Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
And here’s one I prepared earlier… Ordeal By Roses
“True beauty is something that attacks, overpowers, robs, and finally destroys.” - Yukio Mishima
A deeply troubling and troubled figure, Mishima was also a beautiful and brilliant gay Japanese man, author of the novel Confessions Of A Mask and sometime male model (!) who committed ritual suicide in 1970, (seppuku, self administered disembowelling followed by decapitation) in front of the cadets of the Japanese equivalent of Sandhurst, in a failed attempt to inspire a right wing military coup.
Perhaps even more astonishingly, he had effectively rehearsed this death, and many others, in multiple homoerotic and sadomasochistic versions, in a photographic collaboration, translated as Ordeal By Roses: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2016/nov/03/yukio-mishima-erotic-portraits-eikoh-hosoe-ordeal-by-roses-in-pictures?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
His work is beautiful. His politics, and manner of death? Not so much. Still, the work had a big impact on me as an impressionable youth…
Archiving my previous sank-like-stone track, Strega, against the unlikely event of the world belatedly having a collective change of heart further down the line, I realised I had a track there with this very title, which for some reason I had never got round to bothering people with. So, what the hell? It can take its chances at people-bothering too. And see if it swims any better than witches do.
Comments
The artwork is so cool!!!
The background story is so interesting.
Your introductory music is so Japanese and so "suspenseful and chilling".
Your description of homoerotic and sadomasochistic is so visual and creates a lot of scenes in individuals, expansive scenes of possibilities, all unnatural.
The musical scape you create is mellow, yet quite sadistic and dark.
Well done.
@ReneAsologuitar : thank you! I agree, this is much more mellow than my usual. Perhaps it is your influence, as the King of Smooth and Mellow?
Perhaps too that was why I didn’t post it immediately? Got my miserablist reputation to keep up, you know!
As I said elsewhere, life has also been intervening a bit since just before Christmas, so there have been… distractions. But, yes, ‘unnatural’ is indeed where I live, musically and otherwise. Very much in accord with the great piece by influential Trans activist Susan Stryker on that one, likening Trans to the state of Frankenstein’s monster, and with similar effects:
https://sites.evergreen.edu/politicalshakespeares/wp-content/uploads/sites/226/2015/12/Stryker-My-Words-to-VF.pdf
She speaks for me when she says:
“The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster’s as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.”
Maybe it is no surprise I was drawn even as a confused teenager to the dark transgressive glamour of Mishima…
Stitched and remade, we surgically transitioned transgendered fulfil that traditional role of the monster, to critique, unsettle, disturb, from without, just by existing… even in the mellow ones!
See? Getting my mojo back.
Bothered? No. Very much impressed. This is definitely a more “mellow “ piece compared to your previous posts but it still has a dark, somber tone.
I appreciate that you share your perspectives along with your creations. I don’t think I could ever fully understand the difficulties you face. While I often feel like I don’t belong, as a straight white cisgender male in America my feelings of “otherness “ largely stem from being frequently bullied at a young age and an “awkward stage” that will apparently end when I leave this life.
Your music and your stories and your shared thoughts offer a window into experiences I would never have imagined and for that I’m truly grateful.
@Svetlovska : this is terrific. I enjoy the spareness -- it makes subtle changes (like the entrance of a new voice or variation in a phrase) have a big impact while remaining low key. This is ace.
Beautifully tragic in it's tone, even without the background story you provide. You're constantly exceeding yourself in your exploration...
Great!
Another gem, Irena, and love the admittedly tragic backstory. Now I will go seek Strega out! 😂
This photography is incredible btw!
Well, apparently this will finally destroy me because this is true beauty.
This and the T.E. Lawrence thing are my 2 favorites of yours.
Just sublime.
I survived the ordeal (I think). This music is beautifully hostile, it lulls and disturbs. Thank you
Wish I would have thought of Krupa’s line ‘…constantly exceeding yourself in your exploration...’ , sums your work up perfectly 👍