BALLISTIC: a double-CD set and its associated insanities written by Mike Metlay of Atomic City edited by the members of Team Metlay --- INTRODUCTION In December 1994, Team Metlay got together for a recording session. For those of you who are new to the Internet electronic music scene, let me explain just who and what Team Metlay is, and why so many folks seem to care about what Team Metlay does. About six and a half years ago, when the Internet as a concept was still in its infancy, emusic discussion was centered in two places: one was the EMUSIC-L mailing list, which was originally restricted to people with accounts that could access the BITNET network or gateway to it, and the rec.music.synth newsgroup, which was limited to Unix machines with USENET feeds (a relatively new thing back then). Out of the community of emusicians that hung out there, there were certain highly visible people who were faster off the mark to answer questions, comment on trends, start fights, and compare notes on emusic in general, some of whom are gone or less active these days, and others of whom are still out there doing what they've always done. In 1990, a prominent member of this community called up several other of these folks and asked them to come to his hometown, bring their gear, and meet face to face, maybe getting a little bit of recording done. The result, delayed in its release by over two years by financial and other hassles, was Team Metlay's _Bandwidth_, which went on to garner critical acclaim and a small but loyal fan following. Since then, as the Internet has grown, so has the Team. We used to call ourselves "the Internet's first supergroup", a term that still gets used in places, but this has connotations of previously famous people banding together, which we weren't. What I prefer to say is that we're a "hypergroup", in the same way that a Web page is "hypertext". We interact both in realspace and cyberspace, communicating with one another via the Internet as well as getting together in person, once every two years, to visit and record music. We know one another, and have become good friends, there for one another through marriages, divorces, children being born and growing up, and life-threatening illnesses. We are, in some ways, a family; in other ways, we more resemble a street gang, or the cyberspace equivalent thereof. Despite our differences, we hang together, stake out our turf, have our own colors and our own language, and present a (usually) unified front to the world outside. When one of us does something exceptional, like Steve Verity making it onto Hearts of Space, we all celebrate. When one of us stumbles or falls, there's someone there to catch him. We are tight. Atomic City is my record label; it handles releases by the Team and each of its members, a catalog of nine releases to date, of which four are available to the public and the fifth is being finished at the CD mastering plant by the time you read this. The Team's work is the centerpiece of this label, and people around the world follow our exploits, enjoying it when we succeed, as we did in 1990 with _Bandwidth_, and learning from us when we stumble, as was the case in 1992, with _Beta Test/Saturnalia_. There is a long, detailed interview with us in Arne Claassen's Webzine SOUND CONSTRUCTORS, at http://isl-garnet.uah.edu/claassen/sc.html, with an accompanying article on our compositional and playing styles. But _Bandwidth_ is old news and _Beta Test/Saturnalia_ was never formally released for reasons discussed in that interview, and many folks have asked me what, if anything, was salvaged from those sessions, and if the Team was ever going to try this again. I said, at the end of the interview, that I doubted the full Team would ever care to walk into a studio and work together again. Even I'm wrong once in a while. :) Here's a lengthy article on the technical, musical, and personal aspects of the making of our latest album, a double-CD set entitled _Ballistic_. We used to post these articles in the hope that someone else would try to emulate what we'd done; in this age of solo emusicians hiding in their basements and only going out in cyberspace, the concept of live players jamming together seems to be going out of style, unless accompanied by the removal of anything deemed "electronic" and the subesquent substitution of guitars, mistuned drum kits, and the occasional mambo sock. Now, we just hope that our hard-won lessons and helpful hints will provide something worthwhile to those who care to learn from us, and that otherwise it'll just make for fun reading. --- DRAMATIS PERSONAE: WHO'S RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS? _Bandwidth_: December 1990 Dan Barrett, Carl Brenner, Kurt Geisel, Mike Metlay, John 3 Rossi, John 4 Rossi (guest), Nick Rothwell, Adam Schabtach (virtual), Dean Swan _Beta Test_: January 1992 and February 1992 John 0 Curtis, Eirikur Hallgrimsson, Joe McMahon, Mike Metlay, William Sequeira, Dean Swan (p.n.m.), David Turner _Saturnalia_ ("Screaming into the Aether"): August 1992 Kurt Geisel (p.n.m.), Eirikur Hallgrimsson, Joe McMahon, Mike Metlay, John 3 Rossi, John 4 Rossi (guest), Nick Rothwell, Adam Schabtach, William Sequeira, Dean Swan (p.n.m.) _Ballistic_ ("Best of Three"): December 1994-January 1995 Carl Brenner, DAC Crowell, Eirikur Hallgrimsson, Joe McMahon, Mike Metlay, John 3 Rossi, John 4 Rossi (guest), Nick Rothwell, Adam Schabtach, Arthur Turner (guest), David Turner, Steve Verity (virtual) (guest) = not a member of the Team due to lack of Net connectivity, but plays on some tracks (virtual) = Team member not present in person who contributes music via some remote means and makes his presence felt that way (p.n.m) = present but no music recorded; conversation, moral support, and perhaps played on tracks that were never finalized --- IT JUST KIND OF HAPPENED As usual, despite endless promises to keep track of exactly how the process worked, the beginnings of the _Ballistic_ sessions were rather sketchy. Over two years had elapsed since the _Saturnalia_ sessions broke down in, shall we say, less than happy circumstances. Surprisingly, desipte predictions of doom in '92, we'd actually all cooled down in the intervening years, and when I started making noises about getting together again, no one seemed to mind. The initial ideas for the session, working title "Best of Three", were explorations of different ways of working on music...a couple of interesting ideas that sparked a few responses but didn't take wing on their own. The idea of collaborating long-distance on pieces has been beaten to death by the Hub, NetJam, etc ad nasueam... we had a few things to add to that, but they really didn't take the place of