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Drawings and animations by Ryuko Azuma here (blog front page here). [via] Not work safe if you live in a repressive Puritanical culture (i.e., most places). Fairly relentless psychosexual content: genitalia (human and alien), mutilation, b/d, but often exquisitely drawn. The style leans to anime/commercial illustration but twisted. I'm assuming from the blog photo that Azuma is female; a man drawing many of these images in the "West" would be looked askance upon by the pc left or locked up by the religious right. There is a lot of this type of work on the internet, meaning that it has always existed in sketchbooks that rarely saw the light of day until now. It taps the well of dark collective fears and yearnings that artists like Inka Essenhigh, Sue Williams, and Nicola Tyson also access, but I would argue they do it less effectively, especially now that they are market entities and can't "go too far." There is still a divide of what's appropriate in public and private and oddly the internet isn't considered the former, at least until someone decides to shut a site down.
"Pitch Sequences" [mp3 removed]
Sort of trancy, sort of Raymond Scott-y.
The main riffs are done with the Mutator filterbank--a run of notes written in my sequencer's MIDI pitchbend controller modulates a few basic drum machine hits into arpeggiated sounding melodies (which sound different in each channel).
On top of that is a sixteen note sequence which you can't hear--it is carved into four motifs using the "polyphony" mode of a four-voice analog synth. I didn't write these tunes so much as pick them from a range of choices the synth was randomly generating. Each sounds different because the four voices are each programmed differently. It was a bit of a pain in that I had to re-create the motifs by hitting "restart" many times when it got to the recording stage.
Photo by Jim Louis of an awesome newspaper graphic. I need to start reading the sports page.
"Heartbleet" [3.6 MB .mp3]
More analog adventures. I guess it's inevitable this music would go down the John Carpenter trail. He wouldn't do a beat like this, though; it's kind of Ringo Starr-ish. All sounds were made with a rhythm synthesizer and outboard filters--the tunable drums provide the musical notes. The "Ringo" beat is a cymbal LFO'd to give it a sharper attack and to make it pleasantly unpredictable (I hope).
"This really is a great country -- despite what George Bush is doing to destroy our constitution, our reputation and our freedoms." --AMERICABlog
"Sacred Machines Homage" [mp3 removed]
Straight up minimal techno. Not in the sense of "merely repetitive" but more in the spirit of trying to get the most for the least. The percussion doubles as a lead instrument.
"Everyone Fights, No One Quits" [mp3 removed]
The beat is simple but has a strong forward drive--it's one of the first times I've actually liked the bitcrusher-type effect. The "main melody" is the Oki Computer 2, which I am finally starting to understand the guts of. It is a purely digital instrument that for its oscillator uses a up to 16 optional waveforms--as a cursor moves horizontally through them, each morphs into the sound of the one adjacent to it. Moving the slider rapidly back and forth results in interesting timbres. These are further shaped by a sequencer, envelope generators, and LFOs--all of which can also modulate the cursor position. Contrasting with the Oki in this piece are analog sounds that are heavily LFO'd and appear to wax and wane randomly.