New tune, rough live version

Squib (live damp version) by Ed Devane

I just recorded this now and offer it to the mists of the internet as an example of what my new liveset is going to sound like...

New sound design

Catch by Ed Devane

Caught by Ed Devane

Reat beepeat by Ed Devane



I'm working on a new liveset, making good use of the power my new laptop gives me. I'm using feedback processes and my zither exclusively to make new sounds, and here are some examples. Ableton has slowly but surely overtaken Logic as my main sound design / composition tool, partly out of necessity (all my recent tunes have grown out of live sets made in Live) and partly because of the ease of the whole process.

I'm not saying these are pieces of music as they were made through somewhat random techniques...but I think they sound nice and who knows, maybe you will too. "Catch" and "Caught" are versions of the same sounds, and Reet BeepEat is some layered loops of distortion feedback (which have since become My Best Rave Sound Ever).

For anyone who might be frustrated by all this noise and want to hear some beats, don't worry...I'm working on new tracks and will be playing gigs again from January onwards, so I'll have a new proper liveset up here soon enough!

!kaboogie feature on spannered.org, mix of my new stuff



Check out this feature on Spannered - a while back I was asked by !kaboogie to make a promo mix of my stuff, so I made a selection of tunes that have either just been released or will be released in the coming months.

Making a liveset is much easier than trying to mix mixdowns of my music together. I'm no DJ and maybe that reflects in a lack of DJ-friendliness in my tunes! So I enlisted Redmonk to do it for me. He did a good job considering the diversity in tempo and vibe of the tracks!

Main !kaboogie article is here, there's a liveset by ForceFed and tracks by 16 Hz and Major Grave as part of the feature.

Stasis Antimode v/a net release freetastic


The first release of the new Stasis Records label, featuring tracks by myself, Euphiophone, Ventolyn & Becotyde, Swarm Intelligence and David Adams.

There's a really nice flow to this compilation, washes of guitar-like ambient noise and electronic beats. I particularly like the Euphiophone and David Adams tracks the best...

Get it here!

My track is a live take of a tune I spent a good bit of time over-producing...the early live version pleased my ears more than the supposedly new and improved version.

FYED article on Analogue





An interview with myself and Fionn, some Second Square to None plugging and impressions on noise, written by Eadaoin O'Sullivan:
Read it here.

I say "like" a lot when I speak it seems!

Thumb piano, bike recyling part 1



A few weeks ago I found a small wooden box for sale in a charity shop, which cost me 50 cent. This week I had to buy a new wheel for my bike so used the spokes from the old one as the tines, a couple of bits of dowel and some nuts and bolts and boom! Thumb piano.

This is a recording of me messing around on it with untrained thumbs...

Spoke Kalimba

FYED "remix" through audio-image conversion

USER0003 copy by FYED

This is not for the fainthearted, but interesting in the same way car crashes are. I've been interested in the idea of messing with digital audio information ever since a CD of some music I burned turned out very wrong indeed, like the 1's had become 0's, turning what was music into wild cacophony. A couple of weeks ago I was looking for a way to visualise the binary that makes up a digital audio file, and found a way of converting audio into an image format that Photoshop could display.



By processing the image in nearly any way, then transcoding the results to audio, I ended up with the most intense noise I have ever created / facilitated...not perhaps the most listenable noise, but interesting how the same information interpreted through another medium and back again can sound like this!

Little Mix of some wayward tracks and outaken tests



Here's a little mix of some tunes I've made over the past few years. Basically I have no more old music left now, so will be making a load of new ones in the coming weeks and months. The tunes on this mix are a mixture of broken beats, beats with vocals, beats with zither, and noise beats. So pretty much a lot of beats. I hope you play this really loud and experience The Fear.

Def Record


hehehe...this is a shout from below the Irish underground in response to a certain festival (and their compilation CD) on around now.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Associates Ned Deviant(UK/USA) feat TopsyTurvy Girl and DJ Dummy Klips jostle for attention with Sadam Handler, Crywank and Aul Wan in a mega mix of the shits...goodtimes music!!!

New Takeover Recordings release now available!


