It’s like musical survival training. Quick: you’re stuck in a hotel. Can you make some music?
Our friend Recue, aka Riku Annala, was unexpectedly being stranded in a hotel and made it into a musical opportunity. The results are damned fine listening. (Thank whatever act of God / airlines prompted this.) You can enjoy the results, free. Riku writes:
Dunno if you remember but some time ago I shared the little cheap tape head “saturation” thingy with you.
I was recently ‘stuck’ in an airport hotel room (for other reasons than music), but the good thing was that I had my mobile studio setup with me. The released set started out as this sort of a spur-of-the-moment, tongue-in-cheek live jam, as I was messing around with random hip hop/pop-music vocals on top of bits and pieces of my own projects. Eventually, it started to sound so twisted in a good way that I decided to record the whole thing. The set is split in half with the first part being a performance video and the second the complete set as audio. The tools and methods are exactly of those covered on CDM regularly (NI Maschine run as a plugin on Ableton Live and controlled by Liine Lemur on an iPad).
More:
http://www.recue.net
Sure, the accessibility and mobility of music making is seen by some as some sort of assault on civilization. (I think frankly those are the sort of people who don’t like food and hate joy, grimacing every time they pass a playground.) But if you’ve made an investment in some nice mobile music tools, put them to good use. Heck, hand-wash your underwear if you have to make more space for music tech. That next unintended layover (oops, thunderstorms) could mean a new album instead of a frustrated, wasted, lonely night. And I like to think that the beauty of modern music tech is that it salvages wonderful music we might otherwise not hear, allows it to come into being.
Have a listen to the full set, and give it a download: