tom moody
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AMC (The American Movie Classics channel on cable) ran an ad for a documentary they produced about the post-release editing of Hollywood content to remove "offensive" language and scenes. Didn't see the documentary, so I don't know whether the culprits were local TV stations, fundamentalist Christian-owned tech businesses or some combination. Either way, the outrage from people in the interview clips they showed led me to believe AMC thinks the practice is bad. Well, this is a howler coming from that channel, which up until 2001 or so showed movies intact, but now edits them for language and Orson knows what else.
A couple of examples of AMC's own practices:
Trivial (but still egregious): In David E. Kelley's weird horror comedy Lake Placid, about a 30-foot crocodile living in a Maine lake (an obvious homage to the young John Sayles), Betty White plays a crazy woman who has been feeding her cows to the croc for five years, treating it as a combination pet and pagan God to be appeased. The sublime Brendan Gleeson as a local cop confronts her at one point and the erstwhile Golden Girl ripostes, "If I had a dick this is where I'd tell you to suck it." OK, it's not all that funny but it's really not funny when "dick" becomes "____" and you still see her mouth moving.
Ahistorical and evil: One of the revelations of the Watergate years was that Nixon had a guy on his reelection campaign payroll named Donald Segretti, whose specialty was "ratfucking"--little dirty tricks like distributing flyers for opposing campaign events that never happen, releasing smears and rumors about the other guy etc. Part of America's fall from innocence in the '70s was learning that people at the very top thought and talked that way. Karl Rove, Bush's so-called brain, got his start in that campaign, so knowing about the practice and how sleazy these people are is still completely relevant. Anyway, to wrap this up, when AMC ran All the President's Men this bit of actual history was airbrushed to "rat____ing."
The "happy little E-tune" posted previously ([mp3 removed]--eventually it'll get a real title) is reinterpreted here on the SidStation synth: mp3 removed]. Also working on an extended remix of the Sid version, with drums, etc.
This version has more of that "videogame sound" because the Sid is built around the old Commodore SID chip. The machine isn't truly polyphonic: it has 3 oscillators and a kind of step designer feature called "wave table synthesis" that can be used to write multi-voice songs, but I haven't burrowed into that yet. One person who has is Jotsif, who posted some fine tunes on this Elektron Instruments forum thread.
If you don't use wave tables, in order to play several melodic parts simultaneously you have to "overdub" them, in a sequencer, as separate digital audio tracks. This is a pain in the ass (but not as much of a pain in the ass as programming wave tables on a 2 inch LCD screen). The above .mp3 is played with the following presets, in ascending order of pitch: Velobass, Killer, Cutting Lead, and Vengasynth.
Update: I took down the Sid performance I originally posted here and substituted another take, where the Sid-playing is run through the Mutator. It's a bit prettier that way. The non-Sid happy e-tune I posted first (with the electric piano) is much better, I know, I just like hearing how different instruments change the exact same melodies.