Mothballs

And so, we've reached a strategic point: the point at which the large finished room in the basement is once again required for a birthday party. Which means some tidying, some paring down of the old toys and books scattered around it, and some moving out of things that are a) breakable, and b) rarely used.

Including, as it turns out, all of the electronic music equipment I've accumulated over the last 25 years or so, which I confess I've barely touched since we moved in, nine years ago - certainly not much since the basement was finished and it was all installed in that room. So goodbye, for now, to the following dearly loved bits and pieces of electronica, which are now stashed mainly in the workroom, possibly pending re-installation sometime in the future. But maybe just waiting for Ebay.

The synthesizers: a collection of digital, analogue, and hybrid beasts from the unexciting end of the professional musical instrument scale, circa the mid-1980s:



The rack of associated gear, including a few more synthesizer modules, a 12-channel mixer, and an extremely dodgy 1985-vintage sampler:



Various and assorted home-made distortion boxes:



The guitar amplifier, which would be more useful if I could play guitar with any level of skill:



And even the AKG dynamic microphone, with its built-like-a-tank construction and post-cold-war German industrial chic:



Sad times indeed, although as years go by I'm finding it increasingly difficult to be sentimental about all of this. I expect the birthday party, with crafts, games, and an overarching Princess-y theme, will be a great success. And if I need to satisfy my electronic music obsession sometime in the future, well, I've got a laptop and a digital audio interface that almost works, so I guess I'm set. The rest of the hardware, it seems, is doomed to storage for now.

Overcast

In the new organizational structure that is life with a teacher-in-training in the family, and the necessity of shuttling around two now very active kids who are too young to be left on their own, I find myself now driving my very own vehicle in the morning to the local commuter train station. Which is a welcome change from the endless parade of buses that I've been accustomed to in recent years.

All this gives me time in the car, to and from, to listen to music and in so doing dig back through my music collection, almost all of which is a) on compact disk, and b) has never been put onto my Minidisc player, let along any kind of iThing. So there's a large back catalogue of music I've been missing out on, and am happily rediscovering.

Albums, for example, like Dead Cities by The Future Sound of London, an indescribably complex electronica mish-mash from the late 1990's, which has some truly incredible pieces on it: from the downbeat grooves of My Kingdom, to the aggressive video-game grooves of We Have Explosive, through the ambient floatiness of Vit Drowning and Through Your Gills I Breathe, to one of my very favourites, quiet and sad and poignantly calm: Everyone in the World Is Doing Something Without Me.




It's the musical equivalent of the far-off rumble of a jet passing in an overcast sky - lonely and bleak and a reminder that there are people all around you, going places, doing things, absorbed in their own lives, completely outside your own.

Quite like myself, isolated away in the green Protege, on my way to and from the station, humming along with the 1990's, oblivious.

Oh, my bleeding ears...

For those of you still recovering from the sonic assault that was the subject of the last post, I present something a little gentler:

When Dreaming - 128 kbps mp3 (5.3 Mbytes), file hosted courtesy of Rik as usual.

A floaty, ambient thing featuring electric piano from a Yamaha TX7, whooshy pads and lightweight percussion from a Korg 05R/W, and leads and bass from the mighty Sequential Circuits Split-8, with sonic sauce from a slightly broken Alesis Midiverb II and the usual software massaging.

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In other news, following Scaryduck's bombshell that he's not going to update it any more, Pengor, Penguin of Doom has been deleted from my sidebar. Scary's explanation, "because I can't be arsed", seems perfectly reasonable to me. The real estate freed up over there will be replaced by... um... well, nothing for the time being.

Speaking of which, I wonder what ever happened to Voltan?

Lower down on the sidebar, I've added links to all of the 'serious' music files, more for my convenience than anyone else's. Click away, if you like.

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By the way... who the heck is reading my blog from a location in or near Churchill, Manitoba? Just wondering - stay anonymous if you wish. But there's a great big blob on my Clustrmap from somewhere near there.

And Rock and Roll shall rule the Earth

Once upon a time, and a very, very long time ago it was too, there existed a band. It was called the Strychnine Mangoes, and it was the Most Terrible Band That Never Was™. I should know, I was in it.

The ridiculous name, by the way, was not generated by the Band Automatic Name Generator, but by real honest-to-goodness teenagers. Both of us.

The core line-up included this joker on keyboards, drum machines, vocals, sporadic bass, acoustic guitar, harmonica, ukelele (once), and bongos (also once), and this guy on electric, acoustic and bass guitar, vocals and occasional drum machines. This guy occasionally played bass and sang, and every now and then vocals were also provided by none other than the future Mrs. Ricardipus, although she probably doesn't like to be reminded of that very often.

With a modicum of talent, enthusiasm to burn, and a fan base of absolutely nobody, we were going nowhere at all. And not even fast. But fast enough, it must be said, to produce two classic recordings, "Live #!?%$# In The Blue Room" and "Greatest Hits", each on glorious chrome cassette tape and available in a limited edition of two copies. One each, you see.

Highlights included covers of Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, Patience by Guns 'N Roses, various Eric Clapton and Cream tunes, Assault and Battery by Hawkwind, and a few blues standards. We both liked Blue Öyster Cult and Jethro Tull, but we couldn't figure out the songs, which in retrospect seems like a blessing. There were also a reasonable number of originals, none of which will ever see the light of day. You can thank me for this later, although it must be said that the ukelele part on Firezone kicked some serious butt.

There was also a short-lived punk spin-off called Strychnine Headache, the highlight of which was a re-working of the Robert Johnson blues classic Rambling On My Mind, entitled Ramblin' To Hell. This featured me playing electric guitar over a speed-thrashing drum machine riff, and if you ever do shuffle off this mortal coil and ramble your own way down to Hell, I expect that this song will be what's on the soundtrack, for your listening amusement, over and over, forever.

However, today's subject is a recording presented here by popular demand (ok, one person asked for it, a long time ago, in the comments box of somebody else's blog, until I mentioned it a few days ago, when regular Ricardiblog reader Wonderferret also dialed in a request). It's a cover of Cream's Sunshine Of Your Love, featuring the core line-up of Syl on electric guitar and bass, and Ricardipus on bongos. One of the two is singing, but unfortunately the liner notes have been lost and it is therefore impossible to determine who. Shame really.

Audio path: Fostex 160 four-track cassette to chrome cassette to laptop for noise reduction and other massaging to mp3 to Rik's web space and thus to you, by way of a link from here. Hi Fidelity, all the way, but fortunately not Hi Infidelity, which was something different, although more or less contemporaneous, give or take a few years.

Click below, and don't say I didn't warn you. There are many reasons I was never a rock star, and this is most definitely at least one of them.

(Bongo) Sunshine Of Your Love - 128 kbps mp3 (3.3 Mbytes), hosted courtesy Rikaitch.