The Casual Distractions

Innovation

2011-10-14T06:23:00.000-07:00

Safe to say that TCD is the first band that dared to put a KP3 on a pedalboard.

2011-07-31

2011-08-01T05:51:00.001-07:00

July didn't quite escape from TCD. Last night's set has a big sound with bursts of fine musicianship, yet it involved the smallest gear footprint of any recent set. Listen here.

Late Night KP3 and Handsonic Jam

2011-07-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

TC rips a solo session on the Korg KP3 and Roland Handsonic. Enjoy!

2011-06-28

2011-06-29T05:58:00.001-07:00

Another succulent, syrupy sonic session! Listen here. Stay tuned for massive gear overhauls and completely new sounds..

Hacking the Korg R3

2011-06-29T04:22:00.000-07:00

The Casual Distractions demonstrate advanced techniques of the Korg R3 synthesizer. Visit us at www.thecasualdistractions.com for over 100 hours of free music, gear talk, and insights. TCD is electronic improv.

2011-06-21

2011-06-23T07:47:00.001-07:00

This is a short set, just 37 minutes, featuring some gear we've never before used. Click here to listen.

2011-06-10

2011-06-13T05:03:00.000-07:00

Here's the session from 2011-06-10, in which the guitar makes its inevitable comeback.

2011-06-06

2011-06-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

Last night's session was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Demiurge

2011-06-01T12:49:00.001-07:00

"Demiurge" is a nice bit of the most recent set. Listen here.

Darker

2011-05-26T05:32:00.001-07:00

Yesterday's set is minimal and deep.

Two New Singles

2011-05-18T11:29:00.001-07:00

The comeback set spawned two new singles: "Out of Nothing" and "Dark Matter." Click here to listen.

Resumption

2011-05-15T19:48:00.001-07:00

Finally, after 10 months of distractions, a new set. Enjoy!

Reconstitution

2011-05-13T12:00:00.001-07:00

Dust Motes

2011-02-24T12:00:00.000-08:00

Dust Motes is the latest project from the former members of The Casual Distractions. It's a full album of shoegazey rock overlaid with the electronic goodness you loved in TCD.

Preview the entire Dust Motes album at wearedustmotes.com, then head over to iTunes to purchase your CD-quality copy!

You can also follow the latest Dust Motes news on Facebook!

Reckoning

2010-08-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

91 hours, 55 minutes, and 21 seconds of original music. That's 83 sets spanning 104 tracks of continuous, improvised audio.

Over $15,000 of gear bought and sold over a period of 26 months.

42 single tracks lasting a total of 4 hours, 7 minutes, and 58 seconds, edited directly from the sets.

125 original sleeve designs.

A Web site that offers all the aforementioned music and artwork for free.

A philosophy of audio entertainment in the 21st century.

Two live shows, an interview, and some press.

Two mates, another adventure.

TCD: TO BE CONTINUED.

New Set

2010-07-13T07:54:00.001-07:00

The most recent set brings in the deep dub.

Heliograph

2010-06-30T08:48:00.001-07:00

"Heliograph" is a new-old single recorded on 2009-01-04.

We Reconvene

2010-06-25T05:58:00.001-07:00

At last a new set! Turns out the red box of mystery was in fact a Weird Sound Generator (WSG). Also prominent is the Mighty EMX-1, providing both big beats and melodies.

Submerged

2010-06-23T07:05:00.000-07:00

"Submerged" is, ironically, a high point of our voyages into organic ambiance. It's helped along by many unusual and spontaneous mic samples including mouth pops, finger snaps, and shaker eggs. In retrospect, the resulting style is similar to the "nature techno" tracks on Orbus Terrarum.

Plenilune

2010-06-22T09:27:00.001-07:00

"Plenilune" is from the first set we played with a Korg KP3 in the lineup. The KP3's beats are evident in this poppy little tune.

Short Drive to Crazy

2010-06-17T06:44:00.000-07:00

As its title suggests, "Short Drive to Crazy" doesn't take itself too seriously. Beat, dubby bass, and funky leads.

Suspended

2010-06-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

"Suspended" is, so far, our weirdest single. It's a paranoid soundtrack to claustrophobic, mechanical horror, recorded back in 2008.

Rastaban

2010-06-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

"Rastaban," the newest single!

Tachyon and On

2010-06-14T09:09:00.001-07:00

"Tachyon and On" is the most recent single, pulled from the 2010-04-29 set.

TCD Art Gallery

2010-06-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

Today is the grand opening of our gallery of visual art! Grab a glass of wine and browse our collection of over 100 original sleeve designs. Each is captioned and sourced (where such information is available).

Enjoy yourself, but remember: No shirt, no shoes, no chardonnay.

Vox Nihili

2010-06-10T06:27:00.001-07:00

"Vox Nihili" is a single snatched from the jaws of the mostly-lost set of 2009-09-07.

The Function of P16 Is Unknown

2010-06-04T07:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's set features many new sounds and sonic experiments thanks to the Mighty EMX-1 and the all-new GR-33 guitar synth. Keep an ear out for the Bobby McFerrin homage.

