jjSpace - jj's music

jj Remixes the Universe!

jj admin — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 20:51:13 -0500

HypCCjj1.mp3 -- Remix of Hyperdriver's "Crowd Control"

jjMXmp01.mp3 -- Remix of Multi-Panel's "Fondness"

lets_try_se_cityglo.mp3 -- "Cityglo" remix of dj terabyte's "Let's Try Something Else"

lets_try_se_mill.mp3 -- "Mill" remix of dj terabyte's "Let's Try Something Else"

rbt640jj.mp3 -- "80x80" remix of the Opponent Process' "Real Bad Timing"

rbtjjcby.mp3 -- "Drunken Cowboy" remix of the Opponent Process' "Real Bad Timing"

Here's a page of remixes I did for Radiohead's Loophole remix contest.

jj MIDIs

jj admin — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 20:45:46 -0500

These use General MIDI instrumentation, which many computers can handle quite well. And even if yours can't, the files are very small.

Haunt You, Babe -- Karaoke version of my rock song.

Melman -- Just a single Melman, not a double..

Haunts of Molly Zumwalt -- Dire soundtrack. (older version)

Scared So -- Urgent fiddles!

Slacker on 10th Avenue -- Quickening rag.

Twitchaboog -- As the name implies. (older version)

Ramswort's Approximation -- Approximately minimal. (older version)

Peggijes -- Tiny time pills?

Barrelfull -- Pauses.

Bells and Whistles -- You've used the phrase, now hear it play!

Ancient-format RealAudio Files

jj admin — Tue, 4 Aug 2009 20:34:51 -0500

(More of my stuff, mostly from the Eighties) Note that these were encoded in the mid-1990s, using the way RealAudio did things then. In this new century, you'll have to download the files and try a modern RealAudio on them. Happily, some have mp3 versions, albeit not necessarily of any higher fidelity.

Track	Time	Notes
Haute Down (mp3 version!)	1:03	It's a concertina! It's a hyperactive street organ! It's two, more or less, things in one!
Last Waltz of Murray the Sailor (mp3 version!)	1:29	Murray, old salt, the jig is up.
FinnFare	1:00	Yer basic one minute ta-daaah
Actual Footage	1:09	Film at 11. Crust at 11:30. Didn't somebody say something once about letting other people get your kicks for you?
Today's Science Spot (mp3 version!)	3:32	Join us as Bunny explains head lice!
Blues Complaint #1	1:56	Sooner or later, this happens to everybody. (Also known as the "LCD Blues.")
Proletarian Syncopations (mp3 version!)	1:09	I don't know; I've never joppled.
Pre-Mud	0:55	An SK-1, a Microverb, a scratch tape...
Histamic	1:25	In Heaven, there is no horseradish... (The official ConCold_(TM) theme.)
Crow Headroom blurb	0:20	Machine whispering.
Slouch Hat (mp3 version!)	1:15	This I want to learn on guitar.
July 4, 1984	8:11	The cheapest Apocalypse around. Recorded on the title date with a VL-Tone (a $20 keyboard), an Effectron and a 4-track. Later, I went to the roof of my D.C. apartment building and almost heard the Beach Boys play.
Seamus' Slow Steps	4:34	I'd have used real bagpipes, but I was living in an apartment.
Route 90 Through Albany	3:22	From the late 1970s, but still accurate. Features electric piano and reverb coil percussion.
Mr. Kips Looking for a Dollar	2:00	Yes, from that Graham Greene novel set in Geneva. Play it at your next Bomb Party!
Mowers Promenade	3:53	Lots of suburban gentility. If Mozart were alive today, he'd drive a TroyBilt.
Hamilton Airport Interlude	0:18	Short and well organized. Honest.
number 37	1:05	As if 36 wasn't exciting enough. No autoharps were damaged during the recording of this selection.
Monopod Stomp (mp3 version!)	1:15	Put your, well, only foot forward! Another great jj dance track!
Phoned In From a Horse (mp3 version!)	1:54	A nice, traditional-sounding number.
First Citizen	4:33	A version from 1983, with two Casios playing "Bossa Nova" beats at different speeds, Ignatz Plutonium on real drums and me on vox. Placed here largely to give potential karaokeists some idea what the tune is.
Play them all, if you have the ancient RealAudio version that can handle it!

Flash-Embedded Players

jj admin — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 21:32:07 -0600

I'm not a fan of profligate Flash usage, but a few sites that carry my stuff do let you play it that way. So here's a collection of those. Play them all at once for maximum confusion!

This plays my SoundClick stuff:

Now playing: just john

Medium-bitrate streaming from archive.org:

Higher-bitrate streaming from archive.org:

And here's YouTube's copy of the video "Haunts of Molly Zumwalt:

jj on archive.org

jj admin — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 21:51:02 -0600

My albums are now available at archive.org in their full glorious fidelity FOR FREE, with graphics of the whole CD packages, if you feel like printing 'em up.

The Old Double Melman,
Cubeworld Vacation,
Ayatollah of Understatement.

