I've heard "Hey Ya!" getting some airplay again lately and it made me want to share this great cover by the Toronto band, The Blankket.

It's my fav version! I love the delivery and the tone; it really adds a certain urgency to the tune. :)

Hope you enjoy it!

For this week's post, I'm going with art and another edition of exposing people to experimental music.

I think for many people their first introduction to experimental music is soundtracks. Whether you have realized it or not you probably have heard it in some of your favorite TV shows or films.

One of the early pioneers of experimental music is Daphne Oram.

In listening to her music, I realized I had created some pieces that were similar in sound to hers.

I don't know if I actually heard her works before, but she did work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and her sounds were used in Doctor No, Goldfinger, and a number of other films, so it's possible.

I also learned she used a similar technique for some of her music creation. She was the creator of Oramics, which involved drawing shapes on film that was then translated into sound by a machine.

Some of the music I create uses software to translate images into sound, so it's a very similar process. I can choose how slowly the software "reads" the image as a score, the note range for the sounds, what sounds are used, how the colors in the image are interpreted, etc.

For a good read, check out the Wikipedia article for more details.

Decoder Magazine reviewed CLAWED Rob!

My favourite quote: “Why Don’t You Understand” starts to approach Nurse With Wound territory, with a thick mist of reversed, juggled voices, progressively getting creepier and more haunting (and awesome).

:)

It's one of my favourite songs on the album. (Oh, there was a lot of ProTools work on that one.) I love to hear it described as haunting and awesome and being compared to Nurse with Wound is wonderful.

After some careful Google searching, I found that Julia at WNYU played "Introducing the Belltones" from the new album. That means another radio station discovered our music and I didn't send them a CD, so I have no idea how they found us.

KFJC has been playing CLAWED more too. Number 6, Surfer Rosa, Pants, Fox Populi, Eamon Devil Era and Avakhov have all played trackes from the new album now and many DJs played us more than once, featuring different tracks on different shows. Billie Joe Tolliver, Grawer, and SAL 9000 also played more songs from the new album. I checked and it looks like KFJC has played every song on the new album, except "Why Don't You Understand?"

It's great when you know it's not just one or two tracks people like. It's the whole album! :)

I turned on KFJC today and they were playing a song from the new album! Surprisingly, DJ Mance even chose the really long double-track, The Veil of Darkness | Prepare the Way.

I checked and we've had a bit of airplay on KFJC! Mance, Grawer, SAL 9000, and Billie Joe Tolliver have all played tracks from the new album.

Billie Joe also wrote an on-line review for the new album, CLAWED Rob, saying it's "Delicious like hard candy that breaks your teeth."

Awesome feedback!

All of the videos for the album are now up on YouTube, so you can watch the album on YouTube or just listen on Bandcamp. I hope you enjoy it!