How to Rock the Handsonic TCD-style

2010-05-30T17:43:00.000-07:00

TCD's own King Munchie lays down the dirt on his favorite instrument evah, the Roland HPD-15 HandSonic. How do you take advantage of the expressive possibilities of this thing and yet not have it sound like, well, boring hand percussion? Watch and be amazed.

M87

2010-05-28T05:23:00.000-07:00

We've been busy scouting out former yacht showrooms, looking for a place to build our own international superclub, so much of May has slipped by without new TCD. That ends today. Here's a short set we recorded in the air between Barcelona to Jersey City, in spite of all the ridiculous so-called warnings about not using electronic equipment. This set features the return of The Mighty EMX-1, perhaps the Korg box to end all Korg boxes. You may recall its tenure in stage right from December 2008 to March 2009, in particular, the stellar and unique set of 2008-12-26 in which it was the only box on stage left.

Expect to see another TCD effort come to light in the near future, instructions for the masses, the first in a series. Stay tuned!

Installing a Roland GK-3 on the Space Guitar

2010-05-26T06:42:00.000-07:00

Last night I installed a Roland GK-3 hexaphonic pickup on the space guitar. Why? Because once plugged into a guitar synth (a trusty Roland GR-33, no longer made), it will turn the guitar into a MIDI controller. The hex pickup tracks each string separately, and the guitar synth converts the signals to MIDI. The GR-33 itself is a full-featured synth, fully capable of crazy sounds. More on that later.

Here's the space guitar before the mod. It's a clear acrylic Strat copy made by "Galveston," a name that belies its Chinese heritage.

Did I mention it lights up? I installed LEDs inside it as soon as I got it in 2009. I ask you, what good is a clear acrylic guitar without interior lighting? Why, no good. No good at all.

The GK-3 had to go between the bridge and the bridge pickup, so the first step was to check that it would fit.

Then I cracked the guitar open to make sure there was something under there that I could drill into. The nice folks at "Galveston" routed out the entire area under the pickguard. That makes it nice for installing nutty pickup combinations (stay tuned for that) but it's not so great if you need to screw something tightly into the body. I removed the strings and the pick guard.

As you can see, there was plenty of room to mount the GK-3.

I replaced the pickguard and restrung the guitar.

Here's where I deviated from the instructions. Roland provided two small springs to install between the pickup and the guitar in such a way that the screws go through each spring. That makes it possible to adjust the pickup's height much like the regular Strat pickups: by turning the screws. However, I figured it'd be far, far easier to install the pickup without the screws and achieve the desired height by adjusting the bridge itself. After all, a Strat bridge lets you fine tune the height and intonation of each string independently. Why monkey with the hex pickup too? Sure the overall setup is more flexible with the springs, but that kind of flexibility is like having an extra joint between your wrist and elbow -- not very useful. So I ignored the springs.

My chief concern at this point was the hardness of the acrylic and the sheer difficulty of putting screws in it. I knew from past experience, installing strap holders, that the stuff is damned hard. I had even snapped a couple screws in two trying to get them in. Tightness was important for the strap holders -- I didn't want them popping out because I'd surely break a toe when the guitar fell (it's something like 20 lbs.). I wasn't so worried about tightness with the GK-3, so figured it would be all right to drill wider pilot holes. I chose a 3/32" bit, just a mite narrower than the screws. Since the screws were 3/4" long, I drew a red line on my drill bit at 3/4". That way I'd know where to stop. Ingenious, yes.

I positioned the GK-3 so that each string passed over some part of its pickup yoke, as instructed in the manual, marked the screw hole locations, and set the pickup aside. Two minutes later the job was done. No broken screws, no difficulty at all.

Next, I attached the GK-3 body itself. First, I attached it to holder piece "A" as indicated in the directions. I unscrewed three tiny screws on the bottom of the unit, placed piece "A" on it, and reattached the screws through the two. The result:

I removed the strap holder screw from the guitar, slid piece "A" over it, and screwed it back in. Then I slid the holder "B" piece over the threaded post sticking out of the first and fastened it all together, nicely sandwiching the guitar between the holders. Installation complete.

At this point I did a regular setup, adjusting the height of each string to be the desired 1 mm above the hex pickup when fretted at the highest fret. The result wasn't bad at all. The action was nice and low without buzzing.

Then I finally attached the cables to the GR-33 and test drove it. I was impressed with the diversity of its sounds. I chose the discontinued GR-33 over a new GR-20 because the GR-33 is so much more editable. I didn't want to drop top dollar for a GR-20 only to get bored playing trumpet and piano patches. Anyone who knows The Casual Distractions knows that we're all about unrealistic, spacey sounds. The GR-33 has a lot of potential for those. It also has a nice arpeggiator and a send/return loop for regular guitar effects. The GK-3 lets me choose between playing just the guitar, just the GR-33, or a blend of both. The possibilities are amazing.