the everyone-in-a-room-and-screaming vibe. On the other hand, when I finally announced in the fall that I wanted us to get together that winter, the airplane tickets were bought in a flash and the apologies from the few who just couldn't make it were heartfelt. People cleared off time, coordinated schedules, and it all started coming together, with a careful eye toward what had worked in 1990 and failed in 1992. --- THE BALLISTIC SESSIONS Week One: Setup The fellow who really needs to take a bow this time out is DAC Crowell, who lived in my house for five weeks (an act of self-sacrifice in and of itself), moved nearly a quarter ton of gear down to Florida from Illinois by himself in a tiny Toyota, turned an empty room into a pro-level studio, then broke it all down and vanished from whence he came, with only minimal complaining and one severe migraine. I would also like to thank Jonathan Lyons of Tallahassee, Florida, for loaning us the almost-empty house that for five weeks was the most advanced electronic music studio in a radius of several hundred miles, if not more. The house was located in the Indian Head area of Tallahassee, where many streets were called 'nene' (pronounced "nee-nee"), the Apalachee word for 'trail'. So you went past Chowkeebin Nene, Hokolin Nene, Atapha Nene, Ohbah Nene, Chocksacka Nene (say that one aloud. savor it), and so on....the studio was, of course, immediately dubbed 'Electric Neneland.' This studio-from-nothing was the miracle that saved the sessions; right up until about six weeks before D-Day, they were to have taken place in Atlanta, but our host changed jobs and moved to California, losing us his large house and considerable MIDI rig. As it was, all we had to put up with was the occasional lizard finding its way indoors and having to be shooed outside, and the large fire ant mounds on the front lawn. In the first week, between placing monitors, wiring huge patchbays (several hundred patch points in all), frequency-analyzing the rooms, and laying out cable runs, DAC and I hammered out a system based on an initial suggestion made by William (who was hoping to make the sessions but was prevented at the last minute by a family emergency) for a decentralized working environment that could migrate and mutate with the needs of a given session. Here's the idea: each musician's gear list and mode of working forms a _cell_, and cells are designed to be as independent and modular as possible. As you may recall, or may have read in the WWW interview, modularity and independence were the unwitting salvation of the 1990 sessions, and their lack was the downfall of the 1992 get-together. Rather than have a completely interlinked MIDI setup that might prove difficult to debug and use, each individual's cell had the following connections to the outside world: MIDI beat clock input, stereo audio output. Period. With a few exceptions (some folks borrowed spare mixer channels and effects sends on existing cells, and so on), each person was set up to make music as he deemed best, isolated from the rest of the group until he was ready to tie himself into the network and join in. MIDI within each cell could be as hideously complex as each user wished; Nick and Adam were running MAX patchers and sequencers, and my Studio 5LX was routing MIDi data eight ways at once with multiple merges and filtering. But the only outside MIDI control was the start and stop signals and the beat clocks from my TR-707. Several people had massive mixer setups with multiple effects sends and so forth; but all that went to the main board from each person was a stereo pair, except when DAC decided that a particular instrument needed its own setup. We had plenty of extra channels on the board at any one time, and patching into subgroups for tracking or mixing was easy. Each person's cell was designed to be as comfortable and handy as possible without taking up more than its share of space; even so, it got kind of cramped at the midpoint of the sessions. The problem is that a person with even one keyboard takes up a certain amount of floor space, and there isn't a lot you can do about it. But we managed, even if it did get kind of weird in a few spots. I'm hoping that Eirikur's photos turned out and can be uploaded; there's one shot of the Studio literally crammed end to end with single keyboards on stands, so tightly that the only way to get from one end of the room to the other was to crawl. In addition, there were some other innovations that made life much easier for us all. Not only could a player put on headphones and listen to his own mix without disturbing others, but Electric Neneland actually had three studios rather than just one. Studio A was the main room, with the mixer and the main rigs; Studio B was set up for rehearsals of small groups, and had a Mackie 1202 mixer and a small DAT machine with a few keyboards that weren't being used at the moment; and Studio C was set aside for the two MAX-based composers, Nick and Adam, to do computer-based work in peace and quiet with small rigs, out of the way of others. We lived elsewhere from the studio, allowing us to leave it behind for a bit every night and recharge; there were several spare keys that let people come and go as they wished, to stay rested and focused. John 3 volunteered his ADAT, a box which despite some mechanical complaints and torn-out hair did a very workmanlike job for the sessions under fairly harsh conditions and allowed us to multitrack, something that many emusicians take for granted but which was a new wrinkle for the Team. And, finally, we had two excellent DAT mastering machines and the hard disk recording system, which allowed us to use a wide variety of editing and noise removal tools. DAC did some playing and programming on the sessions, but not much; he viewed himself as an engineer, and his full-time devotion to that role took a lot of pressure off of the rest of us, making the whole session run much more smoothly. Arriving a week early meant that before the gang arrived, there would be time to put the major pieces in place and debug the setup as much as possible, thereby not cutting into valuable playing time. His rates were reasonable, too; at the scale his union entitled him to charge, his services for five solid weeks would have cost me thousands of dollars. As it was, I simply had to take advantage of the fact that Appalachicola Bay was only a few miles away, and keep him full of raw oysters on demand. It was a bargain by any measure. Unless, of course, you happen to be an oyster. Week Two: And We're Off! Nick arrived on December 19th, and took a few days to get rid of his jet lag as DAC and I finished work in the studio. He came with no synths, as