The last Atomic Shadow album, City Of Chrome And Glass was released in late August on CD by Auricular Records. Auricular has a long and illustrious history in the San Francisco Bay area. The labels slogan "Celebrating 20 years of difficult music" is proudly displayed on their splash page, as well as a link to get COCAG on CD or download.

New cover art was commissioned by Kelly Ricks. She also did the cover for 12 Full Moons. Both covers are computer manipulated photographs with added elements that are drawn in various layers. 

Some remastering was done for the CD release. 

Be sure to check out the other artist's pages at the Auricular website. I am very proud to be included in this group of interesting artists.

I have toyed with the idea of inflicting mid 20th century style electronic sounds on a group of unsuspecting people in the wild for some time. All it would take is a truck full of rack gear and a venue willing to host the experiment. A venue (to be announced later) has presented itself.  That left me scrambling to condense the essential elements of Atomic Shadow sound design. What would be essential? What would be useful? What could stay at home? I could do it with a laptop, copy of Berna 2 and a midi knob box. But how would that be fun?

I have a pair of open back rack units that I rescued long ago from a dumpster. They have been in and out of the main Atomic Shadow Command Center for several years. So the first phase of the Mobile Command Center project was to identify the various elements that I needed and start seeing if they could fit in the two rack frames. Early on I knew that I needed two signal generators and the EMW-200 mini synth. The Roland SP-404 would stand in for tape machines, which are very heavy. And my trusty Kaoss KP2 would be there because it has a lovely theremin type sound. My Strymon El Capistan tape echo pedal is essential. I don't do anything without that little gem. It has all of the great sound of vintage tape delay units with none of the headaches.

One weekend I drug all of these things on to the dining room table and started making rack ears. That involved hack saws, drills, and lot's of sanding and filing. All done by hand. The circle for the green plasma light was cut out by a shop with the right equipment. Hammerite paint is required. I have used grey and black on various parts.

One thing that became obvious was the Mackie mixer was going to take up a lot of space. It also weighs a ton. I wrote Mackie to ask how to take off the palm rest below the volume knobs. It was taking up 1U of space. I got a letter back asking me to sign a waiver on my warranty and they would 'release service diagrams" to me. I wrote back thinking that I had not made myself understood. But it turned out, after a few increasingly snarky responses, that there is no simple way to remove that part for rack mounting. It would have saved time if the first response I received simply explained that all of the front panel knobs have to be removed and the main circuit board has to be pulled to reach the screws. Instead he went with sarcasm and condescension. 

As a result of the ill tempered customer service there I found a better alternative in the form of a Behringer RX1202fx. This compact mixer has 8 mic inputs, 2 stereo line inputs, built in effects, insert points, tape in/out and more. Very compact. Best of all, no snarky tech support guy necessary! 

After solving the mixer problem I had to figure out how to rack the Zoom G3 pedal that I bought for oscillator number two. Ideally I would have liked two POD HD500 Pro units. But at 700 bucks a piece, no way. I bought the Zoom on a whim and I am impressed with it's ease of use and sound. After making a rack mount box for the Zoom I discovered that there was just room for the Kaoss Quad to sit next to it. So The B&K generator is going through the POD HD500, The Eico goes through the Zoom G3. The EMW-200 is paired with a Lexicon Vortex effect unit. The system is rounded out with the KP2 feeding a Mooger ring mod and then through the Strymon El Capistan pedal. The SP-404 has some usable effects built in. 

I added an Alesis compressor in an empty space to process the tape out channel before going to a recorder. The blinky disco light was added later to impart some added visual interest. In the photo above you can see how it all came together before a couple of final cosmetic tweaks were added. It took a lot of work to figure all of the cable routing, wall wart management, and connector labeling. With some care I think this will break down and set up pretty well. It is heavy. Like real gear is supposed to be. In fact it is bowing the table as you can see in the photo above.

My friend Stephen Howell was laid to his final rest this morning in Cardiff, Wales at the church where he was a chorister in his youth. I have sat myself down to write about him several times since his passing on the 31st of May. The words would not come. 

So let me say that he was a talented, brilliant and complicated man. Without his input and encouragement there would have never been an Atomic Shadow project. If you ever owned an Akai sampler, he was the guy who probably made all of the sounds that came with it. His Hollow Sun company was a provider of quality sounds for Akai samplers and he eventually transitioned to the Kontakt sampler, well after hardware had seen it's day. He designed the user interface for a ton of Akai products, later moving to Alesis when Numark bought Akai. During his years at Akai he learned to speak Japanese. Fluently.

I met Stephen in 2006 on a user forum for the Alesis Fusion. We shared a similar sense of humor and bonded over our mutual love of Genesis. I knew him for several months before he came clean and told me that he was the head sound designer at Alesis. 

Usually the people you meet in the music industry are eager to brag about even the most remote association with famous stars. Stephen was quite the opposite in my experience. I had known him for almost two years before I found out that he had worked at Real World Studios for Peter Gabriel during the production of the soundtrack for The Last Temptation Of Christ. Over the years during,g a late night Skype chat, he would let drop that he had an email from someone famous asking about one of his sampler instruments. His relationships with most went back for a number of years. But it never came across as "Look at me. I'm so important". It is clear to me from some of the letters that I have received from some of his friends and customers how highly regarded he was by so many of them. He felt that personal contact with his customers was far more important than what he called "Social NOTworking".

Stephen was the key figure in the origin story of Atomic Shadow, with the unwitting assistance of a guy named Brian Eno.

Between meeting Stephen in 2006, and sometime in 2009, I began to send him things that I had recorded from time to time. He always had the manners to act as if the mp3 had gotten lost somewhere. Never once did he offer a comment of any kind. The one time I pressed and asked him if he listened and what he thought, he told me! Bluntly, honestly and without holding back. As a result I never asked again. My efforts at sound design were ill suited to writing a song. I was taking a loop of a fan system in a building that had the bearings going out and putting it in an Akai S-612, through a chain of effects and then trying to build verse, chorus, and bridge structures from very abstract sounds. My wife would often come back to that end of the house to see what was making that horrible noise. It was me. Making sounds. She would ask me if I was making a song with the sound and I would always say, "I don't see how I could."

Late in 2009 Stephen and I came across a piece of software called Berna. It is a Mac only, software recreation of a 50s era electronic music studio. I started messing around with it one night and recorded something that was done live, in one take. Since we shared a love for the early pioneers of electronic music I sent him the mp3 of my first experiment (which became #1 on the Project One album). He wrote back within a few minutes to say that he thought it was best thing I had ever sent him. "You seem to have an ear for the abstract. I think you've found your niche. You should pursue this direction".

I assumed that he had been drinking and went to bed. Crazy Welshman.

The very next morning I encountered an interview with Brian Eno on one of the synth blogs. I love it when Mr. Eno shares his ideas because he always has something intelligent to say. I still had Stephen's email fresh in my mind as I read Eno's thoughts on inspiration and creativity. Eno said that sometimes an artist has to take his best shot and then paint a bullseye around where the arrow lands. BANG! The light came on. I was a drummer by training. The noisy one. I was never going to write a hit song. All of the sounds that were useless for songs were the end result. That was the bullseye. Pure sound.

I wrote Stephen that morning telling him of the epiphany. I was going to take a load of these sounds that I had made over the years and experiment with them. His advice was, "Get yourself a pretentious electronic music making name and bollocks your way in to serious electronic music circles". 

Since I had decided to take off in a very Radiophonic direction I knew I needed a mid century inspired name. I had the vision of the Command Center as a backdrop for future videos. I knew I wanted to channel the lab coat along with that whole 50s era esthetic.I needed a Cold War sounding name. It had to be Jet or Rocket something... or Atomic something. The light came on again.

Over the next few weeks I made the first Atomic Shadow album, sending track after track to Stephen for input. Since almost all of the tracks were done in real time with no over dubbing, some experiments were more successful than others. I was very thankful that I had a friend who would give me honest feedback. He would not hold back to spare my tender feelings. Project One was completed in one massive outpouring in 5 weeks during the fall of 2009.

I have counted on his insight, support, and constructive criticism for every album. He always inspired me to dig deeper. 

Apart from the mentoring I am going to miss his quick wit and wicked sense of humor. He could be uproariously vulgar in the most creative and, somehow, charming ways. Always ready with great comeback. For example I once posted a link to the following video on a forum that we frequented. You don't need to watch the whole thing to get a sense of it.

A few minutes later Stephen had left the following comment. "Bugger! I'm going to be humming that all afternoon now!"
I have laughed out loud more during one of our Skype chats than I do when when watching 75% of the comedians on television.

Stephen had a reputation for making sample instruments that were very much like playing the real thing. He was especially found of the sound of the Mellotron. He dreamed up several daft things called Music Laboratory Machines. His genius for melding samples with a user interface that was creative and inspiring to use was unrivaled in my opinion.
Stephen's lab at Hollow Sun Towers was so organized and tidy compared to my space. The photo at the right (by Neil Fellowes) is his creative space. Something about this image of his unoccupied desk, with his tools waiting for him, makes me cry. Every time I look at it. 

Such a wonderful voice, now sadly fallen silent. Far too young. I will miss him every day for the rest of my life. Goodbye Stephen.

Scape is a generative music app for iOS that was created by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers. Brian Eno is a very well known musician, producer, thinker and all around really smart person. Peter Chilvers seems to tick all of the same boxes aside from the "very well known" one. I suggest you check out his website (button link below) to learn more about his music and software. I found it to be very interesting.

The Scape app has a unique interface as shown at left. You have different colored boxes on the right that are moods and boxes on the left hand side that give selections of various back ground patterns and melodic elements. These can all be changed in real time. The various shaped elements are musical events and they follow rules in their sonic behavior.