So, that's it. Don't expect to hear this rig on TCD sets until I get the GR-33 sorted out. It may take a couple weeks (it's difficult to fit rig programming in when you're putting in 20-hour days doing open heart surgery down at the ER), but it'll be sometime soon and it'll be wild.

Ana and Kata

2010-05-20T09:45:00.001-07:00

"Ana" and "Kata" are the singles from 2008-10-10, both driven by relentless Kaossilator beats. The titles, which were coined by Charles Howard Hinton, are the names mathematicians use to describe movement through the fourth dimension. So we have back and forth, left and right, up and down, and ana and kata.

Desolation

2010-05-18T07:27:00.001-07:00

"Desolation" is not so much a single as a 17-minute post-apocalyptic epic. We recorded it on 2009-09-16 during a session dedicated to Pink Floyd's Richard Wright, who had died shortly before. We derived the "Desolation" art from an image of an abandoned, collapsed highway in the ghost town of Centralia, PA.

East Pole

2010-05-17T07:17:00.001-07:00

"East Pole" is a stomping anthem from 2009-02-15.

Singles By Month

2010-05-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

The number of singles is getting unwieldy so we added a Singles By Month view, much like our Sets By Month view.

Panthalassa

2010-05-12T11:21:00.000-07:00

The march of new old singles continues with "Panthalassa." It was born on 2009-01-17 during major global changes: Ethiopia had just pulled out of Somalia, Israel had announced a unilateral cease-fire in the Gaza War, and the U.S. was poised on the cusp between two very different madnesses. Relive the moment!

Analemma

2010-05-11T07:01:00.000-07:00

We're busy shifting gear(s), so here's a blast from the past to hold you over. "Analemma" is a standout piece from over a year ago, 2009-04-05. It features amazing Korg R3 synth washes.

Mr. Looper

2010-05-05T06:14:00.000-07:00

Today's single is "Mr. Looper." We think it's beautiful.

TCD.com 3.0

2010-05-04T09:48:00.000-07:00

The set index and singles pages now feature audio widgets that make it easy to play and download the MP3s. No more clicking a plain old link and getting a different behavior each time.

Also, the singles page has been revamped with separate artwork for each track.

TCD on Matrixsynth

2010-04-30T09:40:00.000-07:00

We recently got a little write-up on Matrixsynth. See it here.

Mayday Mayday Eve

2010-04-30T06:38:00.000-07:00

Last night's set marks the likely end to our busiest month since last September. Coming soon: More music, more singles, a revamped singles page featuring more artwork, inevitable gear changes, and guest vocals by the Bavarian Moose Choir. Stay tuned.

The Bloop

2010-04-28T06:46:00.000-07:00

This set includes ULOs, Unidentified Loud Oscillations, from the deepest, darkest Pacific. Listen with caution in a well-lighted place.

Red Mercury

2010-04-27T06:53:00.000-07:00

"Red Mercury" is the single from 2010-04-19. It starts with a disorienting, eerie atmosphere and gradually works into a lather. Many of the recent singles are quirky outliers, but this one is right down the middle. It represents well our overall sound these days: A couple of hooks lying in a warm bed of boiling microsamples.

Globalstar

2010-04-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

"Globalstar" is the single from 2010-04-08. Unlike most tracks, it starts furiously and gradually thins out to a quiet finish.

Forged From Aluminum Foil

2010-04-23T09:27:00.001-07:00

Last night's session was a blast. It featured a trippy vocal harmony throwdown, a Horace Andy impression that would fit square into any Massive Attack release, and a brief tribute to New Order's "Ceremony." T-Bone described it well, "Syrupy slaps of succulent sonic spews and the sync'd shoegazed sounds of Saturn!"

Laminar Flow

2010-04-20T04:36:00.000-07:00

This new set is full of clicky, glitchy goodness. It's more ambient and less pop than our more recent sets and is better for it. Enjoy.

Codex

2010-04-16T06:23:00.000-07:00

What started off as a mellow, ambient set grew legs and kicked us in the ass. Listen to the damage here.

Triad

2010-04-10T19:47:00.001-07:00

We're happy to release three new singles from one set, the one recorded on April Fools'. This shatters the previous record of two in one set on 2009-10-28.

"Lakes of Wada" will stick in your head.
"Invertible Knot" is pretty.
"Pairwise Stones" is aptly named.

Enjoy.

Realtime: A Pop Music Model for the Twenty-First Century

2010-04-09T07:23:00.000-07:00

(View as PDF)

The Big Idea

Dinosaurs are roaming the land! They are the major record labels who once thrived on the sale of $20 compact discs that cost pennies to produce, and the artists that relied on huge marketing advances and an army of publicists to get their music heard.

They are struggling to survive in the wake of an apocalyptic meteor impact: the Internet’s exponential growth. Suddenly, music is available everywhere and few people want to pay for it. Record stores are closing their doors; labels are dropping all but the most popular artists. The pools of money that fueled the industry are drying up.

The first part of this essay takes a close look at this new landscape. The second part uses logic to describe the sort of small, furry creature we expect will emerge from the underbrush and eventually take over the world.