always, but had his Powerbook and MIDI interface gear set to go. He decided to use the two synths that Steve Verity had loaned us, a Morpheus and an UltraProteus, and my Wavestation as a controller and extra synth. (I had bought it with Nick in mind only a month earlier, and knew very well that I wouldn't have time to use it; Nick blanked its memory and put in stuff of his own, which I am now gleefully deconstructing to learn his deepest programming secrets.) He was bored with the Morph in less than an hour, and fired up the Ultra, fully expecting to be rid of it in half that time. It ended up being almost the only synth he used for the next month, an obsessive passion that even sidetracked him from using the MicroWave. He used MAX for most input, rarely needing the WS, and spent most of his time tucked into a corner with the Powerbook on top of the Ultra, frobbing away and occasionally handing someone a pair of headphones and grinning, "Hang on a bit...what do you think of THIS?" (There should probably be a word for this process: programmer calls someone over, makes them put on headphones, plays something, person listening goes "Oooooh" and smiles, everyone else in the vicinity wants a turn, repeat as needed....we did it a LOT....) The Team would like to extend a special "thank you" to Tallahassee emusician Phil Gelb, who did us a huge favor on the spur of the moment. When Nick arrived and was too wired to sleep, DAC and I took him to a bar in downtown Tally, where we ran into Phil, who gleefully informed us that he had been asked to go to New York for a couple of weeks to play a gig at the Knitting Factory. We learned that his MIDI rig wouldn't be making the trip, and with only a little wheedling from me he loaned us his Waldorf Microwave and his Lexicon LXP-15 and JamMan for the sessions. These boxes were originally intended to be spares, but when Adam's changed flight plans required him to leave almost all of his gear behind, they became vital. Many thanks, Phil! John 3's ADAT arrived by UPS and was installed, and a desperate need for patch cables required a drive to visit a couple of music merchants in Panama City. That's a five-hour round trip and a day lost, just to get some cables that any sane city's music stores would have in abundance. Tallahassee was beginning to make an impression on us. At least Panama City was nice, even if DAC had to be restrained from buying that MTI Auto-Orchestra we saw. Just before Christmas, a sedan pulled up outside of Electric Neneland after a three-day drive from New Hampshire, loaded to the gills with weird old gear, another Mac-based full digital audio and sequencing system, and a thoroughly ill and exhausted Eirikur, who supervised the setup of his Mac, his crochety old Chroma, and his rackful of bizarre synths and little-known effects processors ("What's a Kawai RV-4, and why does it have SIXTEEN JACKS on the rear panel?!"), and then collapsed into bed to recover. Meanwhile, our main digital audio system was up and running, and the old tracks from _Beta Test_ and _Saturnalia_ were being loaded onto the hard disk or striped to digital multitrack as beds for future developments. Of the nine songs from 1992, three were discarded, three were hard-disk recorded unedited, and three were put on ADAT. DAC also recorded and mastered _Band of Fire,_ my solo CD single, at this time, and we had our first encounter with the fun but dangerously unpredictable Hughes SRS 3D-audio system. (See my previous posting on that CD single.) On the day after Christmas, a car from Atlanta arrived bearing David Turner and his brother Arthur. David is a relative newcomer to the Team and to the Internet; quiet and reserved, with a dark wit and an acid sense of humor, he is also a remarkable composer, and was looking forward to meeting more of the Team and getting involved in the process. Normally a very meticulous writer, he was curious about the whole idea of recording music at warp speed. Arthur, a professional jazz keyboardist, was along for the ride, to play a bit if desired; his chops and arrangement skills were astounding, and he fell to creating complex charts and playing wickedly-timed changes with utter glee. David had flown down from Pittsburgh with his TG77 as his main synth, and Arthur used his Kawai K4 almost exclusively. After some bantering with the other arrivals and spotting the hot players, they vanished into Studio B and began writing furiously. Occasional snatches of insane jazz fusion were heard from behind the door for several days.... A fight with Air South over a cancelled flight, momentary panic, and some rapid phone calls salvaged Adam's travel plans, and he showed up with his Powerbook in hand and several sound modules stashed among the socks and underwear in his suitcase. (Little known fact of emusic #4,125: if a Mackie 1202 and an E-mu Procussion have a fight inside a suitcase as it tumbles down an airport loading ramp, the Mackie wins. Adam was fishing pieces of the E-mu's outer case from the corners of his suitcase for days.) Soon after that, another sedan loaded with gear pulled up in the driveway and disgorged a K2000, a Minimoog, a pile of rack gear, several guitar cases and pedals, and Johns 3 and 4. Joe's VFXsd arrived via UPS barely before he did, and no sooner did he walk through the door than he vanished into Studio B with the Turner brothers and John 4, who was rapidly impressing the hell out of us all with his chops, if not with his attitude. (What do you want from a sixteen-year-old?) And at this point, it all becomes a blur.... Week Three: Tracking, Tracking, Tracking When the Team gets going, it's sometimes hard to keep track of what's being done at any given moment. With three studios rather than one, the chaos level was instantly cubed. I'm very fortunate to have such a creative bunch of people working with me, and even more fortunate that they are all open-minded and extremely receptive to alien ways of working. Listening to one another and trying out new ideas, the pent-up creative energy began to manifest itself as a steady stream of ideas into sequencers and onto tape, with DAC hanging on for dear life as he tried to stay above the tide of input. Joe pored over jazz charts as Nick went bananas with the radio as John 3 tried to explain to John 4 that he wanted "whackachuck" on one guitar part as DAC stared at me running three arpeggiators at once as Eirikur hunched over his Chroma and made it make horrendous noises. Well over an hour of music was laid down either as basic tracks or as finished mixes in just over a week, easily surpassing the most productive previous sessions. The local restaurateurs were soon cackling with glee whenever they saw our caravan of autos