquiet.us/3tOYgfw

Today, 1 year ago, Genesis Breyer P Orridge passed away. In memory some unpublished material from my private archive. Film recordings from a soundcheck in 2009 at the Express Festival, Arena Puccini, Bologna Italy. Date: 28 May 2009. David (guitar) carried a camera on that tour. He stuck it on the side of the stage filming the soundcheck. Further musicians are Edley (drums), Gila (bass) who replaces Alice on this one tour, Jess (Keyboard) who passed away last month and of course Genesis Breyer P Orridge.
Notice the positive atmosphere and joking I will miss a lot. It was always great fun touring with PTV.
Songs performed: Kiss Me, Higher And Higher, Papal Breakdance.

New album now available for pre-order on Bandcamp. To safe on postage European orders will be shipped from Portugal.

https://consolidated.bandcamp.com/album/were-already-there

Listen to the album:

Lets stay a bit into the recording ‘tech’.
Below a comment from David Briggs (February 29, 1944 – November 26, 1995). David Briggs is mainly known as producer of many Neil Young records. Young’s records sound extremely good, especially very dynamic, but not ‘clean’. You hear musicians making playing mistakes, singing out of tune, putting down a (beer?) bottle, hitting a mic, a.s.o….. Listening to Neil Young recordings, all these extra sounds never bothered me. Clearly the tracks are recorded live in the studio, all playing at the same time. I assume thats the secret of the dynamic sound. Neil Young is a very popular recording artist for many generations, until today. It doesn’t seem to be the absolute perfect clean recording that makes a record sell….. I often try to explain to younger technicians taking tracks through digital cleaning procedures, meanwhile killing dynamics.

David Briggs, How to Make Records:

I can teach you everything I know in an hour. Everything. That’s how simple it is to make records. Nowadays, buddy, the technician is in control of the medium. They try to make out like it’s black magic, or flyin’ a spaceship. I can teach anybody on this planet how to fly the spaceship. If you look at the modern console, there’ll be thirty knobs – high frequency, low frequency, midfrequency, all notched in little tiny, tiny, teeny tiny degrees – and it’s all bullshit. All this stuff doesn’t matter, and you can’t be intimidated. You just ignore it – all of it. I walk into studios with the biggest console known to mankind, and I ask for the schematic and say, “Can you patch from here to here and eliminate the ENTIRE board?” I just run it right into the tape machines. All the modern consoles, they’re all made by hacks, they’re not worth a shit, they sound terrible. None of it touches the old tube stuff – like the green board from Heider’s. It has two tone controls – high end, low end and a pan knob – and that’s it. I had great good fortune when I was a kid and started makin’ records. I made ‘em at Wally Heider’s, Gold Star, so all the people that taught me were Frank Dimidio, Dave Gold, Stan Ross, Dean Jensen – these guys were the geniuses of the music business, still are. They taught me more about sound and how sound is made and the principles of doing it, and it’s unshakably correct what they said to me: You get a great sound at the source. Put the correct mike in front of the source, get it to the tape the shortest possible route – that’s how you get a great sound. That’s how you do it. All other ways are work. The biggest moment of my life – the one I haven’t been able to get past every, really – is 1961, when I first got to L.A. I got invited to Radio Recorders to see Ray Charles, and I walk into the studio, and Ray’s playin’ all the piano parts with his left hand, reading a braille score with his right hand, singing the vocal live while a full orchestra played behind him. So I sat there and I watched. And I went, “This is how records are made. Put everybody in the fuckin’ room and off we go.” In those days everybody knew they had to go in, get their dick hard at the same time and deliver. And three hours later they walked out the fuckin’ door with a record in their pocket, man. Of course, in those days they didn’t have eight- , sixteen- , twenty-four- , forty-eight- , sixty-four-track, ad nauseum, to fuck people up, and that is what fucked up the recording business and the musicians of today, by the way – fucked ‘em all up to where they’ll never be the same, in my opinion. People realized they could do their part…later. Play their part and fix it later. And with rock and roll, the more you think, the more you stink.