What Has Changed Since the Twentieth Century

The March of Progress Stomps Over the Music Industry

According to Nielsen SoundScan, compact disc sales have dropped by half since 2000. Fewer people are paying for music, so the music industry’s revenue stream is drying up. Why? It is the inevitable result of improved technology.

By embracing compact discs, the industry also embraced perfect duplication. Copied cassette tapes never sounded as good as the original, which limited the amount of copying one could do. Not so with CDs. Then MP3s arrived. Suddenly, music files on the computer were one-tenth their original size, making it practical to store them in bulk and transfer them over the Internet. Today, file sharing accounts for nearly half of all Internet traffic.

The industry is trying everything it can think of to stay afloat, but the writing is on the wall. Technology marches on and human nature is not about to change.

No Need for Shelf Space in the Mall

Increased bandwidth coupled with improved Web searching (Google) and open, widely accepted media distribution services (iTunes and podcasting, CD Baby, etc.) make it possible to self-distribute digital media.

No Need for Full Page Ads in Rolling Stone

Social networking sites (blogs, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, etc.) make it possible for an artist to self-promote. They also enable viral marketing: friends sharing compelling content by word of mouth.

You Too Can Be a Pro

Recording technology has improved to the point where anyone who owns a computer can produce inexpensive recordings. With skill, an artist can make these recordings indistinguishable from those laboriously produced in expensive studios. As such, recording studios, the hefty budgets they entail, and the record labels that supply such budgets, are becoming less important to the process of creating and sharing music.

The Long Tail Is the Place to Be

The graph of artist popularity versus numbers of artists is growing a long tail, as defined by Wired magazine's Chris Anderson. A decreasing number of artists, those backed by the increasingly troubled and financially strapped music companies, are hugely popular (the green area in the graph). An increasing number of artists are relatively obscure (the yellow area). What is novel about this is that for the first time in history the obscure artists are collectively more popular than the top artists (the yellow area is greater than the green area). Soon, everyone will be in the band, and with few exceptions everyone will be in the long tail.

Music Is Ephemeral

Recorded music now transcends all physical media, including vinyl records, magnetic tape, and CDs. Music is available at a moment's notice day or night, and it may be downloaded from any Internet connection. Furthermore, the continued existence of physical media offends environmental sensitivities. As soon as the music is ripped to an iPod, the packaging is so much worthless clutter, wasted material ready for the landfill.

Albums: A Quaint Concept

Without physical media, the concept of the "album" no longer makes sense. Albums exist because long-playing vinyl records once existed. Labels forced artists to fill albums with 40 minutes of music separated into 20-minute sides, preferably subdivided into radio-friendly three-minute tracks. CDs extended the idea of an album, eliminating the sides and increasing the capacity to 74 minutes, but the industry still drove artists to produce music in readily marketable, CD-sized segments. Now that direct downloads have made physical CDs superfluous, there is no reason why an artist should be restricted to a 74-minute album. The album as an art form is giving way to continuous streams of loosely connected multimedia content.

The Mathematics of Disposability

Because there is more music than ever before competing for the same number of ears, it follows that music is more disposable than ever before. In general, a piece of recorded music can expect to get less attention, fewer repeated listens, than it would have gotten decades ago. This is becoming increasingly true.

Since attention spans are shorter than ever, artists have a smaller return on the investment they make in each piece of music. Why should an artist spend thousands of dollars and years of his life carefully crafting a perfect album when each year that goes by means fewer people will bother to hear it?

Let us define the craft ratio as the time spent creating a piece of music divided by the time one listener spends experiencing it. Music created and recorded in real time would have a craft ratio of one. For a typical band that releases an album every two years, the ratio is 17,000 to one. What implications does an enormous craft ratio have in a world of flagging attention and thinning budgets? All things being equal, it is a detriment. It represents more investment for less return.

Freshness Matters

Whether they realize it or not, modern bands are content providers that must compete with American Idol, Netflix, Facebook, and millions of secondhand Harry Potter novels for public attention. The surest way to lose that attention is to stop providing content: let the blog go stale, leave a lot of "Coming Soon!" pages on the band site, avoid social media, release something new every few years.

To succeed, a band must keep the content coming. Be prolific. Release a lot of music, but also release the making-of the music. Release everything. Get on Facebook, Blogger, and Twitter. Post equipment reviews. Make a series of clever YouTube videos featuring liquid nitrogen and thirty drunken monkeys fighting over a drum kit. Peddle a dull essay describing your revolutionary philosophy of making music.

Each bit of something the band creates is a morsel, ayummy, that can feed a potential fan’s need for immediate gratification. Give someone yummies and they are likely to come back for more. With luck and skill, a band can become a preferred yummy provider for tens, hundreds, or thousands of people. The key is to keep the yummies coming from every direction.

Not Just For Radio Anymore

Music is increasingly for more than direct listening. It appears in films, commercials, ring tones, video games, and multimedia art. Political causes, activist causes, and charities adopt it. Other art forms, like remixes, samples, and mash-ups, use it as grist. More music than ever is ambient in the Brian Eno sense: fully integrated into daily life and capable of being enjoyed at a variety of attention levels. Music that can fit as many of these categories as possible, and some categories not yet conceived, will be more successful.