pull up outside, and we bounded from Indian mango lassis to bowls of gumbo to stir-fried Chinese greens to jerk chicken and curried goat, liberally sprinkled with the Jamaican scotch-bonnet pepper sauce we dubbed "liquid murder." At one point, DAC dubbed the sessions 'a four-week gastronomic orgy, with synths.' He wasn't far wrong. Watching Nick learn to speak with a Southern sh*tkicker's accent, taught effectively by DAC and me over the course of the month, was a delight, but he never quite managed the drooling-bohunk level of crackerdom one gets in Tallahassee...like pointing at a menu item that says 'fajitas' and drawling to the waiter, "Yawl git me summa them thar fe-JISTERS, bwah. Them's good eatin'." We had most of the basic tracks together, and a reasonable idea of what the final product was going to look like, by the end of Week Three. For information on the individual tracks and how they came together, see the "Track by Track" section below. People (and equipment) quickly settled into solid working 'cells' and either used them to maximum advantage or helped others poke around on them and learn things, and everyone quickly picked one or two boxes that came to predominate their work. While the wide variety of synths and effects near to hand had a strong influence on the overall sound of the album, realistically each person had one or two boxes that became their own personal 'workhorses', and which provided the majority of their musical contributions. For some folks, these primary boxes were easier to spot, such as Nick's UltraProteus, Joe's VFXsd, or John 3's K2000. Others spread themselves a bit thinner, but even I got through the whole session relying almost entirely on my SY35 through the Vortex, with a lot less Xpander and Prophet VS than I'd expected to use. We rested when we needed to, and were actually hard at work from midmorning until late at night almost every day. Actually, I think we dreaded slowing down; losing momentum might have meant losing good material, even if keeping up the pace meant that we'd all crash hard at the end. It was around this time that the phrase 'going ballistic' started being used in conversation, and soon after that, the album hitherto referred to as "Best of Three" had a real title of its own. We wrapped up 1994 with a bang. Ever since David had joined the Team, he had been hassling John 3 to teach him what a Zap Jam was. John typed up a long explanation and lost it somewhere on his Mac's hard drive, and evaded retyping the whole thing for as long as possible; finally, on his last full day in Tally, David demanded to be shown how it worked, and John 3 relented. The result was the track that finished out the first CD of the set, "Fragment G." We celebrated New Year's Eve with a huge Chinese banquet, a drunken party at my house with lots of political discussions and everyone laughing themselves sick over the Evolution Control Committee's utterly BRILLIANT release, "Gunderphonic." (This tape WILL be banned someday; buy it while you can!) David and Arthur left the next day, and we took the day to relax and chill out, recharging our batteries, with the live show that gave us "Aqua Regia" that evening. It was suddenly beginning to look like an album, frighteningly enough. Week Four: Tracking, Tracking........Tracking....Mixdown By contrast, the fourth week was a little touchy in places. Carl arrived for a few days, his health thankfully allowing him to make the trip at the last minute, and was able to contribute some tasty playing to a couple of songs before heading home. By contrast, the rest of us were starting to burn out, and the completion of the partly-done songs we had on ADAT was getting harder and harder, especially when the ADAT died, came back, died again, and came back again. John 3 managed to get a taped mix of his song "Collateral Damage" finished just before he and John 4 had to leave, after slaving over his K2000 nonstop for nearly four days trying to complete the drum layer; John 4 was laying down guitar parts right up until he piled into the car for the drive home, which turned out to be a harrowing, nearly-fatal nightmare (a blizzard hit the Smokies as they were crossing Tennessee, resulting in multiple fatalities on the highways). Adam and Joe did what needed doing before jumping on their respective planes, including the mastering of _Shatterday_ during an incipient thunderstorm. That left me, Eirikur, Nick, and DAC to finish up the mixdown and add any final tracks that were needed. When inspiration is gone, rely on perspiration; one by one we knocked off the unfinished mixes on the list, dumping them down to hard disk and building up the data files that we would need to make the master DATs. It was around this point that DAC was flattened by his migraine, Nick had to leave, and I had to return to work for several days to run an experiment in the lab that was scheduled at the last minute and couldn't wait a week. My parts on several songs were recorded in the brief hour or so between the end of my lab shift and my hitting the sack and zoning out, every night that week. While I was out, DAC and Eirikur would begin mixing down and finishing the songs that were ready. Week Five: Cleanup and Last Touches Eirikur held out as long as he could, but we finally sent him home with the promise that it was 'almost done'. Ha. As it turned out, DAC and I took another three days of hard work to finalize the mixes; an undocumented feature (bug?) in Sound Tools ruined an entire CD's worth of final mixes, which had to be put together again from scratch, and the Hughes SRS was discarded at this point as well. Finally, agonizingly, we had three sets of master DATs; we were so tired, we only indexed one of them with track ID's, leaving the others unindexed unless they were needed. Breaking down what was left of the studio and packing DAC's car took another day, and soon after that, I was sitting in an empty room at what used to be Electric Neneland Studios, wondering exactly what had hit me. --- TRACK BY TRACK: HOW WE DID IT Here's a breakdown of the development of _Ballistic_, and what went into each track on the album. This is really where the technical details are thickest and the ideas we have discussed up to now were applied. It's a bit awkward to talk about the older tracks that were used as a basis for _Ballistic_; a lot of our studio logs are old and incomplete, and it was a long time ago. However, since ten of _Ballistic's_ 29 tracks were recorded in whole or in part at those old sessions, I'll do my best to notate the personnel, technical, and gear-list data for them as best I can. They represent a wide spread of time and gear, but interestingly enough they share some common elements