Takeover Recordings, the first label I had anything released on (in 2005, a track myself, thatboytim and redmonk produced called "Guilty Feat. Got No Rhythm" on the Lowslung EP), is back in digital form with Response Unit 1, a various artists EP. Techno and electro stylings are the order of the day from T-Polar, Rogue Frequency, The Parallel and Jay Riordan, though I see Juno have been kind not to use either of those words to catagorise the release. I wouldn't call my track electro or techno, so downbeat noise dub will have to do.

It's jiggy stuff that'll get a floor moving, which is exactly what "dance" music should do! Response Unit 1 is available to buy from Juno now. There'll be a Takeover/Nice & Nasty / Static Recordings showcase gig as part of DEAF on Thursday 29th October in Pygmalion, South William Street, Dublin 2 from 6 in the evening until 2.30am, free admission! Alongside everyone on this release (but myself) Rob Glennon, Toirse, thatboytim, Desy Balmer, Defekt, Sean Mac and Daire Delmar will be playing live or DJ'ing. Shapin' up to be a wicked festival!

Trapdoor Material Part Two released this week

We got our copies of the latest ManTrap Recordings 12" "Trapdoor Material Part 2" a couple of days ago from label boss Sunil Sharpe. It's a four track various artist record featuring Fran Harnett, Uninerves (Rory St. John in dubteker mode), Kachanski and myself, and with artwork by Redmonk (who has also been painting the stage we'll be using for the Second Square to None DEAF gig this week). Good buzz to be on a record with these guys, they're all good mates, and we've been looking forward to this record being out for a while.

Expect techno in pure and dubby form from Fran and Rory on the A, techy electro productions from Kachanski and guaranteed DJ-head-wrecking, tempo-changing, 2 1/2 step bass rumblings from me.

For now the record is only available in Spindizzy Records in George's Arcade, Dublin 2, but will be available from Juno etc. in about a month. Have a listen to the samples on the ManTrap myspace page, and draw your own conclusions (and buy the record).

Second Square to None - Ten Second Rule

Second Square to None - Ten Second Rule by SSTN
The Ten Second Rule project is the first fully integrated Second Square to None project. The idea is simple: get loads of music makers to submit a ten second long piece of audio, then get other music makers to use these sounds as the basis for larger pieces of music, for example a live set.

I've written about it more here, so won't go on and on about it on this blog.

I have two tracks in the collection : one credited to Ed Devane and one to Withering Zithering. Currently I'm using images generated from highly processed and subsequently transcoded Ten Second Rule audio files as the basis for visuals which I will play on Sunday 25-10-09 while Fyodor makes the noise. You can view a really rough, jerky, and as it has been pointed out to me, 80's-looking, example of this here:

I've a lot of work to do still so don't be surprised if that's a dead link in a few days when I have something better up there...

FYED mix on Second Square to None



FYED @ SSTN
Here's a set we did for Second Square to None in August. Processes and improvisation combined to make a half hour long blend of sounds and moods. Hope y'all like...

The artwork is a scan of a pencil drawing I did a while back, messed around with a little in PhotoShop.

Balloon Fates



Soundscapes Noisescapes by Ed Devane

Soundscapes Noisescapes  by  Ed Devane

Track on Dublin Electronic Arts Festival CD

As far as I know the DEAF launch is on this evening in the Sugar Club, and the booklet with CD will be given away on the door.

There'll be 40 acts on the 2 discs apparently, and I'm one of them. I submitted a track called "Klatter" off my forthcoming album on Man Trap Recordings, something that may or may not have been included on the inlay. I had to edit the track to conform to the less than 4 minutes. Fascinating eh.

For those of you who would like to hear more beats by me (as apposed to the "noise annoys" material I like posting up all the time), there'll be a promo mix of new tunes I've made in the last few months mixed by redmonk on www.spannered.org, featuring tunes from my album and upcoming (in the next few weeks) releases on !kaboogie, Takeover Records, Stasis and Man Trap.

That is all! Oh yeh I'll be playing at the !k Club for Kaboogie in 2 weeks time, assuming the currently flooded basement of Thomas House has been restored to its former opulence

FYED

Myself and Fyodor have a project called FYED we've been doing on and off for the last year or so since the dissolution of John Mary Trilogy, the band we were in together.

We'll be playing on Sunday 25th October at Second Square to None, using material made by a large group of people for a project called the Ten Second Rule. So in order to have something for people to listen to I made yet another SoundCloud account.

Ch-ch-ch-check it out: FYED on SoundCloud

Oh yeh, we mainly do soundscape / noise / drone / improvised sort of stuff, but have plans to do different types of music in the coming months and years...

