How cool is this guy in the 808 State T-shirt in “heather” grey.
Mega and ultra

I caught him in real time on the L train.

I am making MNDR dance 12 inches right now.  I can’t stop.  After playing shows and hanging with my friends Eats Tapes I just dove back into making techno or techno influenced records.  Feels like a bath of spaghetti.

This new record is titled Variation Repition.  All of the synth work for this record was made on my Sound Lab Suitcase Synth.  I made the initial beat and then ran a signal out to the CV Gate on the Soundlab in order to trigger it in sequence.  I also made some different keyboard midi sequences and than sent those signals out to the synth in order to make different keyboard leads.

I bounced the Soundlab synth stems and then ran them through this filter pluggin made by Sound Toys called Filter Freak.  This is hands down the best sounding and most unique filter pluggin I have heard or used.

I just wrote a MNDR dance record called Caligula for some of the 12 inch releases I have on deck.  I was really looking to channel some classic lyrical dance concepts and also channel some brutally minimal techno and early House feelings for this record.  However I am dedicated to bringing these concepts into my style and into a modern record.

The B section needed a devestating synth sound to lift the record.  I designed a 4 osc synth on my Nord G2 and then ran it through this distortion called Distorto.  Peter Wade ripped the distortion out of his Squire guitar and “mounted” it on some cardboard with drum sticks.  The distortion sounds amazing and it is truly the most hilarious circuit bending I have ever seen.

Here’s a pic.

To be honest, I was never one that cared much about string, brass, pad type synth patches.  I guess it only takes one synth to change my mind.  The Oberheim Xpander sounds amazing and I haven’t been able to find a VST that can match its genius.  Even the GForce VST’s.  They just can not match the error and analog quality of the synth.

I have been using it for pads and also as texture and leads in the bridge of my new track We Can All Fall.  We have been running it through some basic electro-harmonix pedals and some classic boss delays/chorus’s to get it even more fuzzy and degraded.  This record is a slow burner.  Could mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it is digging deep.  We Can All Fall will be another single released in my single’s collection for 2009-2010.

Chris Burden is one of my favorite performance artists.  A couple of years back I was at the Pompidou in Paris which was featuring LA art from 1970-1990.  It was amazing.  In the early 1970′s, Los Angeles was delivering decade defining artists in film, performance art, sculpture, multi-media installations, feminist rhetoric…ect. Chris Burden was one of the most controversial artists in Los Angeles at the time.

He was made famous by his piece entitled Shoot. He had one of his assistants shoot him in the shoulder as a performance art piece.  After the performance he was brought to a mental hospital for evaluation.  My favorite performance  by Burden is Doom. Burden laid motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby.  He planned on laying there until someone interfered with the piece.  After 40 some hours a museum guard put a pitcher of water within arms reach of Burden.  Chris then smashed the glass and the clock with a hammer.

I believe that his confrontational performance art was a heavy influence on the Los Angeles Punk and Hardcore scene.  He also challenged the heirarchy of Gallery, Artist, and lay person.  Tearing down those boundaries and making people reconsider the “God-like” worship of Artists and their institutions.  These paradigms of stage, artist, layperson..ect were also being challenged by the punk/hard core bands of Los Angeles in the early 1970′s and 80′s.

Also, David Bowie mentions Burden in one of my favorite songs Joe The Lion off of Heroe’s.

This remix by the French Duo Perfect Loosers of Tampa Girl Dominique is a brain bleeder…if your brain bled out the color of your tongue after two packs of pop rocks.  Dynamic!  I am going to spinning the living hell out of this.

Here is the link for the download.  Grab it and love it.  Tell me what it makes you do at the candy store and then let Lil’ Dominique Young Unique know on her myspace.  This girl makes Rye Rye and every up and comer look like they gotta play catch up.