I’ve been making music under the unexpected bowtie guise for years now, but have never put together a physical release. Today, drouth became the first (hopefully of many), released on just 10 hand-painted, hand-numbered cassettes:
They are available over on the Cow Tongue Taco Records shop, and there are only four left – so grab a copy quick if you want one. I won’t be making any more after this!
When I was recording drouth, there were a bunch of tracks that I wish had vocals, but that I couldn’t quite come up with something on my own. In the end, it worked out for the album that they remained largely instrumental… but I thought it would be cool to get some different folks to do their own take on vocals.
As part of that, musician pal Christy Scott lent me her voice for a couple of tracks. Ultimately, the idea is to release all of them as a collection. For now though, here’s a new version of ‘mex’, with Christy on vocals. I think it sounds pretty great…
You can download it here. (right click > save as).
My pal Lee has a new band, called Magnificent Bastard. They’ve just put our their first single – ‘Smile, You Fuck’ to stream on Bandcamp and the like.
I convinced him to let me have a bash at destroying his hard work, and he stupidly agreed. So here it is, remixed:
All of the sounds are taken from the original recording, with the exception of the Game Boy – which definitely was not.
Today I’m releasing my first album since 2012, and the first one that’s mainly chiptune based since 2011: ‘drouth’.
The album is entirely composed on LSDJ using a bunch of different modified Gameboys, which were then in turn to control different instruments like a Commodore 64, Volca Bass, etc that play additional parts to give a much deeper sound. Along with a smattering of guitar and vocals, it’s much more an experimental (sometimes ambient) electronic album than a chiptune focussed one.
Unlike previous occasions, I’ve spent a lot more time putting the pieces together for this, even re-mastering the entire thing a few days ago when I realised that the original left the Gameboy sounding a little bit too harsh.
You can download it in full, for whatever price you choose, over at bandcamp – or stream at the bottom of the page.
Tracklist is as follows:
It’s been a while since I got pished on a Saturday night and just recorded some music. Well, I ended up recording after an hour of fighting with my mixer to work out why the stereo output was only producing mono…
There’s always the risk that it could have been my crappy soldering, which meant testing out every possible step. So many variables. Surprisingly, it wasn’t actually any of the Gameboys, but the mixer.
I’m pretty pleased with the result, and it should give a hint as to what the next album will sound like. Listen to and download it below:
To finish off, here’s a picture of my tidied up workspace.
On Saturday night a few of us headed out (full of rum) to belt out classic power ballads for a few hours. It was good times.
We didn’t feel all that great on Sunday though. Normally I’d just lie about and eat rubbish all day, which eh… I did anyway. But Lee aka radiomoths came round and we recorded the base of a new track with a bunch of different pedals, synths, and the C64. It’s all de-tuned and sounds a bit like the soundtrack of some robot death march from a film. Lee also took photos that I’ve stolen from his blog.
After we were done, I ate some more rubbish food. Not too bad a way to get through a hangover.
On Friday I spent some time in the studio working on different tracks. One of them was an experimental cover of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ with my sister and her boyfriend singing and playing guitar. They studied music at University, and it was nice to record with people who knew what they were doing.
We used a bunch of different effects to layer the sound up, and I added in chip drums later on.
You can hear and download the track below. It’s ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ like you’ve never heard it before. In someone else’s words:
I could imagine it being played at a f**** up fun fare with porcelain dolls singing as they go round in a Ferris wheel.
One of my work colleagues read about my Gameboy fiddling and kindly posted up one of his old grey DMGs that was destined for the charity shop to see if I could do anything with it. I decided to document its transition.
It was in the kind of standard condition for a used Greyboy of its age. The case was a bit roughed up and the LCD screen had vertical lines of dead pixels at either end. You can make them out below.
First things first was to see if I could fix that, as if the screen was dud, it would only really be worth spare parts. Luckily, it’s a pretty simple job, and before long the screen was as good as new.
With that, it was time to set about preparing the screen to put a backlight in. The old Gameboy screen was always a nightmare to see, so installing a new LED light source is a must. It’s also a tricky process, involving removing the foil back off of the screen itself. One wrong move and you can trash the whole thing. As it turned out, the adhesive on this particular Gameboy hadn’t corroded away, meaning it was a pretty smooth and simple process.
Then I put the Gameboy guts into a new case: transparent orange, which is a colour that was never available for the DMGs back in the day as far as I’m aware.
Next up, I installed a hex inverter chip to ‘bivert’ the screen. The new backlight polarising filter inverts the screen already, and so this step inverts it back to the regular display type, increasing the contrast in the process. It’s fiddly, but drastically improves the clarity. I’m pretty blind, so any picture improvement is a win.
It took a while as I didn’t realise that the backlight kit was missing a crucial resistor, and I had to go through each step to test it all again. A good lesson in not trying to do too many things at once.
Here’s the screen all lit up and biverted.
Next was installing a pitch oscillator that I had had lying about for ages. In other words, a small knob that changes the clock speed of the Gameboy to run faster or slower. What’s the point in that? For games it helps speed up boring parts that you can’t skip, but for music it lets you slow down or speed up things with the corresponding pitch change. Pretty damn cool.
The potentiometer fits into the space where the speaker sits, so it had to go.
I included a switch to turn the pitch oscillator on or off, which turned out to be a bit too big for the case…
I also wired up two RCA jacks for line level audio output. This wasn’t the ideal place to put them, but space was tight because of the other mods. I had begun to install a 3.5mm line out in the same position, but realised that the plastic seemed to be much thicker than in the other model I had done this on, and so the barrel was too short to fit through. RCA it is!
There was a lot of wires in there by this point. Just for fun, I decided to throw in some orange LED lights to give the case a nice glow. By the end of that, it was a bit tricky getting the case to go back together neatly.
At least I used appropriately coloured electrical tape…
So after a good few hours working on this beast, spread across a few days, here’s the finished result:
The case cutting and drilling leaves a lot to be desired, with rough edges obscured by the buttons and pots… But you can’t really notice. Despite that, I’m pretty pleased with the end result. Everything works, I learned a fair bit, and an old Gameboy has a new lease of life.
Today marks the return of the X-Files. To mark the occasion, I’ve come up with a chiptune tribute: ‘toads just fell from the sky’.
https://soundcloud.com/unexpectedbowtie/toads-just-fell-form-the-sky-x-files-tribute
The truth is out there.
After the last few posts concentrating largely on gear and production stuff, it’s good to be able to follow up with one centred on music.
I had planned to wait until I had an album together before releasing anything, but it became clear that a number of the earlier tracks had a sound that naturally branched off in a group. As a result, my first release in 4 years will be a 5 track EP titled ‘really something’. I can’t quite believe it’s been that long, but there we go.
The tracks themselves are all fairly laid back, and stripped back a lot from my previous sample-heavy chiptune releases. The only time the pulse really increases a shade is on ‘Down Street’, a track which previously only ever featured on the ‘Relycs‘ collaborative release that was put out on cassette, and dedicated to abandoned tube stations.
It feels like a nice transition. Listen out for my pal Haigie’s laugh on track 5.
The whole thing is up to stream/download for free over on bandcamp.
Tracklist:
unexpectedbowtie 