Martin Gumucio

Just in time for Christmas I got a pretty unique piece of gear in my mailbox. The MSSIAH is something so rare as a brand new accessory for a 25 year old computer.

It was with trepidation I approached the studio yesterday. We worked ourselves to the bone preparing the apartment, I had no time at all to prepare or research. With so many factors could go wrong, and only two hours at my disposal, I was curious to see how far I would get.

C64 and tv worked directly, the cart plugged in fine and everything just worked  right away fantastic!  Then reality set in. Just like with the old apps back in the day, I realize that I have no clue how to actually use the software. I forgot to download the manuals!  Just like the warez of old I was resorting to the old “press every key and see what happens” tactics.  Also my iPhone could not display precisely THOSE pdf’s from the 8-bit ventures websites.. modern technology eh?

So in the end it was a big day for retro technology, everything worked flawlessly, i could remote control it via midi, i could play notes on the keyboard. And thats about all I had time for during my first session. Turns out that the parts of the system that failed was me! and my iphone. Not the candidates I was expecting.

Update

One more session later and I have made the special little cable that was needed to connect it to the mixer. Enabling me to present to you the following sweet sweet sounds:

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Last week I had the good fortune to record these two true Jazz Messengers. They had just completed a group of concerts with a Christmas feel to them, and kindly agreed to share this song with you. Click on the player below to listen and stay tuned for more of Sweetest Sounds in the coming year!

Click to listen:    [audio=http://walintonia.com/martin/mp3/Jul.mp3]

The first week of this years summer has passed and quite an eventful week it was:

2CV Meeting

Every year aficionados of the charming little Citroën 2CV, meet up somewhere in the world, to show off their cars, trade parts and just generally enjoy summer in each others compnay. After meetings in areas such as Boston USA and last years Scotland the time had come for Sweden to host the event, and we went to the little town of Borlänge to check out more orless 2000 participants. Imagine something like Woodstock, but with cars instead of music. The 2CV owners really are a colorful bunch, if you own one you don´t mind showing off, that much is clear after seeing the multitude of painted and modified tincans breathing of French engineering and 40s design.

Norberg electronica festival

After cars and Borlänge we were just a short drive away to our next stop, Norberg electronica festival! We went to this glorious event for the first time only yesterday, and were hooked at once. It is a meeting place for all kinds of electronic music that brathes fresness and innovation. The sets are consistently of high quality and always interesting, altough maybe not always understandable, or indeed possible to listen to for long periods of time.

It is so cool to see how different people approach electronic music from such a variety of points, of course the normal setup for an artist is a MacBook and some kind of Mici controller, making for a pretty poor live shows, but there were many notable exceptions

The acts that made most impression this year was:

P2 Ström, From the Swedish public service radio P2 comes this incredible electronica lineup. The best of the best. Everyone not paying their radiolicense should be thoroughly ahamed of themselves. We only cared for the Live acts, Anders Ilar and Håkan Lidbo, we love you. Bonus points to Håkan for trying to make some kind of annoucment through the voice-effect later to be used in the music, it sounded very cool but was utterly impossible to understand. Setup: MacBooks and midicontrollers, but who cares, these guys and girls rule all.

Pamela Kurstin – Theremin! This set ended the festival, at 2.30 in Mimerlaven, and was totally amazing. Armeed with nothing else than a theremin and some Echo pedals we were offered layared theremin compositions with an absolutely stunning degree of virtousity and elegance, World class.
http://www.myspace.com/pameliakurstin theres also some cool pics she took are here

Volds stod umager – On stage, a table with four people sitting quietly, each have an opened radio set in front of them, and each is reaching inside. Touching components, short-circuiting and generally disturbing the electronics, a short distance from the table the resulting sound gets the final treatment of 1 (or two) guys wrecking a mixerboard with extreme physical abuse. The result? The most brutal in noise I have every heard at a volume I didnt think possible. Putting your hands to your ears did nothing and each burst of noise from the mixerboard guys felt like a jab in the ribs. Super-hard noise with unexpected elements of hiphop, possible because one of the radio tunings?

WinterStormer – These guys really stood out, when most of the others had 1 laptop on stage, these guys actually brought their entire studio, complete with 2 huge modular synths. Not only did they bring it here from Norway, but their setup all their nice stuff on the main floor, on the same level as the public. Which is another nice thing about Norberg. The artists are always accessible, if you want to ask them about something there are there and really willing to chat. I bought a studio album from these guys so a review of that is coming. (more…)

Its a double post, two completely separate but equally awesome topics in one post. Yay!

First off is this mail, that came to the band-page of our not-quite dead synthpop band Enter. Since it is in swedish only i will give you a short summary of what is going on: Katedralskolan is the high-school i was attending when our band Enters activity was at its peak, and Théföreningen was a good place for laid back dudes like me to hang out and chill. It seems like one of our old demos never left the premises, someone found the tape, played it, and liked it!

This just arrived to our band-page inbox, about 15 years after i left Katedralskolan… I haven´t asked for permission to post this, so thats why the name is blanked out.

En dag för inte så länge.. (jo, det var ganska längesen nu, men det hör inte hit) så hittade ett par kompisar till mig ett mystiskt svart band i Katedralskolans Théföreningslokal, med endast en lapp på vardera sida, märkt “A” respektive “B”.
“Det mystiska svarta bandet” (som det länge fick heta), blev snabbt en hitkassett som alla skulle ha hört, och hela théföreningen sjöng “Gillette”-låten i korridorerna.
Av en slump kom det sig så att Björn Lindström, en gammal räv i föreningen från ’90-talet, hälsade på oss vid ett möte. Han identifierade kassetten som en demo från ett synthpopband vid namn “Enter”. För att göra en väldigt lång och spännande (nja) historia kort, så gjorde jag lite detektivarbete på google, och fann er hemsida.

Vi i théföreningen är väldigt intresserade av att köpa ett ex av båda era demos, samt fullängdaren, om detta skulle vara möjligt!

mhv /xxx, xxx , ordf Théföreningen

And if that wasn´t enough awesome for one post here is another thing, sure to make your christmas merry.

“Merry merry christmas to guess who? yes yes , to YOU!”

THE STAR WARS CHRISTMAS ALBUM

I have a lot of friends and relatives that are into music, they compose, they arrange, they perform in various high-brow societies and even in symphonic orchestras. At the other end of the spectrum are my electronica-inspired friends. They all claim to be good at music and the time has finally come for clarity. It is time for you to test your musical skills in 6 minutes

I will update this post as soon as I get the time to do the test myself with my full score. And no I wont cheat. I expect the same from you.

Put your results in a comment to this post, let the battle begin!