Chef Menteur interview on WTUL

April 2nd, 2024 by admin

Chef Menteur, my long-standing group project—which includes longtime friends Dan Haugh on drums (etc) and Court Batson on bass—has a new song on the brand new WTUL Marathon compilation…and we will be talking to DJ Kerry about it tomorrow morning (Wed April 3) around 8am or so.

We will (hopefully) be talking about what we’ve been up to all this time and the new album in progress.

https://wtul.fm or 91.5 FM in New Orleans. Their new antenna means you can hear it all over the city now.

Support local independent radio!

aleatoric: solo ambient guitar live

May 7th, 2022 by admin


i’m playing some ambient looping guitar tonight (sat. may 7. 2022) at lemieux galleries, taking inspiration from brian eno, harmonia, and terry riley. 300 block of julia street, 6-8 pm.

Terry Riley’s “In C” (reprise)

April 30th, 2021 by alec

Here’s a really informative video about Terry Riley’s “In C” that came up on my YouTube feed the other week (thanks, The Algorithm™!). This piece — and Terry Riley– have been inspirational to me in so many ways I can’t even explain. He talks about computer performances of the piece, which reminded me that in 2009 I made an Ableton Live version so that it could be performed using random number generators and MIDI. (At the time, I was not able to find any computer versions online, just references to them, and I may have been the first to do it in Ableton). A nifty little book called How To Read Music that helped me with the transcription, as my grade school memory of musical notation was somewhat sketchy.

In fact, watching this video made me want to revisit ye old blogge here, and realizing it was offline meant I went down a rabbit hole of PHP, WordPress, and backups hell for awhile to put some blood back in these old veins.

More importantly though, revisiting the concepts of generative performance made me rethink some of my own ideas for generative composition and I’ve worked out a sketch that I hope to develop. More on that later!

It’s been a minute.

April 22nd, 2021 by alec

I had known this little outpost of the internet wasn’t functioning for awhile now. I hadn’t posted to it since 2014, so I figured it didn’t matter. Most of the “readers” were bots and spammers, and I disabled the user registration because they were only registering so that they could comment about deals on athletic shoes and cosmetics and luxury watches, and maintenance was a hassle for a blog I wasn’t updating because everyone was on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram.

But, as I contemplated starting a new place to dump musical (and potentially other?) ideas I’m playing with, especially with my growing disillusionment with all forms of corporate-run social media, I finally made peace with resurrecting this blog. I had accidentally erased all of the files but some sleuthing into my own backups eventually proved successful. One of the first things that happened was an alert from my hosting provider that I had installed a captcha plugin that had been used maliciously to spam fake dialog boxes on unsuspecting users.

Since I last posted here, we had a fascist President come and go, we lost several beloved pets, I joined a talented singer-songwriter’s band playing atmospheric guitar harmonies, my main band (having ascended from trio to a quartet) lost its long-time bassist/multi-instrumentalist and was replaced by another talented friend, rehearsed for 4 years, played one gig, and then fell apart again without releasing anything more than one single… then the drummer and I rebooted again with one of our oldest and best friends on bass, and honestly things have never been more fun and satisfying, playing late 60s-inspired original garage psych instrumentals with funk and jazz influences from Curtis Mayfield, Jimi Hendrix/Band of Gyspies, the Meters, the Beatles as well as 80’s-early 90’s shoegaze/jangle/goth bands and African guitar music…. We got to play one gig at the Circle Bar (RIP), with a brand-new set…. and then of course COVID-19 happened.

The three of us have been getting together outside to jam on various acoustic instruments during the intermission, but soon we’ll all be fully vaccinated again and looking forward to returning to electrified amplification. I hope our neighbors haven’t gotten too used to the quiet in the meantime.

Personally, I’ve miraculously come into possession of my dream synth and have quietly been making droney, lush, and pulse-oriented evolving analog sounds that have been a form of meditative exercise and escapism for me during the pandemic. I need to find the time to finish mixing them and release them. Also I’ve been spending some time in Max/MSP again, working on some custom sequencer patches. I also have a design for algorithmic composition that I’ve sketched out and am working on implementing, inspired by Terry Riley’s In C. (Which I have written about and produced an Ableton Live version of here before).

Meanwhile as a guitar player I’ve been concentrating on learning a bit of theory that puts more chords, patterns and scales in my arsenal. After most of my lifetime as a guitar player thinking that too much learning would keep me from expressing my “true” sound, I am pretty comfortable tapping into that and now wish to increase my vocabulary. I’d also love to be able to hang with any musician in any impromptu jam situation at any time. Honestly a lifelong dream is to just show up with an instrument and just be able to play. I’ve acquired a much better ear but I still hit the occasional wrong note from time to time. I can play a melody or harmony almost intuitively but not a diminished chord or an augmented one. (I’ve just leveled up to being able to play major-7ths anywhere on the neck. Not that it was hard, but I just never learned it. But that is just half the battle — the other half is training your ear to know when to play the major 7th.)

Finally, as a guitar geek I’d be remiss not to share my love of a couple pedals I’ve acquired in the past 5 years. The Eventide Space has given me the Twin Peaks style atmosphere I need for playing with Saint Lorelei, but I use it a lot in everything. The Dusky Hypatia is an extremely versatile fuzz/overdrive pedal that gives me the tone I need when I want more than the Tube Screamer boost.