Onward, Toward Unemployment!

Money is, for better or worse, becoming less a motivating factor for musicians. As the disposability of music increases, its perceived monetary value decreases. CDs that sold millions of copies in 1990 for $20 are now on iTunes for $10. Amazon has used copies for $1. Apple’s iTunes, with its 99-cent song downloads, has come closest to realizing the dream of seamless micropayments. But new artists are not about to quit their day jobs.

The industry is trying desperately to hang onto its profit margin. It is no longer enough for a band to produce a simple CD. A release must be a multimedia event, with packages offered to consumers at a variety of price points. For example, the free MP3 download, an inexpensive CD of same, a more expensive bonus edition on 180 gram virgin vinyl with a hardbound book of prints, and a "collector’s edition" featuring a pint of the artist’s blood. An army of suits is hard at work thinking up other, wilder business models in an effort to keep the money coming.

The fact is, creating music is increasingly art for art’s sake,ars gratia artis, as it was before Thomas Edison realized he could mass-produce phonograph recordings.

The Realtime Ideal

It follows from Part I that a band must do the following to adapt to the twenty-first century market. We call this the Realtime approach, as opposed to the Studiotime approach, the old way of overproducing an album’s worth of songs over a period of months or years. Realtime is a model of making and distributing music in the modern world.

A Realtime band:

Has a strong Internet presence.
Distributes itself on the Internet, without a label.
Promotes itself without a label.
Creates music at home, without expensive studios.
Exists in and thrives in the long tail.
Does not mass-produce physical media, like CDs.
Does not restrict itself to albums and songs.
Admits it is disposable and ephemeral, perhaps going so far as to release music as podcasts (a subscription model).
Has a low craft ratio, which implies music released frequently.
Continuously creates content in a variety of media.
Creates music that lends itself to ready application in film, multimedia art, activist causes, mash-ups, and as ambient music.
Is motivated by something other than money and deluded dreams of having a career in music.
Does these things while having fun and reveling in the post-postmodernism of it all.

The Casual Distractions Are a Realtime Band

We are a different kind of band. We improvise electronic music. We don't write songs or albums. We don't practice, or rather, everything we do is practice. Each set we play is a unique, nearly seamless string of moods and styles that lasts anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour. The sound constantly shifts but orbits around ambient, pop, and experimental.

We have released over 60 hours of original music on our Web site and through podcasts and torrents since we formed in July 2008. Most of this music is in the form of the aforementioned sets. We also release "singles," short song-length clips culled from the sets.

A typical set might include any of the following:

spoken word material
beats
synthesizers and other electronic instruments
melodies
swampy, dubby grooves
acoustic instruments played through a microphone
sung vocals
happy pop ditties
rhythmic loops
strange, unidentifiable effects
mistakes
trippy, deep space ambience
warm synth washes
jarring, claustrophobic darkness
amusing chatter recorded unintentionally
sounds from nature

We never know what will happen. It would be simpler to predict the stock market or next week's weather. It all depends on a hundred variables at any given moment. And yet, a cohesive, overall sound is emerging, one that is unlike any other.

With few exceptions, we post all performances for anyone to download for free. That means hours and hours of free music. There is a set index to help navigate through it all. The index describes a set in terms of a timeline, breaking it down into like segments. These are not songs per se, more like mileposts on a long journey.

We don’t use laptops. We don't use music software. We tried it before and became convinced that the unlimited possibilities of software stifle creativity. Instead, we found inspiration with hardware, boxes with blinking lights and knobs to twiddle.

The Casual Distractions are Todd Christopher and Joe Rizzo. Christopher has been creating experimental electronic music for years as Instruction Shuttle and has too many releases to count. Under this moniker he has, among other things, performed in New York City and collaborated with Dean Garcia of Curve. He also created a CD of exquisite electronic pop as Lasers Shoot From Our Fangs. Rizzo has created three albums of electronic pop as Amoeba Crunch and has a long history of playing rock and roll before that.

We are not only producing gravity-defying music, we exemplify the Realtime approach and are promoting it. We believe Realtime is the punk of the twenty-first century; an antidote for ProTools, Auto-Tune, quantized beats, Photoshopped perfection, and endless digital studio tweaking; a return to creating entertainment that is immediate, relevant, and alive.

See what it’s like being ahead of the curve. Visit us at www.thecasualdistractions.com.

Not Trees

2010-04-09T05:33:00.000-07:00

Last night's session is online! We created out of thin air at midnight, in the deepest pit of our war room, with glowing lights and switches for illumination.

2010Q1 Torrent

2010-04-08T09:41:00.001-07:00

We just released our 11 sets recorded in the first quarter of 2010 in a new torrent. Download them all in one go!

Three New Singles!

2010-04-05T09:55:00.001-07:00

We released three new tracks on the singles page:

"Low Horizon"
"Consecration"
"Apotheosis"

All are from recent sets. Enjoy!