that separate them from _Bandwidth's_ tracks. Most notable is the emphasis on live playing in all of these compositions, although there is some heavy-duty sequencing in a few places. These tracks represent a continuum of change from how it was done in 1990 to how it was done in 1994; for more discussion of the recording process in 1990 and 1992 and our then-fresh perspectives on them, please see Arne Claassen's excellent Team interview for his _Sound Constructors_ net-zine, and its associated materials, on the Web at this URL: http://isl-garnet.uah.edu/claassen/sc.html The new tracks are, of course, mentioned in the context of the session descriptions given thus far, and it should be easy to see how they fit specifically into the general creative environment of _Ballistic._ Note that these descriptions are the closest to writing credits anyone will get for individual tracks; we dispensed with those on the CD itself, as they are largely meaningless. Disc One: TRAJECTORY Prologue: 0500 One of the ongoing ideas of the sessions was to place as much of the material as possible within a context, a framework that delineated the feel and scope of the music. For _Ballistic_, that scope was the futuristic panorama of Atomic City itself, a place not too distant from ours, where the skies above are filled with a welter of fascinating radio waves intermingled in the exosphere, and the planet below is carefully negotiating the terms of its survival between the rival forces of Technology and Conservation. This is where my own feelings about humanity's goals and ideals come out, to the extent that they ever do. I regard science and technology as a Pandora's Box that can never be closed, and indeed should not be; I recognize its potential for destruction but revel in the good it has done, and foresee a future where our current struggle to maintain the planet while moving ever forward remains essentially unchanged, but has taken on new trappings. "0500" is a simple beginning, but does a nice job of setting the tone for what is to come. It was put together from several radio sources culled from DAC's shortwave receiver, mixed with the distinctive character of the Atomic City World Service, which has pioneered the use of voder technology for newscasting. Gloria, the World Service's best-known news anchor, does not exist; she is a speech synthesis program operated by the World Service's staff, who type up the appropriate stories on hard disk and input them as data for 'her' to read over the airwaves. It's cheaper than paying for on-air talent, and less prone to illness or salary dispute. A Gathering of the Mighty "A Gathering Of the Mighty" was recorded at the _Bandwidth_ session, with an Xpander, Prophet T8, D-50. MKS-70, K5, and P-330 piano module. (We think. It's been a while.) It was recorded through a Roland M-240 line mixer direct to PCM digital 2-track via Sony PCM-501ES. It was played live by me, Dean, John 3, and Nick, and was originally intended as only a live jam. The original was far too long and we despaired of being able to release it despite its great emotional intensity; for the _Ballistic_ sessions, it was digitally edited down to a much nicer length. Note how the piano gets lost every time the chord sequence goes funny partway through the pattern, and eventually bulls on through, dissonances and all; Dean had a terrible time figuring out the inversion John 3 was using. For anyone who might be curious, this is the very first piece of music ever recorded by the Team. ...organisms... (Core Dump 2) Steve Verity, mired in deadlines for an upcoming NAMM show and broke after getting his album _Digital Planet_ out on CD for Atomic City, could not attend the _Ballistic_ sessions. He was, however, able to provide a 'virtual' presence that worked out more smoothly than Adam's virtual contribution of "Killing Chrome" on _Bandwidth_ four years earlier. Since Steve works for E-mu Systems as (among other things) an occasional sound designer for the Morpheus and UltraProteus, he had modified software to burn his own MIDI data into the ROMs of selected machines, combining his specialized patches with sequences he wrote himself and loading them into the memory space normally reserved for the cheesy demo sequences. Once this was done, all he had to do was to mail the synth itself to the session, and have us hook it up to the mixer and press the DEMO button. In effect, he mailed himself to the sessions within his machine! While we were unable to make use of the demo sequence in the UltraProteus, the Morpheus's sequence came in two parts that worked beautifully as transition tracks; we split them, added digital fades and some effects, and used them where appropriate. "...organisms..." is named for the famous line by everyone's favorite nature-show host, Marlin Hoek, and is the second of the two sequences we call Core Dumps. Frost on the Steel Viola The basic tracks for "Frost on the Steel Viola" were recorded at the _Beta Test_ sessions in 1992. Eirikur came up with the first part of this piece, which uses his Seiko DS-250/DS-310, a bizarre additive-spectrum envelope- crossfade synth that appears only on one other actual album release that any of us knows of (Jarre's _Rendezvous_). Breakfast conversation: Metlay: "Dean, did you see? Eirikur's brought this weird old thing--it makes the most awful screeching grinding noises." Dean: "Yes....." [beatific smile, closes eyes] "Isn't it *wonderful*?" For the middle section, Eirikur (at my suggestion) added an ostinato part using a related but slightly edited sound on the Seiko. Then came a drum track, that he played manually using one key on his Xk to control a Yamaha TX-802 drum patch which varies from mellow to harsh and metallic depending upon velocity. After violently insisting that Eirikur play the entire 24-bar section by hand ("I like the way it *breathes*"), I created the phrase structure using Music-X on my Amiga. The next layer was an improv. string pad, by Eirikur, using his brand-new (used) EX-8000, which had been purchased (inspired by my unit) the previous day on a gear-scrounging run. The third section was just me, playing improvisational layers of EX-8000 bells over gritty VS pad. We found that I'd started on exactly the same chord that Eirikur ended on, and the edit just crossfades between them, which is a nice effect. We went back and added the rumbles on the first section a bit later with Eirikur's K1r. This basic mix was embellished somewhat during the _Ballistic_ session, using the ADAT to add tracks to the basic stereo mix. There was no way to sync the new parts to the mix except by ear, so all added tracks were played live. The added Theremin solos were played by Adam and multitracked so that he could duet with himself, a texture enhanced by the special SE-70 signal processing he designed for use with the Theremin. The Xpander and Synthacon in the center section were by me and John 3, and DACC set up the swirling sample and hold Synthacon texture for the final part. DACC demonstrated a fine command of convective synthesis here; when the Synthacon refused to stabilize and play the swirling pad nicely, DACC stood behind it and furiously waved a newspaper at its rear panel. The rush of cool air forced the synth to settle down and behave for the length of time it took to record the track. Joe's jaw had to be retrieved from the floor and surgically reattached. Beijingplatz It wouldn't be a Team album, I don't think, without Nick being able to piece together one of those intricate Chinese puzzles that characterize his compositions: layers within layers of repeating and mutating figures that gradually grow in thickness and complexity over the course of the song. Nick started this as an attempt to spend a day writing a pure MicroWave piece, which he'd never done in his five years of owning one. Despite the MW being an eight-voice synth, he got into doing something with an increasing layer of loops. (Uh-oh. :) The UltraProteus got added in when the voice stealing got out of hand. This particular piece was executed on the UltraProteus and the Microwave, with some radio noise and a live SY35 part tossed in later. The Ultra plays the flute part, which was driving us crazy when we tried to record it. The filter cube Steve had placed in the patch Nick chose for the part was very lively, with lots of sharp resonances that happened to be near the overtones of the key he was playing in, so whenever certain notes would play, the Ultra's gain would shoot up by 30dB and peg out the mixer inputs. An argument about how best to fix the problem, and many patch edits that didn't work, concluded with my ordering Nick to find another filter cube instead and use that. Which he did, and which worked quite well. (The trick is to make a good decision in time, not the best decision too late. ;) Nick adds, "What came out reminds me of all the Froese stuff from around 1976 - Macula Transfer and that era." He credits Joe McMahon with the idea for the ending. Transpacific State Radio, 0310 In the UltraProteus, Nick discovered a wealth of interesting timbres that were given life and depth by the filter cubes. He quickly hacked together a MAX patcher that allowed for algorithmic playback of minisequences and mutating loops within the Ultra, and utilized in several pieces, usually in concert with sampled, treated shortwave radio noise. This lovely bit of gamelan/percussion layers quite well with the airwaves, and paints a picture of a dimly heard radio station on a cheap radio late at night somewhere in the South China Sea. I'm Worth More Than That Three tracks on _Ballistic_ are derived from movements of "Screaming into the Aether," a longer composition that is not available in its entirety except on _Beta Test/Saturnalia_, the CD archive of the 1992 tracks (ATOM CD 06, a Silent Volume). The original piece was cobbled together from several separate sequences, with a DAT playback of a live jam inserted into the middle of the sequence. That live section, subtitled "I'm Worth More Than That," was extracted from the original session tape and remastered on its own; it contains an Ibanez MIDI guitar being played in an unusual finger-bowed technique by John 4, with VCS3, EX-8000, Prophet VS, Xpander, K2000, K1r, TX802, Orla FM string synth, and Wavestation being played live by William, Nick, Eirikur, and me, underneath. This piece is not a true Zap, as the guitar work was recorded first and the synth parts flown in later. Exosphere/Intercept There are no keyboards or synthesizers on this track. It's all processed radio, taped voice, and Theremin. DAC instructed Nick on how to manipulate the sidebands and frequency response of the radio using the many tube-driven bandpass filters in the studio. This grew into a fascinating audio tapestry, with the Theremin over the top (while playing the device, I found that my wedding ring acted as a very nice load on the antennae, and improved control a lot) and a Digital Dorothy vocal recording of long-outdated telephone intercept codes at the end. It's noise, but it's really fascinating noise...;) 666 BPM Did you know that when a Rhodes Chroma overheats and crashes, it not only hoses its own internal architecture but also dumps random electronic garbage out of the MIDI retrofit, and that a synth like the Yamaha TX802, if hooked up to said interface, will sometimes actually attempt to interpret said garbage as system exclusive data, resulting in the crashing of its own architecture and a crash of face-ripping digital noise before it gives up completely and shuts itself down? Neither did we. Paradigm Shift And then David and Arthur came out of Studio B, and asked, "Is it our turn yet?" The tracking of "Paradigm Shift," the first of the two tracks they'd worked up, wasn't without conflicts; David's inherent perfectionism and Arthur's high standards clashed with the limited schedule and resources of the few days they had remaining to complete the pieces. After a solid set of changes were recorded on ADAT, with David's D-70 and Arthur's K4 lines over a simple swingline from the tiny Boss DR-220A, I told them to move onto the other piece (see "I can See..." below) and to stop work at once. Neither was entirely happy about where they had to stop, and I credit them both with being very professional and cooperative. If you are used to running your own studio and doing things your way, it can be hard when someone simply says, "It's good enough. Drop it and move on," and you can't argue. But we never would have gotten the other song out otherwise, so I have no regrets. As to this piece, David simply took me aside and said, "I'm afraid it'll never be finished. Promise me you'll try." I did; this is the result, a very tasty set of changes overlaid with all sorts of fun technology. David envisioned a sort of technocollision, "a rocket factory blowing up" as it says in his session notes. While we didn't quite get that far, not wanting to obscure the lovely harmonies, we did spice up the mix with all sorts of nifty additions, including another excerpt from the World Service, a high leadline on the SY35, and some more radio noise. However, this time we didn't use a real radio, and instead relied on the imitative capabilities of various synths, producing a wide variety of swept and modulated noise. Fanatical MicroWave users will recognize a patch distributed by Waldorf on the Internet, featuring an amazing wavetable modulation that produces