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Photos from the Wrecking Ball, a twice-monthly "Evening of Electronic Musical Debauchery and Mayhem" in Brooklyn. Top, Heat Sensor, three intense guys with laptops, who've gotten some ink recently working with hiphoppers MF Doom and King Ghidra. All glitchy texture and monotonously elegant looped beats, this was hard to stay focused on, except for occasionally ear-tickling Kruder & Dorfmeisterish atmospherics. Middle photo, Bubblyfish, incorporating 8-bit/gameboy sounds organically into danceable techno. This could be pop music in Europe, and that's meant as a compliment (because I hear they have techno on the radio over there, and not just in car commercials). Her final number--begun and ended with a childlike pecking out of "Good King Wenceslas"--especially shined. Not pictured because the photo was overexposed: Man From Planet Risk's jenghizkhan, the most dissonant and "art," as opposed to arty, entry in the program. He had beats, but also skronky sounds resembling giant uncoiling springs overlapping in reverberating, Stockhausenlike crescendos. Also, like Bubblyfish, some pretty melodies wafting into the mix.
Heat Sensor
Bubblyfish (and speckly texture on the photo--sorry)
"Reel for Omniverters" [mp3 removed]
A friend commented that he likes the music I wrote for the Macintosh SE better than what I'm doing now, because what I'm doing now is "dance music." I disagree that anything written in the last six months is particularly danceable, although I use a lot of dance tropes because I love it. FWIW, "Reel for Omniverters" is more in the old style of writing, just with newer instruments.
Technical crap: this piece uses Cubase to control three synths, one "outboard" and two virtual. I spent a frustrating week trying to adapt my writing method to the Cubase environment and finally gave up. In Cubase, staff notes are contained within "parts" on a timeline, and you can't cut and paste notes, only parts. Which means constantly moving in and out of the parts to write. So what I did here was write the whole thing for piano in my notation program, which allows one to easily move notes around on any number of staffs, and then saved it as a MIDI file, which I imported into Cubase and used to play the instruments. So, why not just use the notation program to play the synths? Because it's limited to its own (conventional sounding) virtual instruments and its MIDI control isn't very good. Cubase is more compatible with the virtual instrument environment. Because the next step is to eliminate the use of Cubase's "house synths" and import (or control) better sounding ones.
UPDATE: Bonus--piano version [mp3 removed]