Serious This Time

2010-04-03T10:01:00.001-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the real 2010-04-01 set. And it's a whopper.

Mindblower

2010-04-02T07:32:00.001-07:00

This set is unlike any other we've done. We particularly like how it slowly unfolds, like a time lapse film of spring itself.

F, Indeed

2010-03-31T06:18:00.000-07:00

What we have here is the first bit of a stunningly beautiful set that lasted 45 minutes. The art shown here should give you some indication of the nature of the conversation immediately following our discovery that the recorder wasn't working. We stopped playing, hammered the broken recorder to bits with a ten pound sledgehammer, carefully collected the remnants, spat on them, and flushed them down the toilet. Look for the video on YouTube.

Needless to say, we've taken steps to ensure we will not lose recordings again.

The second set is very nice, but the first was even better. Wish you were there.

An Interstitial

2010-03-26T06:59:00.000-07:00

We haven't had much playing time recently, what with us helping to get the Large Hadron Collider back online. We expect to be back in the groove soon; meanwhile, here's a short set to bridge the gap.

March Madness

2010-03-12T05:53:00.000-08:00

We played this set following a lively discussion of Romantic pointellism in Tsarist Russia, the comparative history of cantilevered architecture, and the preferred techniques for delivering a newborn bison. Hopefully it shows.

Halflife

2010-03-08T18:24:00.001-08:00

"Halflife" is our latest single, pulled from the 2010-02-25 set. Funky beats and guitar! Listen to it here.

Wireframe

2010-03-05T06:16:00.000-08:00

Last night's set turned out to be a string of pearls, each one an accessible, well-formed pop song. It's the most accessible TCD in months! Check it out, and be sure to skip around.

The Music-Making Hermits

2010-02-26T05:42:00.000-08:00

We came before the rocky abode long enough to play another set, one with full dynamics and widely divergent styles. Enjoy.

Xenophasia

2010-02-18T18:51:00.000-08:00

Our single "Xenophasia," culled from a set from last April, is best experienced with headphones in a dark and otherwise quiet place while browsing the Voynich Manuscript.

Xenophasia means, literally, stranger-speak.

Singles Fury

2010-02-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

More singles, including "Loxodrome" and "Lissajous."

The mighty "Lissajous" is a personal favorite. It burst from our heads like Athena: fully formed and with a shout.

More Singles

2010-02-12T08:02:00.000-08:00

We posted two more singles.

"Graceful Degradation" has a unique rhythm and a late-80's jangly guitar. It's a perfect example of the unexpected places improv will take you.

"Every Seventh Wave" has a groove so deep it's hard to see the bottom.

Omphalos

2010-02-09T10:19:00.001-08:00

"Omphalos" is our latest single.

A Smooth, Unclimbable Surface

2010-02-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

Here's the soundtrack to your next lucid dream.

More Singles

2010-01-29T19:25:00.000-08:00

We just released three more singles. Enjoy.

"Solarium"
"It Seemed to Me That Someone Was Talking"
"Ultima Thule"

Known Pleasures

2010-01-28T21:05:00.000-08:00

This is the first TCD without guitar since June 2009. As predicted, the venerable Yamaha PSS-470 has made its triumphant return.

Track Names

2010-01-26T06:43:00.001-08:00

You may have noticed us naming tracks, against our usual convention. The reason is threefold. First, it is becoming increasingly difficult to come up with a purely descriptive title for each and every one. You can only say "beautiful, quasi-pop with blurred beats and well placed, thought-provoking samples that segues into something completely different" so many times before it becomes meaningless. Second, titles are an opportunity for us to pay tribute to things that inspire us. Of late, the titles within each set follow a theme that you can discover through careful observation (or careful googling). Some are more of a puzzle than others, but the themes are there. Third, short, snappy titles are practical now that we're producing singles.

The All-Seeing I

2010-01-21T21:31:00.000-08:00

We followed tonight's (killer) set with a discussion of TCD art and strategy through the first few months of 2010. Wild things are coming. Stay tuned.

Kaossilator Pro, Reconsidered

2010-01-18T05:42:00.000-08:00

This thing looks much less attractive now that the shock of a new Kaoss product has passed. I already run my Kaossilator through a KP3. Using them that way gives me MIDI sync and 4 tracks for looping. That's 90% of what this new box offers, and you could score both on eBay for the $400 they want for the Kaossilator Pro. The only "new" things they threw in are 100 more sounds (meh), a slider on your gate arp (meh), and a vocoder (robot voices - meh).

To anyone who owns the old hardware, it's the Pink Kaossilator all over again. Yawn.

Dice Men

2010-01-15T03:56:00.000-08:00

Beats from the backside of time, buckets of blurps and boings, galactic guitar, salubrious samples. New set just posted.

Kaossilator Pro

2010-01-14T08:50:00.000-08:00

I... I... I want one. This is so great I can barely type. It's four bills, available soon - but not soon enough.

New Flickr Pix!