formants similar to those in human speech. While formant wavetables are well known, this patch is amazing for its lifelike quality. The patch was so delicately balanced that, if the MicroWave were turned on from cold and this patch played, there would be nothing but the "static" noise for five or ten minutes as the MW warmed up ... and then the voices would start. John 4 provided the guitar intro and outro, and a few analog textures unified the piece into its final form: a startling departure from our story so far, but a welcome direction to the flow of the album. When these two pieces were first recorded, some of us worried that they wouldn't "fit in;" upon listening to the CDs, I was actually struck by how well these startling digressions worked in the context of what else went on. Trajectory (Core Dump 1) This is the other Core Dump from Steve's Morpheus, and makes wonderful use of the Morph's filters and autopanning capabilities; it burbles and percolates along briskly, with one sound fading to another on a perfect evolving arc...a trajectory of sorts. Zibbelon For weeks, Eirikur had been telling us about this composition he was bringing down with him, something called "Zibbelon" because it was loosely based on a TX802 patch called "Zibble" (which was, interestingly enough, the setting that got hashed in "666 BPM", making for a nice thematic link). We were worried that we wouldn't have time to get it arranged and recorded, as time went by, but Eirikur assured us that when the time came, we wouldn't have any problems; he needed a particular sound from Joe, and a couple of things from my Xpander, and his rig would do the rest. As it turns out, he was right, and we got a very tasty little rubato miniature out of the effort. Quantum Sleep "Quantum Sleep" comes in its entirety from the _Saturnalia_ sessions, with me on Xpander and VS and Nick on K2000, D-70, and Wavestation, following Eirikur's lead on K1r and TX-802. The piece was thought out ahead of time by Eirikur, and described to us in detail; we used Performer to sequence part of the beginning and end, but the center section was live. The idea was what we like to refer to as an "Eirikur special;" he would come up with this off-the-wall concept, describe it to us enthusiastically, and somehow convince us to realize it on tape. Eirikur had the idea at four AM one night; in his words, he "wasn't getting his sleep quantum, in part due too taking too much Prozac in response to the interpersonal stress at the sessions." Over breakfast at good old Ritter's Diner, he described his vision of the piece to the gang, of all these little quanta diddling around in space, until they fall asleep, upon which they dream until being rudely awakened...and Joe, who had to leave before the piece was recorded, added, "And there can be an alarm clock!" Eirikur and I are fond of the results, particularly because Nick and I didn't understand Eirikur's directions ("Stanford-y...academic-sounding FM gongs in the distance....dreamland...") and did a bizarre freeform improv for the middle section that could never have been planned, complete with pitch-shifting delay for a wonderful murky quality. It's really fortunate that we decided to record that first take! Enter the Helix "Enter the Helix" was recorded at the _Beta Test_ sessions and is reproduced as originally tracked. It features myself, David Turner, and John 0 Curtis, on Xpander, Prophet VS, Korg EX-8000, Casio FZ-1 sampler, and an Ensoniq EPS-16Plus rack sampler. Possibly a few other doodads as well. The original idea was, according to John 0, that we 'loosen up' and throw away our preconceptions and strictures of composition and arrangement for a few minutes, just making noise for the sheer joy of making noise as a sort of warmup to the real work ahead ("Hot Tub Party in the Gene Pool" was the song to be recorded that day). The resulting sound-collage was recorded for posterity and holds up amazingly well; in particular, David does amazing things with a battery of sampled effects and backward vocals in his first-ever experiment of this sort. In thinking back to that session, John 0 likens the experience to the meditative disciplines of Zen, offering the koan, "Does a Tabasco bottle have Lexicon nature?" (the proper response is, of course, "Ballistic." ;) Thousands of Years Nick and DAC go at it again, building up an intriguing rhythmic line of percussive sounds mated with swelling tones made ethereal by long, infinitely regenerating delays; almost a trance feel. The piece has no chords; just a two-note pattern of open fifths. The sound is a raw Wavestation PCM sample (a flute overtone transient), layered with a sustained inharmonic of some kind, pitch-shifted and delayed by an LXP-5. A wave sequence provides the sense of movement, along with a drum pattern, the only one Nick has ever written (he just got a drum machine recently). Nick's R8 was still in the UK, so he had to scat-sing the rhythm to DAC, who input it to the TR-909 and processed the hell out of it; in Nick's words, "The reason it sounds so good is that DAC spent a lot of time and energy fine-tining the EQ and effects processing on it; the raw sound out of the 909 is not much to write home about." (I can hear the gasps of righteous indignation from here. :) Carl had been in the studio for less than fifteen minutes, having walked in during the recording of this piece, when we looked around for a good accent line and said, "Hey, Carl! Let's have YOU play something!" Carl, in the grand tradition of Dan Barrett peeling off his coat and gloves in 1990 and playing the final solo on "March of the Plastic Ants" before getting his bags out of his car, promptly sat down at the VFXsd and worked up a nice pelog melodic pattern, which he played live over the ADAT of Nick's texture as a finishing touch to a lovely trance piece. Into the Aether This piece originated as the first two movements of "Screaming Into the Aether" from _Saturnalia_; the "intro" had D-70, K2000, and Wavestation, and the second section had Orla FM stringsyth (!), TX802 and K2000 over Prophet VS and Wavestation. The powerful bass drone that opens the song is the Roland D-70, of all things; this tone moves so much air that the woofer ports on the studio monitors were blowing piles of papers off of tables. The heartbeat is the K2000, and the whispers are carefully-constructed wavesequences using the WS vocoder algorithm (they make another appearance on "The Essential Menace," and are tuned to 'sing' rather than 'whisper' on "To Gather Again"). Nick's CASSIEL wavesequences make another of their 1992 appearances in the second part, performing the bassline and repeated melodic figure as well as the rhythm pattern. Eirikur's