Anyway, like funerals are more for the living, perhaps blogs are more for the writer than the reader. But I still hope a few people get ideas or interest from anything I’ve posted. I’d still love to hear from anyone who wants to trade ideas or share experiences. May peace and good music follow you wherever you go.

“Watermachine” Sound Installation at LeMieux Galleries

June 11th, 2014 by alec

WatermachineI currently have a sound piece playing at LeMieux Galleries as part of the group show “Water, Water, Everywhere” curated by Christy Wood.

The “Watermachine” plays  a predetermined, but constantly evolving mix of three long (around 5 minutes each) field recordings I made: a waterfall in North Carolina, the surf in Alabama, and a thunderstorm in New Orleans.

It was created with Max/MSP (a “visual programming language for media“), some free sound editing software and a mobile recorder (Zoom H2). Two of the sound sources have their volume controlled by a very slow oscillator (LFO), each on cycles of a prime number of seconds so that the volume curves don’t realign at the same places for a very long time—and when they do, they are each referencing a different part of the sample. Though subtle, the sound mix would not repeat itself exactly for many years. The third sound source, the waterfall, is brought in algorithmically when the sum of the other two sources has dropped below a certain threshold, and fades out again when one or both are audible again.

Staggered Lab’s “Aleator”: A 24/7 Generative Music Stream

April 4th, 2014 by alec

I got an email from Kwame at Staggered Laboratories asking me to check out The Aleator (as in “aleatoric”) their generative music stream which composes pretty listenable “post-rock” styled music 24/7.

It’s pretty interesting. Give it a listen

Experience “Under Pressure” online

April 22nd, 2013 by alec

“Under Pressure” with video animation by David Sullivan and sound by yours truly was a piece exhibited at the Duets show at Loyola last year and later at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

I neglected to post the video online, but here it is. View it in fullscreen with good speakers if possible!

Under Pressure from david sullivan on Vimeo.

The Workman’s Friend (A Pint of Plain is Your Only Man)

March 17th, 2013 by alec

homebrew-stout-IMG_8456

An Irish drinking song, rescued recently from cassette tape. Written and recorded as a lark to 4-track cassette in winter of 92-93 (20 years ago!) by my then-girlfriend (may she rest in peace) and I during my college years in Dublin.

Lyrics taken from Flann O’Brien’s poem “The Workman’s Friend” in his marvellous book At Swim-Two-Birds. If the head on the pint of plain looks frothy, that’s because it’s a home-brew Irish stout I made with a friend and not a Guinness properly poured by a Dublin barkeep. Uploaded for St Patrick’s Day 2013.

And, here’s a spoken version of the same poem that I just found today, by the Dubliners.

Audiobiography (for Disquiet Junto)

February 27th, 2013 by alec

My third (or fourth?) entry to the Disquiet Junto is a 2-minute narration that was uncomfortable to do. I initially resisted doing this “audiobiography”, as I generally dislike the self-consciousness that arises from talking about myself or hearing my voice, but as so many others in the Disquiet Junto have done it, I felt like I was cheating by skipping it. By the time I was finished, there were many things I didn’t talk about that contributed to the whole picture that didn’t make the cut : Indian music, analog synths, field recordings, Autechre, My Bloody Valentine…. but I was already several minutes over the allotted time when I started editing.

I also created a new SoundCloud account to post works from this site. I’ll be retroactively posting all the tracks from this blog soon.

background music: Chef Menteur – “Io” (edits)

More on this #60th Disquiet Junto project at:disquiet.com/2013/02/21/disquiet0060-audiobio

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: Groups – Disquiet-junto

More details on the SoundCloud “audiobiography” project at: blog.soundcloud.com/2013/02/06/audiobiography/

Disquiet Junto: Morsebeat

January 4th, 2013 by alec

this is a track I composed for the 50th disquiet junto project.

My grandfather was a big time amateur (“ham”) radio operator who had talked to every country in the world, and he convinced me to get my novice license as a young kid, where i learned morse code. He passed away about 10 years ago but I am always thankful for his interest in electronics and tinkering that he passed on to me. The call CQ or “seek you” is what ham operators use to initiate conversation, that is the foundation of the pulse of this piece. The other signal incorporates a simple message from my (expired) call sign to my grandfather’s (RIP).

I used Max/MSP to generate the Morse code messages, (a little rusty to do it manually) and I ended with a sample of the Radio Tirana (from communist Albania) interval signal that I could pick up on my Heathkit ham radio, and was magical to me as a kid.

more on this 50th Disquiet Junto project
more details on the Disquiet Junto

Note: I first found out about disquiet and its founder/former NOLA resident Marc Weidenbaum when he reviewed my band Chef Menteur’s earliest mp3s and wrote about New Orleans’ burgeoning electronic music scene in the early 2000’s (See this 2005 piece he wrote right after Katrina). He’s only gotten more involved in the electronic music community since moving to San Francisco, keeping regular dispatches up and engaging via his twitter account @disquiet. His Disquiet Junto project on SoundCloud is now one year old; and this is my first entry, posted near the end of year one…. Congrats & thanks Marc!