quasify

Daily Mediafriend. Work is still progressing on my mad puppet masterpiece, in the meantime use this opportunity to learn about the thalamus.

Also, a Mediafriend interview.

Mediafriend: [coughs] You can always hear a musician’s apartment and the street outside their window through their music. It can happen in many different ways, but it usually happens. I’m pretty sure it’s happened in my music. That’s probably a good thing, I think Boston is an interesting city to listen to. But if you listen carefully, you can hear NJ, Philly, NY, and whatever in there too. That’s just the cities I mean…

Me: You mentioned “broken electronics”. From what we’ve heard you’ve done your share of breaking electronics so to speak.

Mediafriend: Yeah, my brother got me into that. It all boiled down to the notion of having entirely new instruments. Nobody is going to rip off your sound if they have to reinvent your instruments first. Well, maybe.

Me: What instruments are we talking about?

Mediafriend: The Playertron mainly. It’s a big part of the sound. The Playertron is a series of tape players with a bunch of knobs and switches that allow you to control the speed and play a cassette tape like a monophonic instrument. We record tones or voices or whatever onto tapes and go from there. It’s great.

Me: We heard you play all this live on the album. Is it true that none of this was sequenced?

Mediafriend: That’s mostly true. Definitely all the synth parts and those tapes and of course, any guitars [are not sequenced]. The beats are mostly tapped out on a trigger pad or played on a drumset. Some of those beats though… on those I sequenced a beat, burned a cd, and mixed them up on a pair of cdx’s [cd turntables]. So, everything does go through some process of actual performance and nothing is completely sequenced.