As I mentioned at the end of the last entry, I do have a third project-installment update coming, about visual-art. Soon. In the meantime, though, I have a couple more music-related updates to tack onto the last post. First, my band Snazzmobb now has a sample-track from our forthcoming demo-EP streaming on Youtube! This song was inspired by a spam-bot that was harassing the band's Twitter account (@Snazzmobb) mercilessly for a while. We got literally HUNDREDS of messages a day for about a month that just read, "Real People; Real Sex!" (followed by a link that we're not quite dumb enough to open.)
Headhat Records and Starving Raptors have teamed up to release an AMAZING charity-compilation, to benefit the New Hampshire SPCA. That's right, it's for kitties (and other animals).
This thing is, no exaggeration, 66 tracks long, and clocks in at almost 4 hours. It's only $5, which goes entirely to the charity, and features some phenomenal material.
My experimental-electronic outfit LeVautourEnsemble has a previously-unreleased, exclusive, otherwise-unheard track on this thing, called "Mamihlapinataei: Searching For Words In Other Tongues"... among an amazingly-diverse cast of characters, featuring some big names in indie-hip-hop, underground-celeb-types, and tracks that you probably haven't heard (but probably should) from as far away as Belgium, Australia, Japan... There's lots of exclusive content on this thing, and lots of things you'll hear and wonder how you POSSIBLY could have managed to sleep on up until now... Really, this is a QUALITY mix, from start to finish, that you absolutely need to hear.
Download it now here. (Dropped yesterday, MayDay, through Starving Raptors, available through Headhat later in the month.)
My solo musical outfit, LeVautourEnsemble, has just released our second record, "Machinique Meltdown," on the world-infamous Headhat Records!
Like the first LeVautourEnsemble record, (2010's long-delayed "...whose wings are a dull reality"... as well as Tipsy Cougar's notoriously chaotic 2011 album "Immaculate Conceptions" and a ton of other awesome and awesomely-odd stuff) this one is available to download for FREE/ donation through the "webhat" imprint. Download it here.... now. Because I said so. I mean, it's free, what do you have to lose??
Predictably, this record is an odd one. It's sorta-kinda a concept-record. It's sorta-kinda a response to a perverse challenge (I like challenges). It's sorta-kinda a hip-hop record (?!?) (emphasis on the sorta-kinda). It's sorta-kinda a whole bunch of things that it's really not at all.
As many who know me personally are probably aware, I get a strange sort of thrill from finding new odd-ball accolades for my press-kits ("... like a young CC Deville wielding an out-of-control fire-hose," anyone? "...mystical..."? lol) Well, from this one so far I've gotten an absolute GEM courtesy of Headhat label-boss/ noise-beat virtuoso Adhesiveslipper. (as if I needed MORE reasons to love Headhat to death.) This record, apparently... "has the headiest liner-notes of any record we've released so far." I'll take it! Thanks Dan! (To the rest of you, please take that as a challenge to listen to this record and give it the most out-there review [good, bad, outraged, indifferent, wtf, whatever]. It probably deserves it, and I'd love to hear what you think.)
Since I know that very few people even OPEN the file with the liner-notes in it for digital-downloads, I may as well just post those notes here, give you a taste of what this thing is about, what you're getting your eardrums into with this one....
LeVautourEnsemble- Machinique Meltdown
“Machinic, a word that does not exist, translates the French machinique, the adjectival form of le machin, a gadget, a watchamacallit.”
This footnote from editor/ translator Robert Brinkley’s notations to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s 1975 essay “What Is A Minor Literature?” provides part of the title and a sort of a point-of-departure for this collection of songs and sounds.
This album was spawned as an outlet for a meltdown of various sorts, in the immediate aftermath of a graduate-literature program which found me, by the end of the final semester, deeply immersed in attempting to understand and apply the critical-theory of Delueze and Guattari to a variety of research, writing, and art projects... resulting in a sort of troubling void where Deleuzian concepts such as rhizomatic mapping, deteretorialization, assemblages, “becoming,” and, of course, the ever-elusive “machinique,” acquired vast degrees of personal resonance on many different levels.
The resulting album was initially intended as a concept-record about varying sorts of apocalypses. In its finished form, in many ways it is this indeed... though, in true Deleuzian form, in a far more confusing, meandering, and easily-misunderstandable way than initially intended. You could probably refer to each resulting “song” on this short album as a “Plateau,” (and you probably wouldn’t be entirely wrong)... but I’d kind of prefer that you didn’t.
This album was recorded between January 2011 and December 2011, primarily at the LoftDeLeVautour, Portsmouth, New Hampshire. All instruments, sounds, voices, noises, etc were performed, created, and/ or mutated and heavily manipulated by Bernard P. Provencher LeVautour.
Again, in true Deleuzian fashion, I choose to refuse to explain anything about any track on this album with any further degree of detail within these notations.
