Break. Beat. Box.

Jesse Kriss : Doctored

2008-01-22T08:17:07-0500

This started with drums and keyboards. After listening to that loop for a few days, I finally hooked up the turntable and grabbed some records. The spoken samples are from a record I've been dying to use for a long time: it's a promo record of an interview with Miriam Makeba that I picked up from the giveaway pile at KRLX. (A quick web check reveals it on eBay for $75.)

The guitar sample is a lucky needle drop — I found it after about 30 seconds of playing with The Mississippi Blues No. 2, The Delta 1929-32. (Damn, that's selling for $107. Twenty-five dollars seemed like a lot at the time...)

Chris says: Jesse's opening volley certainly sets the bar high for this match. A kinda Moby-meets-Ninja Tune mashup if you will. The beat really doesn't do it for me after a few listens, especially since it's more or less static across the entire 6 minutes of the track. The vocal samples set the mood perfectly, and are straight out of anything DJ Krush might slip into a mix (doesn't help that I've been obsessively listening to "Cold Krush Cuts" recently). I'm curious to hear what Tolva does with this one; there's a large amount of great source material to work with. Knowing his (questionable) fondness for 80s and early 90s industrial and new wave, this match is definitely bound to get interesting.

John Tolva : Prophetess

2008-01-22T08:20:30-0500

I actually took two clips from "Doctored." The guitar sample is gated and EQ'ed and has a delay that pongs around. Kinda sounds like a cello and it underlies nearly all of the track. The guitar sample also appears as a series of clipped, untreated stabs. The witch's brew of a pad is the keyboard sample from "Doctored". Still recognizable but made more sinister by a dash of chorus, a sprinkle of reverb, and a few handfuls of delay.

The ticking clocks are from Orbital's The Box EP from 1996. (Highly recommended that. I've always been unsettled by lots of clocks ticking out of time; moreso when they stop. Call it a fear of the unquantized.) Actually the treatment of the clocks is the most complex part of this track -- I've altered their speeds and pitches -- though you only really can hear it when it is alone in the mix.

The vocal sample, from an NPR interview of a linguist explaining the etymology of the word for computer in Icelandic, was prompted by the mention of witch doctors in "Doctored." Icelandic permits no foreign words so new concepts are sometimes fancifully-described. A computer is a "number witch doctor" or "prophetess." It is also my last name, coincidentally and wholly unrelatedly.

Production note: after treating the samples initially this track was "recorded" pretty much in one take moving from session view to arrangement view in Ableton Live. I tweaked certain envelopes after the take, but for the most part it was overlaid and mixed live.

Jesse Kriss : Choices

2008-03-20T07:25:49-0400

Well, this one's a bit different. I was going for more of a soundscape than a standard song, I guess. Picking up from John's ticking clock, I used a sound I created a while back that starts with a clock and morphs into rain. It's that, plus a keyboard part I recorded, plus ambient recordings I made when I was in Ghana in 2001.

"Life is made of choices."

Sorry, John — I kind of ignored your rule.