More Mutant Audio

So recently I have been returning to weekly sessions of electronic noise generation at Greg Kucharo's Mutant Audio Lab after a month and a half away. After today, Greg seems to be convinced we have rough structures/ideas for four tracks of any substance. He hooked up a Korg Kaoss Pad (basically a touch-sensitive effects processor and on-the-fly sample utility) through my Alesis D5 brain, but have yet to do anything with it.

I had initially entertained the possibility of adding some organic parts, namely a real high-hat and ride set-up, so that I could get the natural feel and sound possibilites from them, but the problem of micing and the sheer loudness of them compared with the sound levels we play at through the monitors/headphones is too wide a gap (I am not a quiet player to start with, and prefer the ringing crispness of big Paiste 505, 2002 and 404 lines). That being said, I think I am starting to understand aspects of the Pintech gear to get some more subtlety out of them, so maybe I won't need the metals, but I will definately need a different kind of pad for use as a hh, since the cylindrical Pintech pad does not cater to my wannabe Stewart Copeland style approach. I basically keep cracking my own fingers and wrists.

But enough of that. We ran through some mid-tempo material featuring mostly straightahead beats from me, and heaploads of synth washes and Greg's near endless string of interesting sounds: grimy bass noise, Keith Emerson on bennies lead lines, and some cool drones. We ended with more drones, ambient noodling, and claustrophobic effects from the Roland pad setup attached to my kit, into a kind of sountrack theme for a movie about walking through an open field of tall grass slowly, knowing it is full of potential danger and something is about to bite your elbow. Greg tends to lead, since he actually knows what he is doing, but seems unbothered by my rather naive attempts at polyrhthmic usefulness.