2010-01-11T18:34:00.001-08:00

2010-01-07
Originally uploaded by thecasualdistractions

For Short Attention Spans

2010-01-09T19:26:00.000-08:00

If you're easily distracted and are still reading this, check out our new singles page.

Time Kill Central

2010-01-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

Solve the puzzle in yesterday's set and win big!

And Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Madness

2010-01-07T21:52:00.001-08:00

Here's our first set of the new decade. Listen as we turn traditional TCD inside out, layering fuzzed-out beats and funk riddims into the microsampled melange. Enjoy!

New Torrent

2009-12-31T03:59:00.001-08:00

The 4th quarter 2009 torrent is now available on our torrent page. It's a quick, easy way for you to download the 11 sets we posted from October to December of 2009. Not familiar with BitTorrent? Follow the link and learn.

Singles

2009-12-26T17:58:00.000-08:00

We posted a few "singles" on the set index, links to smaller mp3s that are excerpts of the more recent sets. So far there are seven. Look for them as links within the set descriptions. The singles are the same tracks we're posting at myspace. We'll continue posting mp3s of complete sets, naturally.

Self-Sustaining Exothermia

2009-12-23T20:54:00.000-08:00

Nothing like smokin', convoluted sampledelia to get you through another tumultuous holiday. The Tenori-On is off, again, replaced with a Roland SP-404SX and an ever-trusty Kaossilator. That's two 404s and two Kaossilators now in the arsenal for those of you keeping track at home.

Things here come into sharper focus about five minutes in. They turn nutty with about five minutes left, much like an old-school TCD set. Pure fun.

TCD Stickers!

2009-12-17T19:56:00.000-08:00

Get a black and chrome TCD sticker like this one for $2! While supplies last.

Infrequently Asked Questions

2009-12-09T08:48:00.000-08:00

This site attracts people with weighty questions, as evidenced by the keywords they use in their searches. Here are our responses to some of these.

difference between a kaoss pad and a kaossilator?

A Kaoss pad is an effects unit. Its focus is not so much creating sound as modifying sound that you put into it. The sound can come from any source that has RCA outs.

A Kaossilator produces sound. It's a combination synthesizer and looper that just happens to have the same form factor and touch pad as other Korg Kaoss products. You could, for instance, run the Kaossilator output into a Kaoss pad. In fact, that's what we do.

can you hook kaossilator to a bass guitar?

Yes. You can also hook a harmonica to a banjo, or hook a kazoo to a digeridoo. But hooking two noise-making devices together isn't very interesting. It would make much more sense to hook a signal processor to the guitar, like a Kaoss pad (KP1, KP2, KP3, or Mini-KP). See here for an example. This way you can manipulate the guitar's sound in real time. The combination is a single, more sonically powerful, instrument.

diy korg expression pedal

Glutton for punishment, eh?

diy turing machine

Good luck with that!

how to record your korg kp3

Is this really so hard?

kp3 looper controlled by midi pedal

See here.

can i hook my handsonic to my kp3?

Sure, why not.

drum circle Handsonic

Now you're talking.

electribe vs. tenori-on

About $700.

has yamaha abandoned the tenori-on?

Not yet.

hook er-1 with microkorg

Since both boxes have stereo audio in, you can do this in either direction. You can also connect them to each other and make them fight it out.

kaoss pad national public radio

Uhh...

npr korg kaoss pad kaossilator

Are you trying to say something about Carl Kassel?

microkorg with looper pedal

That's it, spice up your open mic.

panning on the kp3

Other than auto-pan, forget it.

rainforest sounds vocal warmup

Sorry, can't help you there. Thanks for visiting, though.

using a harmonica and a kaossilator

Who is this guy? Really, the world has got to see this.

what kind of loops do i use with a korg kp3?

The eternal question.

art of noise beatbox piano outro

Yeah, we like it, too.

how to get a sitar sound from rp 350

Try the Envelope Filter or the FX25 effects. The "swell" setting of the Noise Gate is also, uh, swell.

mini kp vs. digitech rp

Get the former if you don't mind using your hands, the latter if you do. Or if you're like us, get both.

ye scurvy sea dogs!

Yes. Yes, indeed.

404040404

2009-12-05T06:34:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest set, which includes our new Roland SP-404 sampler. It will be a bigger part of the sound once we get it fully loaded. Goodbye, JV-1010.

New Directions, Continued

2009-12-02T21:16:00.001-08:00

This is our second session since deciding to focus on dense, microsampled textures. There is less "pop" here, but we think it changes quickly enough to keep things interesting. Let us know if you agree.

Meanwhile, we've decided to step back from live shows and focus on evolving our sound. To that end, we've once again turned our rigs inside out. The Tenori-On, last heard in March 2009, has made its triumphant comeback. The bass guitar/VB-99 rig is gone (!), replaced by a JV-1010 mini rack synth that I suspect may never see another TCD set. A few more new bits will arrive in coming weeks. Stay tuned!

TCD Facebook

2009-12-01T19:38:00.000-08:00

We now have a memorable Facebook address: http://band.to/thecasualdistractions.