You can move the elements around on the screen and they interact with each other depending on where they are placed and if they touch and overlap. Some of the letter E shaped things and the diamond shapes can be quite loud and jarring if you aren't expecting it. The E shapes are bell-like sounds and the diamonds tend towards cinematic "giant drums in a cave". The app comes with 15 pre fabricated Scapes. You can save and share your own sonic masterpieces and share them via e-mail. There is also a random generation option if swiping proves to be too much of a chore. As you explore the options new elements appear each time you re-open the app. So you start with a certain palette and find your colors expanding each time you use Scape. 

How does it sound? Well, it sounds terrific. I have no doubt that it will be used by some to make entire compositions and albums. It's simple, fun, and you get great sounding results with minimal effort. If anything it is almost too simple to use. I think that with some imagination you can (and should) put your own stamp on things. For my demo I recorded four segments using Scape and then did some editing to make things flow. You can get interesting results by slowing down or speeding up the playback speed, reversing the playback and applying your own effects in your DAW or hardware system. I have done most of these techniques in my demo track. So everything you hear began with Scape and was prodded in to shape. The final mix was three stereo tracks.

I have another composition that I am working on where I took the same basic tracks and ran each through a chain of outboard effects that were manipulated in real time during playback. This is how I will use this app for the most part, as a starting point. Your soundscapes are ripe for running through a granular synthesis engine, or as a subtle layer that is heavily filtered and reverberated, running in the background of a track. It is a great source for raw material that can be used, or even... abused, and taken in new directions. The interface invites experimentation. If you own an iPad and even dabble in abstract electronic sound I'd say it's a keeper.

The elements for The Mouth Of Hell video came together over the last two weeks. Since it went up on Vimeo yesterday it has been viewed over 2100 times as of this writing. This is the most successful Atomic Shadow video ever thanks in large part to the support of Synthtopia and Matrixsynth blogs. The largest percentage of views came form their sites. Thank you guys. FaceBook was a dismal third place and there have been 3 total views from Twitter links.

I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at how something like this comes together. If you haven't already seen it, here is the video.

The main backing track for this was an experiment with an iPad app called Stria by apeSoft. The product description at the app store explains that Stria was a composition by John Chowning. Synth obsessed readers may recognize the name of the man who who invented FM synthesis and that should give you a clue about the direction this app takes. It can do multiple sine wave (up to 240!) frequency modulation, as well as simple wavetable and additive synthesis techniques.

The great thing about the app is that there are a variety of well thought out sliders that make it simple to tweak and experiment. A lot of us have a bad FM aftertaste because we remember the Yamaha DX-7 and it's spiteful user interface. High marks to Alessandro Petrolati for making FM fun. The idea for the app, and Csound programming, is credited to Eugenio Giordani. Search apeSoft at the app store and you will find Stria, iDensity and iPulsaret. The other apps offer tweakable granular synthesis fun and like Stria always yield interesting results. Keep your eyes peeled for their upcoming VCS3 app!

I recorded some sounds that I made with the app and set about looking for sounds to compliment the first track. I went to my Kontakt instrument, Panoramic Wave Generator (see the product page above for details). I use the PWG quite a bit because all of the basic samples are ones that I made and I find that if you experiment with outboard effects and tuning you can come up with some wild soundscape material. 

After editing the resulting recordings together I realized that I had the basis for a rather unsettling track. But it needed something else. One of my favorite ways to make sounds is to start with recordings of things that I find happening in my daily life, and then to warp them in to new sounds. The human voice is capable of so much nuance and subtle tonal shading! Recordings of people talking can be processed by changing speed, pitch, reversing, and applying effects. I have been asked how I made the sound of these tormented souls and now it can be revealed. It began as a 40 second recording of a baby crying. 

To make the video performance I wanted the piece to have a definite ending place. Sometimes when I perform for a video I get too lost in the moment and noodle around too long. So for this video I recorded the Stria/PWG track to an Akai cassette recorder and some moaning/howling sounds to the Pioneer reel to reel. Both tape decks were bussed to outboard effects units. I made a random, growling bass sound on the EMW200 mini synth that was feed in to a Strymon tape delay pedal. And then, for the final element, I made three loops of moaning and howling and loaded them in to the Roland Sp-404sx sampler. The 404, EMW200 and Akai cassette deck are part of my ongoing experiments to build a performance system. The Command Center is not at all portable. Since found sounds are so important to what I have been doing, the sampler looks to be the best way to bring these sounds out of the studio.

During the performance I used the onboard effects on the sampler and then ran the output of the 404 through a Korg KP Quad.  I like the Quad because you can chain 4 effects, turn them off and on, and adjust them in real time. I spent a great deal of time adjusting effect settings, making notes of where I wanted to play the sampler and which effects to use, syncing the tape machines, and so forth. I wrote a "score" that was posted off camera on a clipboard with clock to keep The end result it a product of how I felt the day it was recorded. By the end of the day I was down, sick and miserable, with a bug that I had gotten from the same baby that provided the crying that was used in this piece.