For a taste of the record, as your download is downloading, and a taste for the accompanying video-footage (If I remember right, there's some sort of video or other for the vast majority of the tracks on this record if you visit my Youtube channel)... here's the intro-track, and the outro-track. Believe it or not, I totally feel that, over the course of the record, the transition between the two begins to make a little bit of sense.
Last night I finished and posted a new video for another track from LeVautourEnsemble's forthcoming second album, "Machinique Meltdown."
This one comes about as a response to a sampling-duel with Ross Boyd of The Tuna Fish Discrepency, prodded and mediated by Adhesiveslipper of Headhat Records. It's on, Ross. Can't wait to see what you make of this absurdity.
In my contribution to this excellent game, I mashed the wacky sample in question up in a steaming pot of crazy-broth with some robots, kittens, bass, beats, and spirally chaos. Who doesn't like those things???
As per usual (or at least often) with LeVautourEnsemble content, I think a little disclaimer is in order here. Since I've had some issues in the past relating to online censorship of nude mannequins (no, I'm not kidding. When I initially dropped the current logo for this site, among similar images from the same concept/ photo-shoot of Miss Chloe Claustrophobia, I was flagged on several websites by the content-gestapo who apparently can't tell plaster from flesh...), I should probably point out that anything in this video that appears in any way naked is NOT human. Most often it's a robot... sometimes a kitten.
I'm currently working on a new record with my solo-electronic project LeVautourEnsemble. This one will be called "Machinique Meltdown," and is a follow-up to "...whose wings are a dull reality," which came out this past October through HeadHat Records. (If you haven't gotten a copy yet, it's downloadable for free/ donation- click here.)
I'm hoping that this one doesn't take NEARLY as long to finish. In fact, I was originally shooting for exactly the opposite extreme, to start and finish the record in a single week, right after I finished school... but the week turned into two, and now it's been about a month, I have two songs and a bunch of fragments (which, of course, is still a step in the right direction, since that's FAR more accomplished than in any single month over the course of the ten years I was working on the last one for.)
I decided this one is going to veer a bit more into the hip-hop(ish) direction... because I felt like it. This will also be a bit more of a themed/ conceptual endeavor- a collection of tracks about various sorts of apocalypses.
Here is a video for the first track on the record, "Preface."
Another track, "I Am The Tongue," that will appear on the album was actually originally completed as part of an academic project... but as of now I think that it'll still work-
If anyone out there happens to be interested in dropping a cameo on the new record, by all means, be in touch. I'd love to pack this thing with as many odd-ball guest-appearances as possible.
Also, if you're perversely curious how that "PASTICHE" show that I had alluded to before turned out, peruse the following, at your own risk-
After much delay, Tipsy Cougar, my noisy indie-electro/ "metro-grime" project, has finally finished and released our album, "Immaculate Conceptions," through our good friends over at Headhat Records.
... and, guess what? It's available right now, to download for FREE/ donation! Click here to get it directly, or here to browse the rest of the excellent stuff in the Headhat/ Webhat catalog!
I was going to explain a bit about this project and the gradual creation of this record, but... Just download it and see for yourself... I think this mess may speak for itself.
First off... As I alluded to in my last entry, after being "in the works" for the better part of ten years, the debut record of my experimental literary-electro project LeVautourEnsemble has finally been released!
To get this thing out, we've teamed up with a great little record-label out of Newmarket, New Hampshire called Headhat Records. The partnership is a really good fit for the project... Since 2001, Headhat's been putting out interesting, experimental, and obscure material, with a refreshing strategy that reminds us of a digital-updating of the D.I.Y. attitude of the cassette-mixtape labels we grew up with.
The record was officially released Monday, 10/4/10, and is available for download now, with album-art, liner-notes, etc, here... and the best part is? It's available for FREE (or optional donation if you're feeling particularly generous and supportive).
Don't forget to browse the rest of the Headhat catalog as well, there's a lot of neat stuff over there.
Check out Pull Trouble From the Fire. I've been making some noise with these guys lately... very exciting stuff, a ton of fun... very interesting things to come on that front I'm sure.
Following up on something else from my last entry, the show that I sat in with The Tuna Fish Discrepancy last month was a ton of fun, and I want to thank Ross and company immensely for the opportunity to tag along and mangle their songs.
Video-footage from almost the entire show is available here...
This is my personal favorite-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0YJFLZlT8Y
In news of other shows upcoming... mark your calendars... Friday, Oct. 22 will be the first in a (hopefully) recurring series of experimental electronic nights called "PASTICHE: an evening of post-modern sound-experimentation" at The Jam Factory (Next to Raxx, on Elm St.) in Manchester, New Hampshire... I will be playing an improvised LeVautourEnsemble noise-electro set, with The Attic Bits and The Ross Boyd Experience. A flyer and more details (particularly some crowd-response prompts to allow YOU to help me make my set as crazy as possible) will be coming in my next entry... hopefully tomorrow.
