Here are my favourite albums of 2007 (in no particular order)
Category: Music

Untrue - Burial

Mirrored - Battles

Slope - Steve Jansen

Future Rock - Strategy

Cendre - Fennesz/Sakamoto

I'm OK, You're OK - Jason Falkner

First Night Forever - Burnt Friedman

Runout Groove - Lilac Time

And We Fell Into A Dream - Bill Nelson

Nuclear Jazz - Flanger

Astronomy For Dogs - Aliens

Country Mouse, City House - Josh Rouse

Light Years - Shin.e

Pepper's Ghost - Buckethead

May Your Heart Be The Map - Epic 45

(Nigel)

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DDD News - August 2007
Current mood: aggravated
Category: Music

We have added four new downloads here on MySpace, these are Transcendence, The Man Who Invented The 20th Century, Focus Shifted, and Blueprints. An earlier mix of Focus Shifted is included in the DVD/World TV version of series one of the E4 programmer 'Skins'. Thanks to Elf Hughes and Alex Hancock.

There are also two other new tracks on our Google Pages site: Magus and Ashrama. Magus is one of our best tracks but unfortunately due to filesize restrictions on MySpace it would not fit on the MySpace page! So check out our Google Pages site if you want to hear these tunes, they're really nice, as well as our whole back catalogue of tunes (there are 12 in total).

We currently have several other tracks in the pipeline. We have been busy.

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Rob's music making history
Current mood: Send us more money
Category: Send us more money Music

The first time i made electronic music was with a Yamaha PSS480 when i was about 10. I used to jam along with the automated backing and compose beats. The thing never seemed to work when i connected it to my Atari ST computer with MIDI cables, i tried for about 4 years to do that with no success! Must have been a bug in the keyboard.

Later i discovered sound-trackers when i was about 14/15, i had this demo called TCB Tracker and you could put together a song using samples on 4 tracks, unfortunately it didn't have a save function as it was an early kind of beta version. (TCB stands for The Care Bears, a brilliant ST demo crew). I had a Stereo Master sound sampler cartridge for the ST, it could sample for ooh at least about 20 seconds at 8-bit resolution as the ST only had 512kb memory (my attempts to upgrade to 1Mb usually failed, one time i even soldered on a load of chips onto the motherboard they didn't work and i tore them all off luckily the ST still worked. Eventually i got an upgrade that worked so i could sample for about a minute!)

I soon got myself a copy of the public domain Noisetracker for the ST, and i was away. I made a load of tracks and used to sample beats of old late 80's/early 90's hardcore music, had some wicked beats. My friend Baz liked most of the stuff i did. It was mostly techno/electronica.

Later when i went to university i spent all my student loans on music gear. I had an Acorn A5000 with Serenade software, blimey that was buggy, had to work around the bugs in it most of the time. Had a Roland JX1 (nice sounds but was really a performance synth as was it not multitimbral), a Boss Dr Rhythm DR660 (this was cool you could really set up you own drum banks, it would even play the built-in drum samples backwards), a Fostex XR5 cassette tape multitracker which i hardly used, a Cheetah MS6 6-note polyphonic multi-timbral analogue synthesizer module with a digital user-interface (this was brilliant for building up techno bass & bleepy sounds and good for pads too), and a Phonic MM122 12-channel mixer. Oh and of course the brilliant BassStation Rack, essential for techno-producers (the filter controls off the BassStation Rack are part of our Deep Dream Decoder logo!). Lastly I had a distortion/overdrive/turbo fx box, which i put the BassStation through to really get the techno going. Most of the gear i got from Music Village in Chadwell Heath, who are still in business today but called Digital Village.

These days you can replace all that gear with a computer and a USB MIDI controller, which is what I have done. You can do a load more, as you basically have loads more channels/tracks, loads more instruments with loads more control over the sound they make, amazing effects all in software, quick editing (although not as quick as Noisetracker!), a built in mixer, etc etc. We are using a PowerMac G5 with Logic Pro, an expensive set-up but worth it (more on this at our googlepages website).