New music up on SoundCloud



Hello, I'm uploading some "new" stuff onto my free SoundCloud account. I have a feeling that will mean that you won't directly be able to hear the previous tracks I had on there but no matter.

Since finishing my album I haven't been making much music, at least not with a computer...I did however buy myself a Sonuus G2M Guitar to MIDI translator, a simple device that allows me to play synths or samplers with my zither. I've been playing the instrument a lot of late, and have made a removable fretboard for it, which opens up a whole new world of possibilities previously unavailable to me.

Currently I'm working on a new instrument, which will be a small electric harp / hammered dulcimer type instrument. I'll post pictures in a few weeks when it's done. Other than that I'm amassing a big pile of materials - metal tubes, bells, wire, mechanical components such as motors, springs, solenoids etc. for use in an as yet unthought of kinetic sound sculpture / sculptures.

http://soundcloud.com/ed-devane

SoundCloud

I've moved to SoundCloud for my music hosting.

All I'll say is that I do not recommend Mocha Hosting. If you like seeing all your files disappear without a trace or any backup then it might be the company for you though...

Anyway, I haven't got much up there yet as it's a free account, and limited to 5 uploads a month, but here it is...
Ed Devane on SoundCloud

FTP compromised

All the MP3's linked to on this site and www.secondsquaretonone.com got deleted for some reason that the hosting company blithely passed off as being the result of a worm attack. Sounds like an easy answer for them to give...but as far as I know Mac computers don't get viruses / worms?

Anyway until I find another way of hosting them (and spend up to a week uploading them on this sloooooow internet connection) you'll just have to be content with not listening to my music from this page...

What I've been working on this week

Safety Bubble in Invisibility Mode

This is a live recording of an improvisation I did yesterday with the feedback system I've made using Ableton as a mixer and several effects units and loop samplers. As such there is no input, with amplified line noise from the effects output being fed back through itself, which creates different types of sound depending on the effect in question and EQ settings. If you've got a subwoofer or big speakers things should start rattling all over the place at high volumes.

I've spent the last few days setting this up in such a way that I can control nearly everything without having to touch the computer. The plan is to get really good at controlling the signals, learn to play the effects as instruments, record record record and afterwards arrange and edit the results down to something interesting.

The name refers to a product that surrounds the body, keeping other people at a safe distance, which has a transparency control. As far as I know no such product exists but until one is made available I'm going to make do with my reticence and disinterest skills to achieve the same result!

Finale

Finale


Just came across this tune I made while living in Spain a few years ago. It's pretty rough, as I never got to do the gig it was supposed to be the closing track of, so gave up working on it .The set was going to be based on different stages of a failed relationship, ranging from upbeat and poppy (initial stages) to harrowing soundscapes (less happy times)...all that kinda stuff. A bit emo in retrospect! Anyway, this tune is a summary of what the different stages of the 45 minute set would have been like. I found 2 singers willing to work with me, Susana Peralta Benevente and Liza Venezuelana, who were going to accompany me live.

I'm not sure what happened to the gig, I think the guy putting it on was more ambitious than he was successful (something I suppose many people are guilty of!!)...I ended up preparing another set of pre-written material, so not really live, but nobody showed up so I didn't bother playing.

I like the sounds that make up the middle section of the tune...I hope some of you like them too.
Creative Commons License
Finale by Ed Devane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Some artwork I did for Fyodor's CD-r release


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I did this a while back for the Second Square to None mini-label. We record everything played at the gigs, and some of them get put onto 20 cd copies, cased in square, white cardboard sleeves. We commission an artist to do different designs for each of the 20, and so far each artist has taken a different approach to doing this. Fyodor made the mixes on the CD using some unorthodox turntable techniques so I decided to do a bit of "subtractive synthesis" with the artwork and etched / embossed the cardboard with various blades and files.

There are 5 sets of 4, although 2 are missing (one is a mystery, the other was lost through my own stupidity using Photoshop). I had to raise the levels a lot for the patterns to be visible at all - the artwork on the actual copies is only visible when held at an angle to a light source - so they look a bit green / grey instead of their actual white. I need projects like this in order to do any drawing at all, otherwise I don't bother and make noises instead!

Second Square to None # 5

Second Square to None is a project I'm involved with here in Dublin. We had a great time the other day at our latest gig in Twisted Pepper, great livesets from Gland & Conduit, who put the brand new Void sound system through its first N-O-I-S-E test (at which it performed admirably); Ventolyn & Becotyde (the first of hopefully many times he'll play in Dublin), Bluefood, and the last gig Sunken Foal will do with Rod on live beat-tapping. There was tonnes of other stuff on, which you can read about over on the Second Square to None blog.

The next one is on Sunday 9th August, and I'm in the process of booking people for it. Myself and Fyodor are planning on doing a set where each of us has one side of the stereo system - where I'll have the left speaker(s) and he'll have the right - and try to approximate what the other is doing. It's going to be a bit of a noisefest! Probably have a few beats in there at some stage...I'm going to prepare a time-based technique "score" for it, which we plan to practise seperately then together closer to the time of the gig. No pre-recorded sounds...

Drawing on wall



I did this for A4 Sounds, an art/music collective who have put on some extremely fun gigs in Dublin and more recently Belfast, where this picture was taken. It's deliberately lacking in detail as I knew it was going to be transferred onto a wall in a skate park (with the aid of a projector). Lisa, a.k.a. iheartwillies and a couple of others spent a week doing all the hard work of transferring about 10 pictures onto the rough surfaced wall. Then we had a gig, at which myself, Kachanski, Rory St. John, Ronan Dunne (who still hasn't got any sort of website), Scurvy Lass and Jimmy the Hideous Penguin played, with our gear set up on the top of a half-pipe. Meanwhile coloured chalk was made available to the audience to colour in the murals as they wanted. Great craic!

I've only started drawing again recently, it's something I used to spend a lot of time doing as a kid but like nearly everything else I used to spend time doing, gave way to making noise. I tend to think in 3 dimensional terms moreso than 2-D so will be undertaking various attempts at sculpture in the coming months. I'll post pictures here as I know my legions of avid followers are dying to see photos of bits of wire stapled onto bits of wood. Fascinating stuff...for me, to make...for now the process tends to be more satisfying than the end result but I am planning on building various technologically enhanced kinetic sound sculptures...just need some money so I can buy loads of stuff from this shop.

A track that found its way onto a blog

...that wasn't meant to. Ah well, I hope people listen to it, that's the main thing...

I wrote this while living in Barcelona a few years ago. I was working in Hertz Rent-a-Car at BCN airport, and having to get up mad early in order to get there for 7am, hence the title, which in Spanish means "(doing something) in the early morning" (the wee hours). The vocal is by Susana Peralta who currently is singing in Rain Lickers in Barcelona.

Madrugando
Creative Commons License
Madrugando by Ed Devane is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Older livesets that are floating around online, collected

Yup yup, as may be becoming clear by now, I want to collect everything I've made that is online, whether it's meant to be or not, in this one place. So by the end of this, the day I made my blog, there will be approximately 6 fucking hours worth of my music....ugh!
You don't have to listen to it (all in one sitting) so relax!

This is a mix I did for (you guessed it!)!kaboogie in spring 2008. It's a live recording of a practise in preparation for a gig I did in 4 Dame Lane in Dublin supporting Boxcutter. It's fairly heavy and dubby, but not the most banging set ever.

March 2008 liveset

Next up is a recording (a very distorted recording) of myself and Scurvy Lass live at the 2008 Mantua Festival...which I have to say was one of the best gig experiences I've had, though again I had no soundcheck which resulted in it being a lot more distorted than it was meant to be. Luckily that didn't detract from it all! This was made to keep people moving violently and features lots of heavy beats and bass, and noise zithering.

Mantua 2008 liveset

This is the first proper liveset I made using Ableton Live, in 2007, for the first gig I did in Dublin of club music, again for !kaboogie, this time supporting Drop The Lime. It was also probably the first time I started experimenting with the techno 4/4 beat...this one starts spacey and ends pretty fast and hard.

Summer 2007 liveset

I think that about covers all the sets of mine online that are in any way worth listening to. There may be some of the same tunes in these mixes, or versions of the same tunes, but most of them reflect what I was working on at the time.

Ambient/ Noise Mixes collected

I've always liked making unsettling ambient music and soundscapes, though to be honest I've never actually "composed" any pieces in this style. That is to say they are largely improvised or process based (feedback being my main process), so I don't mind giving them away for free. I see these recordings as studies for my next big project, which will be highly composed/constructed and mixed in 5.1 surround sound. To the chase I am now cutting.

