Ombilicum 2. Seasons 03. Spring

bruz : ombilicum 2. Seasons 1. Autumn

Transmission 13

transmission 13-reflections 1. remix by bruz:ombilicum

TRANSMISSION 13 | Myspace Music Videos

video playlist

an artist plea

The intelligence of new artistry is to link the idea that some finished work is worth something with the idea that the first thing to be considered is the work, not the something.
We can all understand that the most simple something we can give in return is some money. It could also be an advice (sometimes worth millions) or some help in some field (web, image, video, programming ...).
Of course, each of us doesn't have money, advice or help to give all the time, that's fair enough. And that's what streaming is here for now. Or "name your price" download. you can give 1$ for a whole album or 0, or 10.
But you have more to give than you think.
You can leave a comment, or share with friends. That's what the web is about. And that's quite some worth to artists. I you get 10 tracks for 0.00$, and tell 10 friends you love the stuff and share a link, you HAVE given the artist's work a worth.
You know the real aim of a real artist is not to be loved by millions or become a billionaire; his main objective is to be nearly absolutely sure that he will be able to create his next work. That means being nearly sure that he will get : some time, some money, some material AND some feedback.

So what if next time you listen to some music you stumble upon and really like it, you take a second and think "those were definitely 4 really unusual minutes that music brought me !" and drop a note on the comment box. Or copy/paste the page address you're on, and mail it to your best friend ever saying "let's say you owe me 4 minutes of you life ! Go & listen to this and tell me if it did something to you. If it did, let's try to find out why tonight !"

Well, you can do exactly what you want of course, even nothing. But when you come to think that mankind can only survive through consideration, you quickly realize that consideration only takes a second. In the street nowadays, a look, a smile, 10 cents, a handshake, a joke, a "you look tired today ?", a "thanks" is worth billions.
I don't want to think that in 5 years time, the streets will be crowded with silent people, plugged to their iphone, listening to the latest happy tune sang by the latest happy star who doesn't even know who wrote the song. I do hope that in 5 years time, all the mp3 players will have 2 headphones inputs (or 3) and that people will not be silent anymore. That out of 24 hours, they will give 1 hour to considering. People are not nothing. We are not conditioned robots with automated smiles. We can give billions to someone with the half begun stretching of a ripple near the eye.
So please, take, share, talk about, criticize, download, send, ask for more, steal the time, please, consider.

track #04 - ombilicum

The Echelon Effect : Mosaic

Very first bravo to The Echelon Effect and a 10-track album entitled "Mosaic" made of a mixture of very tense pieces, evolving from quietness to rumble, and very quiet ambient ones full of intertwining textures and repeated melodies. In an unusual way, the drums are real, no looping or electronic here, which gives it a rocky kind of punch when the tracks go wild. Treatments and mix are not complex and quite relevant, no high frequencies experimentation or exaggerated processing, these are songs in a way.
Nearly an hour of very pleasant music to relax. you sometimes think of the American Dollar when guitars jump in, or what Danny Elfman had tried on the "Kingdom" soundtrack.

You can buy the download for the price you choose (from 0 but please...) on BandCamp or the band's site . they're on Myspace to.

There's a favourite :  "Defying Gravity to Reach You", track #08, which should be quite good example of what is written just above :

Ombilicum

This is probably the first volume of a series of works on the idea of filiation, a questioning on where we get what we are from and what trace we leave in others without knowing it, everyone growing up fed by unknown textures that are mostly invisible though they do build up personality.
When I was a kid, there was an old upright piano standing in the living room of my parents’ house in the countryside near Lyon (south east of France), with loads of my mother’s bibelots throning on its cap, which would make it nearly impossible - even outrageous - to open when time had come to tune it. I would sit there for hours, playing it with my right hand while blasting heavenly pads chords on my casio synth with the left one. It was mostly improvisation and repetition. I used to record these on a tape recorder then I would listen to it thinking “waow, those five seconds there are just beautiful”. The tracks were most of the time about twenty minutes long! Since then, when working for other musicians or artists as a producer, I’ve always tried to stick to those five seconds miracle, thinking that if you had these in a track, the track was ok. Or you would have to look for them.
You see, I’ve been more on the rock side of the road from college on, head banging over a strat or strumming wildly to the chorus of an irish song in a pub somewhere. Only a year ago, to me, the guy with the computer was the guy in the studio, talking plugs and effects, gate, threshold, cardioid, insert or vst, words i would just nod to, as long as it sounded ok to my ears. I’ve always been writing folk songs when time allows, cool melodic s low acoustic guitar stuff. As I had eleven new songs, I thought I might as well record them though I had no budget for this project and could not afford to have it recorded and mixed in a studio. So i bought myself a D.a.w. ?? Digital Audio Workstation. Which i’m married to now. From january to may 2010, i got to know her, learnt to speak her language, basic everyday words first. I spent hours on the net, watching video tutorials, reading hundreds of threads, clicking madly through sites links to the big new VST plug of the century. I realized quickly that software was quite expensive too. Hopefully on the world wide web, you can get a professional advice on how to use a compressor for free. You can actually get the compressor itself for free too (see freeware list below), and sounds, and effects, loops, even Daws. You can find people on the net too, real stunningly brilliant people. This is the place where i would like to thank those who build up virtual machines that way, with genius, talent and freedom of thought. You get to learn to click on the “donate” button. Today, i’m painting moments of sound with their amazing tools.


I spent spring and summer mostly on the machine, choosing sonorities, conditioning them to alteration so they would speak that language i was looking for. I realized that all this sound manipulation had a friendly taste to me. It was not easy, but it was curiously familiar. As if i had done this in some other life, or was it childhood showing up? By the end of august, i had composed nearly sixty pieces of instrumental music, mostly orchestral stuff, + a dozen of new age / ambient / chill-out (call it what you like) tracks that friends found so relaxing and soothing that they said they wanted that, home. So it’s in your hands now, or on your hard drive, OMBILICUM, which I hope will give you some time of rest or just nice background music while talking with friends over a 2004 French Bordeaux bottle. There’s no particular extremely philosophical hard-boiled concept behind all this. The thing is just an attempt at marrying sounds from different sources that will bring something back to memory. I think that when a music is relaxing, it means that it is actually doing something to the mind, by re-assembling pieces of reassuring memories that eventually make you think there might me some order in this chaos. 

11.12.2010

This is where i'll drop unreleased stuff, bits and pieces of some sort. Some kind of peaceful dustbin.