I'm currently attending a music technology course where we're learning to use Cubase SX and Reason. I really like Reason and plan to get myself a copy, I am really impressed by the sheer fun of using it, the speed at which you can compose tracks in it, and also by the brilliant sound library which comes with it. The contemporary drum sets and loops are brilliant, the house music loops and drums stand out in particular. The Combinator synth is brilliant as well, some of the sounds blow me away.

I wonder if anyone is still using tracker programs, like Noisetracker and Soundtracker, MED or anything else. Will have to do a google search for them... I often think it would be nice to be able to just load samples into Logic and play them on the keyboard like a soundtracker. Might sound a bit rough but would be cool for dance music producers.

Mostly when working with Nigel we are compromising our musical styles to kind of blend them together, so you may notice some of the tracks have some quite techno elements, but i still haven't really returned to my techno roots with this new system. Perhaps I will do some banging old-school techno one of these days.

(Rob)

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DDD News
Current mood: Send us money
Category: Send us money Music

The 7th Unseen Skins episode; 'The Cat & The Duck' (which featured our track 'Thrown Skywards') was released March 8th 2007. Thanks to Chloe Moss and James 'Elf' Hughes, we hope to work them both again in the future.

We completed a stereo mix of 'Thrown Skywards' (available now) and re-recorded some of the vocals including the original lyrics of 'All That Remains' (available later due to a cock-up with the mix) in early March 2007.

We have also added a new track; 'It Scratches At My Skin', this was recorded and mixed Jan - March 2007.

We are working on several other tracks which are of quite a broad range of style. These tracks are at various stages of completion.

(Nigel & Rob)

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DDD news

Both 'All That Remains' and 'Thrown Skywards' were in contention to be included in one of the short internet films shot as spin-offs to the E4 'Skins' series. In the end the producer decided to use the second track. The short film; the 7th 'Unseen Skins' episode is scheduled to be released in March 2007 on the internet.

We are currently working on two new tracks (provisionally titled 'Blueprints' and 'Scratching At My Skin'), these will be available online soon.

Nigel & Rob

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Here are my favourite albums of 2006 (in no particular order);
Category: Music

Calexico - Garden Ruin
Unkle Bob - Sugar and Spite
Junior Boys - So This Is Goodbye
Marconi Union - Distance
Midlake - The Trials of Van Occupanther
Bill Nelson - Return To Jazz of Lights
Eric Matthews - Foundation Sounds
Ryuichi Sakamoto - Bricolages
Ed Harcourt - Beautiful Lie
Shack - On The Corner of Miles and Gil
Mick Karn - Three Part Species
Roddy Frame - Western Skies
Fila Brazillia - Retrospective
Dears - Gang of Losers
Sparklehorse - Dreamt for Light Years in the Belly of a Mountain
Burnt Friedman + Jaki Liebezeit - Secret Rhythms vol 2
Gomez - Five Men in a Hut
Beck - The Information
Mogwai - Mr Beast
Josh Rouse - Subtitulo

(Nigel)

9:06 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Happy Christmas. Deep Dream Decoder Is Here On Myspace
Current mood: drunk
Category: Music

Hi Rob here.

Happy Christmas everyone. We are Deep Dream Decoder, a techno/electronica band. Our names are Nigel and Rob and we both live in Havering London UK. We currently are making music as a hobby.

I have created a MySpace site with our first song available for download. Also have done a little artwork on my dad's Ubuntu Linux PC (Ubuntu is a free Unix operating system).

The music was created on a PowerMac running Logic Pro 7.1. You can read about it on our Google Pages site. (Try searching in Google after February).

I find it hard to write so I will leave the blog for Nigel to write! Hopefully you'll hear plenty from him. Write to us and let us know what you think of the music. Your feedback is very welcome.

Seasons greetings
Rob

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