TCD MySpace

2009-12-01T18:36:00.000-08:00

TCD is now on MySpace thanks to Brianne!

Skinny Puppy

2009-11-23T06:51:00.000-08:00

The TCD gang caught Skinny Puppy in DC last night. Much fun and bacchanalian revelry were had. SP slammed it hard and played a lot of old stuff, which pleased those of us who remember when Rabies came out. Ogre is still spooky and still pronounces "cruel" with two syllables. cEvin kept both hands busy the whole time and appeared to have at least one Kaoss box. Justin Bennett kicked ass behind the drums. We spied a KP3 in his kit during teardown; who knows how he found the hands to use it. I won't bother to post a full review; you can read all about it here. They're in the midst of the "In Solvent See" tour, which is about to dive south and cut west. Catch them if you can.

The Empty Bench

2009-11-17T20:51:00.000-08:00

Tonight's set features many heretofore-unheard-of sounds and is therefore rather interesting.

Interview

2009-11-13T07:20:00.000-08:00

Check out our interview in the Carlisle Sentinel!

Suspended In Air

2009-11-12T04:10:00.001-08:00

New set.

We Are the Kings of All Media

2009-11-11T18:26:00.001-08:00

We'll give it to you any way you want it.

This Blog
MySpace
Twitter (casualdist)
Our new old school Mailing List
Facebook (The Casual Distractions)
The TCD Flickr Photostream
Our Podcast, available on iTunes
BitTorrent
MP3s, stream, or right-click and save

We generally announce new sets across the board. But each feed has its own bits of exclusive content. No matter which you pick, you're getting something special.

Coming soon: YouTube!

Live Page!

2009-11-08T19:39:00.000-08:00

Check the new live page for info regarding the live act. Upcoming shows, past shows, reviews, posters, it's all here. Of course, we'll continue to transmit gig news via this blog, Twitter, Facebook, sky writing, guerilla wheatpaste poster activity, and setting your pants on fire.

Halloween Throwdown Pix!

2009-11-08T16:13:00.001-08:00

Here's a load of photos from the Halloween show!

Holy Hand Grenade

2009-11-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

New set. Enjoy!

Bump In the Night

2009-10-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

Thanks to everyone who hung out with us last night. You can download the music here, though it's less exciting when you're not engulfed by lasers, fog, and cookies. A good time was had by all, especially us. Special thanks to Cafe Aurora for hosting the event and to the Carlisle Sentinel and Dillsburg Banner for covering it!

The Wrong Button

2009-10-28T21:23:00.000-07:00

Yes, this set is totally awesome, the best in months in fact, but it's a mere soundcheck to the UTTER INSANITY that is coming this Friday.

There is only one word to describe our plans for the 256 cans of Reddi-Wip, the 50 gallon drum of fake blood, and the vat of lime Jell-O we've cooked up for the show, and that word is: EPIC. Be there!

Honey Pump

2009-10-22T21:42:00.000-07:00

This set was short and sweet. It features no keyboards whatsoever, which is a first. There are some deep, deep grooves here. Enjoy.

Live TCD October 30!

2009-10-21T05:28:00.000-07:00

Join us at Cafe Aurora in downtown Mechanicsburg, PA on Friday 30 October, 7:00 - 10:00. Admission is free, but all proceeds from snacks and beverages will go to help the facility.

Click here for a map.

Aurora Social Rehabilitation Services is a community non-profit organization serving adults with mental illness and mental retardation in Central Pennsylvania. Aurora facilitates recovery among those served with opportunities for empowerment and self-direction through life skills training, education programs, and social activities. They operate Cafe Aurora on Friday nights, featuring various events and musical acts.

So come on out, put on your costume and have something different to do the night before Halloween. It is a family friendly environment, so bring the kids for a bit!

Even if you're not interested, or able to join us, please pass this on to friends and family who might be. It really is a good program that benefits from the performance.

(Thanks to Dave S.!)

Updated KP3 Hacks

2009-10-20T05:48:00.001-07:00

I modified the Hacking the KP3 piece to include a workaround to its sync problems. Loop Type 3 makes the KP3 a useful instrument. Otherwise, it's a fancy paperweight.

TCD Stage Lighting

2009-10-17T20:03:00.001-07:00

TCD Stage Lighting
Originally uploaded by thecasualdistractions

Valles Marineris

2009-10-17T07:47:00.000-07:00

New set. Enjoy the big ending.

Seemingly Quiet

2009-10-14T12:44:00.000-07:00

The recent lack of posts isn't due to inactivity so much as plumbing. We've been through yet another massive equipment turnover. The shiny, new gear has been properly connected and ergonomically adjusted. The blood-stained and battered old gear has been duly sold on eBay. Expect to see a proper set and new Flickr pix (of course) in the next few days.

Just to prove that we're not idle...

We'll be playing a live Halloween show at Cafe Aurora in Mechanicsburg, PA on Friday, 30 October. More on this later, but suffice to say it'll be a more "interactive" experience than the last TCD gig there.