Live at Lazybird, Dublin, 20-02-05

This is a recording of my very first gig in a public venue (having played tunes at parties and stuff before). I had started using Native Instruments Reaktor in conjunction with a mixer, a modified guitar and a loop sampler 2 months before, and nervously left a CD of some of the recordings in with the guys who ran Lazybird, a weekly Sunday night oasis of all things weird and wonderful on the experimental music front in Dublin. I was surprised when they got back to me a few days later to offer me a gig. It's an oddly bowel-loosening experience, the waiting to go on stage if you've never done it before! Pre-gig shit out of the way when I got on stage I realised that my MIDI controller wasn't working but I managed to get over it quickly enough and got down to making the noise.

Ambnoiund Mix
I did this one for Paul Grant's show on Power FM last year some time. It's a mix of older recordings from the archives, made with an assortment of zithers, motors, effects units and loopers.

What You See Is What You're Given

This is another mix I did for !kaboogie in December 2008. It's a .ZIP file so you'll have to download it if you want to listen to it! I assembled it from improvisations I recorded in preparation for my set at Second Square to None #1 on 30-11-08 in The Joy Gallery, Dublin. That's the next set:

Live @ The Joy Gallery

Winter...I definitely write differently when it's cold! Both this and the previous mix were made with the same gear and techniques so sound quite similar. I collected some more of the recordings made around this time and will make a mini-release of them for anyone interested in the coming hours/days. Like I say, someone may find some value in them if I make them available...otherwise they'll stay unheard on my hard drive.

So yeh...this is just a taste - the main function these experiments has is to provide the raw material I make my more edited music with. A word of advise - listen to these on headphones in the dark for best results.

Mash up !kaboogie - "Convolutions # 1"

Every week a new mash up (that is, the mixing together of 2 or more tunes in order to make something new) gets posted on kaboogie.net. Never wishing to make life easy for myself I chose to use loads of tunes, probably more in hiphop sampling style than mash style. Whatever.

The experiment didn't have the desired effect, but sounds pretty good. In fact this is probably the only time I've ever sampled other people's music, something that personally I see as a cop out - not to detract from other people's use of samples, I just enjoy making my own sounds...a lot.

Convolutions # 1

Anyway, I used the following tunes:

Squarepusher: Metteng Excuske V1.2 ("ping" noise) / Boris: Ibitsu (feedback)
Laura Sheeran:Below is Golden (vocal)
Brian Fleming: Phuis Fluich (percussion loop)
Evan Parker / Keith Rowe / Barry Guy / Eddie Prévost: Supersession
(sound effects)
I-Sound And Dj Scud (Wasteland): Fin (main beats)
The Slits: Instant Hit (rfythmic loop)
Photek: Infinity (basslines)
Maja Ratkje: Dictaphone Jam (main vocal/noises)
Amen sample from a DJ Floorclearer mix
Rave chords from a Black Hoe showcase mix by Migu & Antichristus
Laura Sheeran: The Breathing (outro vocals)
Dj Krush: Bypath 1 (outro beats)

"Malinovska" - DEAF 2008 live set

For the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival last year I was asked to play in Andrew's Lane Theatre by !kaboogie. Other acts on the night were Ebola and Mad EP; earlier that evening in the same venue the legendary Nurse With Wound dazzled us with their multi-faceted sound blizzard.

Anyway due to some miscommunication with the sound engineer I never got the sound check I had specifically asked for, even though I was there for the whole day. Suffice to say it didn't go as well as it would have if I had been able to hear anything but bass...not my best gig, but one of my most ambitious. Here's the only recording I have of it, done a couple of days before at home. It's a bit rough around the edges but a lot of it is played in live...

Play it here

The structure of the set is based upon a vivid dream I had a few weeks before, with each track relating to a key moment in the plot. Attempts to describe the dream in words have failed; instead I give you the track names, which might give you an idea.

1. Mountain Walk
2. Native Reserve
3. Predicament
4. Bears!!!
5. Crawling Through Webs
6. Frozen Backpackers
7. The Being
8. The Tower (vocal and lyrics by Scurvy Lass)
9. Jinx
10."Malinovska! Malinovska!!!"