https://paulbirken.bandcamp.com/album/five-seven-five-ep

Paul Birken "A Pit In Wisconsin"

New 11 track album "Vicissitude Interludes" on Electric Music Foundation is out now.
https://electricmusicfoundation.bandcamp.com/album/125-vicissitude-interludes
Promo video online as well.
https://youtu.be/pIsBq8hw_SE?


Candidate Assessment (Field Survey Mix)

Practice jam playing mutes and solos to create some sort of momentum from a lone pattern playing of the new Roland TR-09 drum machine.  Always fun figuring out the timing and feel of the button functions while letting it run wild.

PaulBirken-Roland_TR-09_Jam-1Pattern-possibilities

This was up online a while back when Trevor Wilkes hosted it at Fun-In-The-Murky, but I found it again and thought I'd archive it here.  Done sometime in 2002.

Music bits: 
An hour's worth of cuts and reworks, effects and weird scratches by artists like Frankie Bones, Joey Beltram, Adam Beyer, Andrei Morant, Dj ESP, Tony Rohr, Dj Sneak, Dj HMC, Nigel Richards, Dj Rush, Christian Morganstern, Mika, Bob Brown, Terry Mullan, Angel Alanis, Dietrich Schoenenman, Dj Urban, Freddy Fresh and myself.

Tech bits:
Acid 3.0 (final mixdown was 855 tracks! - unlike Ableton which I use now, each snippet in Acid required it's own track...damn damn)
Tuareg 1.5
Soundforge 5 bunch o' plugs
wavesurgeon 2.56

How it happened bits:
Lots of pieces dumped and loaded on the MPC2000xl like I'd do for a liveset.. cut up, filtered, run off through the patch bay into effects, crossfaded and recorded back in.

mix slows from 138 bpm to 105 bpm and then goes back up to around 135 somewhere in the middle...mostly done as an experiment learning smooth tempo changes in the program.

Machines....shut down...think about it

Birken Studio Mix 2002

Full Video is online now:  
https://youtu.be/F84Vn74XmEY

Carl Slater is a talented visual artist from the UK who invited me to create a soundtrack for a looping installation piece he was going to put together.  The interesting challenge was making something on the music machines that sounded like a dj mix, but transitioned from ambient to full on techno and back to ambient within 15 minutes so it could continuously loop with the visuals.  A fun challenge to tackle!
Final audio mix was mastered by Joe Farr

Excerpt from "This Is Tommorow"
Across The Atlantic Project, a thoughtful dialogue between installation and environment addresses the evolving function of the city. This is most effectively presented in Carl Slater’s ‘Echoic Candy (4-Bar)’. The work, consisting of projection and sound, is situated within Millennium Complex, previously incarnated during the 1980s and 1990s as the Warehouse nightclub. Placed in the middle of what would have been the dance floor, a projection loops a wide range of clips from stock footage to psychedelic imagery once used for the Warehouse’s own stage projections. The accompanying sound work incorporates audio recordings of parties held at the Warehouse in 1991, reworked by techno producer Paul Birken. Opposite the projection, another screen presents images exclusively drawn from video documentation of a club night however the footage is intentionally obscured by the artist. The work draws attention to the layers of time the work weaves together, paying homage to the collective experience the building contained only two decades before.

Paul Birken "Echoic Candy (4-Bar) - Soundtrack for visual installation by Carl Slater

Surely you can't be wasting your time listening to this nonsense?

thetonewrecker

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