Home  Music  Words  About  Contact

zerocrossing

nospm4ccs-reaktions@yahoo.com
www.hollywoodripper.com

Grew up in an Ozarkian family dislocated to Los Angeles. Now live in Northern Virginia. First instrument was accordion, at 7; later picked up clarinet, sax, flute and miscellaneous percussion. Stepped out of 1970s teen music programming at 14, when I became a Johnny Cash fan. After crossing that barrier, I never had to look back or worry about what my peers are listening to. It didn't take long for me to discover jazz and classical and avant-garde and all sorts of crazy stuff. I started at University of North Texas in 1975 as a Jazz major, but I wasn't exactly the best sax player on the block, so I ended up in the English Dept. and eventually became an English professor instead. While I was at NT, though, I had friends and boyfriends who studied computer music and composition, so I was exposed to a lot of what was then a cutting-edge aesthetic. (Now the same aesthetic is being sold commercially ... okay, to the more left-field electronic music types, but still!). I played accordion in an LA-based Celtic-Rock band during the early 90s, and had the privilege of backing the great Shane MacGowan of the Pogues for three gigs at the Viper Room in August 1993. The gigs included the opening night of the club. Moved to Virginia in 1997 and got into multimedia (esp. video production/post-production). I've been working on computer music for the last couple of years, but didn't get into software synthesizers until a little over a year ago. Reaktor has quickly become one of my very favorite tools. Oh, I also write about movies, and am known in film geek circles for my knowledge of Jack the Ripper films.

Forbidden Machine (2.8 mb) - Created using Forbidden Planet (Smith) and Grudge (Stringer). Forbidden Planet is a simple, two knob ensemble I built about 1 week into working with Reaktor. It creates science-fiction-y sounds. This piece was improvised in Live 4 with Forbidden Planet and Grudge hooked up to each other. Grudge provided all the sound processing live. The improvisation was edited (i.e. "cut") in Adobe Audition, with no additional processing.

Katrina Cries (5.1 mb) - Audio clips extracted from video footage, but mangled in RachBoz Ungeheuer (Scott, Leboz) or lfoGraincloud (Scott). 2 Beats written in FLStudio's step sequencer, but mangled in L3. (Man, I love that thing!). For more specifics on audio clip mangling: the "Help Help" clip and the Bush clip were mangled via lengthy improvisation in RachBoz Ungeheuer. Most of the Bush and crowd clips are from the Ungeheuer sessions. However, the Bush clip was separately mangled in lfoGraincloud, which you can hear immediately after the first (unmangled) cries for help. The Broussard clip was not mangled, though it did have a crackling lo-fi plugin applied to it in the host.

red droid meltdown (1 mb) - Created using Scylla (Scott). The piece was improvised and recorded in Reaktor standalone, edited (and re-edited) / processed (and re-processed!) in Adobe Audition. I think I might have used some other Reaktor ensembles during processing, but I can't recall. If I did, they would have been eQuaalizer (Scott) and/or Trilobyte (Suthers). This piece is titled after the meltdown of the red R2 unit that occurs while Luke Skywalker and his Uncle Owen are bargaining for droids with the jawas. Were it not for that meltdown, who KNOWS where R2D2 would have ended up! :-)

song of solomon (4.4 mb) - Created using DoubleOuzo (Leboz), eQuaalizer (Scott), Trilobyte (Suthers). Again, improvised and recorded in Reaktor standalone and edited/processed in Adobe Audition. It took a lot of work to give this piece a "shape," but I think (hope?) that the persistence finally paid off. The piece is titled after a famous love song in the Bible, and is intended to be celebratory rather than disrespectful. But it IS noise!