Bits songs …

The following is a clickable gallery of images of 13 Atari 2600 cartridges. These carts are the basis of the songs I am working on for my solo record “Bits”.

The songs do not include music or sound effects from the games, although the music uses many sounds that evoke early elecronic “chip” music.

Robot/Nature (1998)

Here’s another early super8 movie. The first half was shot as a stop motion experiment in my living room. The fire is one of those chemical logs you get at the supermarket. It was all shot a single frame at a time before I knew about frame doubling (when you shoot two frames for every shot instead of one to save your time and sanity).

That strange object that dissappears before the robot was a electronic toy ray gun I had since I was six. I need to find that thing - it made some great sounds.

For the second half, Chuck and I went out to a park in Bellingham and looked for creatures to film. The snake was a plus. Watch for the bug that gets run over by the slug.

The film is really scratched up - it adds to the effect I guess. When I got the footage back from Kodak, I ran it through a new (and untested) projector. It chewed the film up. I threw the projector in the trash and kept the bulb.

After shooting the film, the little robot guy lived on the dashboard of the car I was driving at the time. It was a Chevette named “The Black Ghost II” and it look like this:

(not my picture)

I loved that car. It was the son of the original “Black Ghost” and was the best car I ever got for $300. It eventually died of a broken heart and bad clutch.

The music in the first part of the film is from this record:

I played this record every day in first grade.

The second piece of music is from David Bowman’s vortex trip in 2001.

So check out this wild and crazy animated adventure.

~23mb

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R.I.P. #HTS721080G9SA00

On Friday, the 28th of March 2008, we observed the passing of our friend Hitachi hard drive #HTS721080G9SA00. It was a good friend for almost two years of continuous and faithful service. It enjoyed rendering, audio recording, video capture and the decoding of the occasional mp3 file in it’s time off.

Although it struggled with a life long 8 meg buffer, it’s 80 gig capacity and 7200 RPM spin rate were quite top notch for it’s time. Not to mention a robust SATA interface.

The cause of death is uncertain, but a faulty windows installation may have led to its early demise. We hope it may continue on in the afterlife as a short term backup drive in an external home.

It is survived by one 2GB SD card and four external 3.5 inch USB 2.0 IDE drives.

sSssSssSssSSS …… KABOOM!

This is probably one of my favorite games of all time. The story goes like this:

There is a guy dropping bombs on you. You catch them in your buckets or you die.

“Kaboom!”

This is one of the more catchy songs I’m working on. Simple structure and melody.

The guitar sound still eludes me. I tried a 57 close mic and the 414 as a way distant room mic. After solving some phase issues, the sound ended up ok for the clean tone, but the darn distortion haunts my ears. Tried my Dan Electro Daddy’o and it was better than the amp gain …. but ehhh. ?

So the problem is that I’m just not turning it up loud enough. I don’t want to bother my neighbor. Or scare off her pet squirrels

Humanidad Aterrorizado (1998)

My second film.

Shot on the same Yashica super8 camera as “The Long Winter”. The color effects were achieved by mounting a split color polarizer in front of the lens. I love the old Technicolor feel that it created in the footage.

The stop motion sequence was filmed in my mom’s basement. I was the cloaked figure, so my sister Auria was the camera operator for the shot. I must have done a terrible job of explaining how the shot was suppose to work so we had to shoot the dissolve sequence twice due to some communication breakdown. I was mad because I knew I was going to have to edit the film.

It was all shot in sequence based on images and ideas we came up with as we went. I constructed the robotic arm out of some Robotix of mine from when I was a kid. Auria ran the arm from off camera.

Jenny had to be wrapped from head to toe in tin foil and I think she ended up wanting to kill someone by the end of the day.

This pond was just down the hill from the chicken-coop that Adam and Auria were living in and Jenny and I eventually moved into. It was also very close to the barn from “The Long Winter”.

I edited the film by physically cutting each scene out, hanging it on a clothesline, and taping it back together

I tried various songs with the movie until one day I realized that it was the same length as the song “The Mule” off of the Eureka Farm album “The View”.

The final animation was created to use up the end of a roll of film. The music is by Raymond Scott.

~40mb … so let it stream for a bit before you start.

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Brain Games for sure

Working on “Brain Games” today.

Due to computer program issues - I did not get much of a chance to work on the lyrics.

The first time I ever played music with Dave was using the strange “jam-out” mode of this game. I was living in a basement, waiting to move into my real apartment while it was being remodeled.

You could play twelve “notes” with each keypad. They were not even close to being in tune.

I’m trying to go for a more old school guitar tone on this song so I am using my bigger Delta Blues amp and the 414 close miking with little preamp gain and a whole lotta volume … a tone like Gábor Szabó has on his 60’s LPs.

Not quite there yet. It might be because the guitar I’m using has the pickup directly wired to the output - no electronics. It sounds a little to twangy and bright. I want it to sound rolled-off on the high end.

It’s also the first song I’ve written in standard tuning since 1997.

I might have to tune up one of my real guitars instead of using this home made jobby I hacked together so many years ago.

The Long Winter (1998)

My first film.

Shot on Super8 B&W film in sequence (no editing). The camera was a Yashica:

I wanted to make a horror movie with a beginning, middle and an end. We had a costume … and a giant turkey leg.

The soundtrack came from a cassette we found in the barn in which the first shot takes place. When I would screen the film for my friends back then, I would have to drag out the projector and press play on a tape deck when the movie started. My how the times have changed.

It was in this barn, two years later in the year 2000, that my band Eureka Farm called it a day.

Later that year, my friend Dave and I composed a thirty minute collection of music entitled “Picturebook” in the barn. It was performed only once - in Moscow Idaho - in conjunction with a slide show of original work/found slides.

(I am credited in the film as “Richard Levi”)

~20mb

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