Site offers downloads in various formats, as well as streaming. On the other hand, the site's also often very busy, so if things don't work out on your first visit, consider trying again.

Links from Article Text

The Old Double Melman

jj admin — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:57:08 -0500

Three years in the making, this is the official release of The Old Double Melman Adventures in QuickTime Musical Instruments, a CD now on sale at lulu.com.

This is in the tradition of music boxes and Raymond Scott. Gryltose is my answer to Scott's Powerhouse.

Many of the tracks are also available in lower-fidelity versions, here, free.

Among other software used in the making of this album are RedMoon's maxWerk, Motu's Digital Performer and Audacity. Graphics by Bryce, mostly.

History of General MIDI and QMI

The General MIDI spec was formalized in 1991. General MIDI (GM) implementations consisted of simulations of standard instruments like pianos, guitars, drums, fiddles and oboes, as well as sound effects like helicopters and birds. This gave the computer musician a built-in orchestra that was heir to those "consumer electronics" keyboards that Casio and others were selling. Once you had GM installed on your computer, you could create hours and hours of MIDI files and still be able to fit those files on the 2.8 meg diskettes of the day. If you fed the MIDI data from your computer to a different device, such as a Roland keyboard, the resulting music would sound similar.

QuickTime Musical Instruments was Apple's version of GM, first introduced in version 2 of QuickTime, their multimedia playing and editing software suite.

What we're talking about here is something meant to be the living room piano, a parlour orchestra to accompany the odd video game or slide show. The individual instruments often sounded like bits from 1970s vintage television show themes.

And so this became a folk instrument of the 1990s.

The Old Double Melman is the name I give to my technique of taking two identical (or NEARLY identical) tracks of music, processing them separately and then recombining them in a process I also call Brute Force Additive Synthesis.

Most of these tracks were created using Redmoon's maxWerk software (I think of it as being similar to a fabric loom.) Motu's Digital Performer was used for some arpeggiations and other tweakage. Apple's QuickTime Musical Instruments created the actual sounds, often two or more versions that were then individually tweaked and then recombined using Audacity.

_{(also available online, at archive.org)}

Haunt You, Babe

jj admin — Mon, 4 Dec 2006 20:19:50 -0600

This is the song that wowed everybody.

I was watching a news story on a guy who'd been on a sex offender registry, committed another offense, did time, was released, and had yet further constraints put on his activities.

Sounded to me like his life was down to a list of stuff he couldn't do.

So I wrote a song.

Here's the song. (stream or download)

OR, if you wanna sing it yourself, Here's a MIDI and here are the lyrics:

Haunt You, Babe

I can't kiss your mouth
Or be in your house
I can't watch you go to work

I can't feed your cat
I can't look at that
I can't help being a jerk

They won't let me near you
They make me behave
I can't make them fear you

I guess all I can do is haunt you, babe

I can't get even
Or even get close
I can't seem to catch a break

I can't get lucky
Or use one of those
Things that you once threw my way

I can't get over
How you can control
Such a large agency

They make me back off
They make me hurt
I can't get them out of my way

I guess all I can do is haunt you, babe

I'm out of your face
But not out of your life
I'm just not that easy

Maybe my real world
access is cut off
And maybe the telephone

And even a break-off
of internet contact
Can't keep me from out of your dream

I guess all I can do is haunt you, babe

Anyway, the graphic above is from an animation I've been working on, slowly, for the song's video.

Here are a few more shots from that (click thumbnails for large versions):

Glass Jaws

jj admin — Fri, 1 Dec 2006 21:19:37 -0600

Back in the 1980s, I got an Emax keyboard, and one patch was of voices -- for instance, a demo sequence was the Stones' You Can't Always Get What You Want.

Also, the Emax had a great arpeggiator. So, I thought to myself, "Self, wouldn't this be a great chance to make something sounding like Philip Glass?"

Here's the music.

And since then, I've done some graphics for it.

700 x 700
480 x 360

And, if you love those, you can spend money on it!

Finally, here are some things I did some masking with Bryce and then Photoshopped. Click to see full-sized version.

jj's music

jj admin — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 09:25:05 -0500

I'm a pre-post-postmodern composer and recording artist. My music has been noted for scaring animals, and it has been featured on Scooter's The Inner Side radio show (especially #81) and some other SubGenius shows, as well as the Le Vestibule radio show in Canada, a very well-known and respected nation!

I've been recording music for decades, since shortly after I learned as a tot that simply yelling with a reel of tape near my mouth was not how to do it. I soon got the hang of taping, and in the 80's I started bending computers to my sonic will.

And now you can play my stuff on fancy-schmantzy professional music hosts!
For the streaming and the downloading.

SoundClick -- has the largest selection of jj music.

SoundCloud is where I've been tossing things for other people to mess with.

Archive.org also has many tracks, in formats ranging from full fidelity masters to compact .ogg files.

Buy CDs! (And be ahead of the retro trend!)

Lulu has my CDs for sale. This includes 2007's The Old Double Melman, 2003's Cubeworld Vacation and 2001's astounding Ayatollah of Understatement.