TX802 patterns (the light FM cycles with the synched echo) and Orla were preprogrammed to provide a sense of rhythmic and melodic motion. The deep bass resonant drone in the second section is provided by the VS through a carefully-set pair of Korg SDD-2000 DDLs, one per audio channel. The flute-like lead is John 3 on the K2000, intentionally delaying notes to syncopate with the sequence. John 3 reports that it's the flute part from "Lepsog, Deamon of the Sea" from _Flight of the Crimson Butterfly_, one of several unreleased projects from the 1970s which John had done with his then-partner, well known Canadian New Age musician Pascal Languirand. This piece originally segued into a short movement called "carousel," which was removed for this release and doesn't appear elsewhere on _Ballistic_. In 1994, we re-EQed the piece for more punch, and added John 4's proceesed guitar to the intro. Fragment G (Zap 22) On New Year's Eve, David was feeling a bit down; he wasn't sure that both of the pieces he'd started would get finished, he and his brother were to be the first to leave, and to top it all off, it looked like John 3 was going to get away without actually ever teaching him how to Zap Jam. John 3, however, was as good as his word, and with the hard disk recorder running directly, he took David, Joe, Adam, and me on an object lesson in Zaps. By John 3's parlance, a Zap is a group jam session that promotes careful listening between members of a performing group. It starts simply, with one or two people creating sounds; others listen to those sounds, and join in with appropriate additions. There is no fixed rhythm or timebase to start out with, although one may occur and go away in the midst of the piece; the critical factor is the combination of listening to other players and knowing one's own instrument as well as possible. The resulting Zap lasted for about 19 minutes; it had a shaky start and an equally shaky ending, in which the Minimoog sort of wandered around a bit, but the majority of it worked incredibly well, coming together to form an atmosphere of dark grandeur, barely suppressed danger, and flashes of great power. The overwhelming image in my mind was that of the surface of Jupiter, as seen from space, as the cometary fragments of Shoemaker-Levy impacted on the atmosphere. The piece was named "Fragment G" when it was edited down to size the following week; the agreement of the Siding Spring Observatory to let us use a Fragment G infrared photo on the album art was largely serendipitous. The February 1995 issue of PHYSICS TODAY features the other of the two shots that we were approved to use, but it didn't have the 'oomph' of the first one. David, having 'zapped' at last, went away content, and it may not have occurred to him until much later that "Enter the Helix" was a Zap already. Disc Two: IMPACT To Gather Again "To Gather Again" was a total surprise from the _Saturnalia_ sessions; it's an excerpt from an early jam session that lay in John 3's tape archive until we agreed to meet again, forgotten by the rest of us until then. John 3 brought the tape and some suggested edit points with him, and he and DACC cut out a section of excellent music from the original jam, jettisoning sections with severe errors and finishing up the piece with a digitally- spliced new beginning. Because of the splices and the rhythm bed, the piece doesn't qualify as a true Zap, but it makes for a great start to the second disc. The drum machine is a TR-707, using the same pattern as "A Gathering Of The Mighty" as a thematic link, and the track features some of the Wavestation voice effects that show up on almost every _Saturnalia_ track and are absent otherwise (Nick was very proud of the lovely vocal textures he'd created, and borrowed one from his MUSENET piece "Dawn and Brigid" for the jam) as well as the only place on the entire two hours of recorded music to feature a Waldorf Microwave, except for "Beijingplatz" and "Paradigm Shift." The Micro has been very ill-used by the Team; a lot of members own and use them but they rarely seem to come out at sessions. It's hard to say why. Here, Nick recreates the infamous Tangerine Dream singing cyberchipmunks with it. The K2000 is featured here as well, I believe; it was a very new instrument at the time and we all had a strong interest in it, including Nick, who played it constantly until he got tired of it (which took about ten days ;). It's definitely John 3, Eirikur, Nick, and me; I don't know if anyone else was even there at the time. Spamming the Globe A special guest appearance by international rave-culture megastars, the Future Sound Of Sopchoppy, featuring Adam "Schabba-san" Schabtach on MAX patcher driving obnoxious Procussion stacks and obscure but useful bugs in Studio Vision for the opening HONK, "MC Atomic Mike" Metlay on noodly Mobyesque SY35 patches and Cyclone set on 'puree', D. Andrew "EEEEVIL" Crowell on totally authentic, ever-so-Snappy, eat-your-hearts-out-kiddies TR-909 loops, and Joe "What's THIS thing do?" McMahon on MC-202 resonance slider. Breakbeats! Jungle dub loops! Flying trance energy techno speed injection!! Loud fast noxious silly fun loud fast noxious silly fun loud fast noxious silly fun loud fast....Huh? Oh, Sopchoppy? Look it up on a good map of Florida. Population of like three hundred. On a good day. Maybe. The Essential Menace This is the last and shortest of the "Screaming Into The Aether" excerpts; the original piece's "outro" had D-70 and K1r with Wavestation providing the 'whispering'; for release on _Ballistic_, we added Gloria's vocals and my wailing SY35 line. Note the "Riding the Rails" K2000 preset, which in '92 had not yet become old hat. ;) The news story was included at the very last minute, thanks to a serendipitous cooperation between Adam and Eirikur, who was out of Tallahassee at the time and basically FAXed it in for us. I Can See the City From Here This is the other piece David and Arthur put together, and for sheer shock value it puts almost everything else on this album to shame. It's a 10/8-to- 4/4-and-elsewhere jazz jam session at warp speed, with burning soloes coming at you from all directions over a rock-solid electric-piano-and-bass line courtesy Arthur Turner, whose left hand is currently being amputated and fitted with a MIDI jack for sale to the highest bidder. The main melodic figure and slow 'requiem' line are David's on the TG77, the organ lines and slammin' brass soloes are Joe's VFXsd, the backing strings are John 3's from the K2000, and the piano interlude is the K2000 (Arthur again, mad as hell at me and playing that way). The guitar soloes are John 4's, out of a miked Fender Twin, twice: he did several takes, and we couldn't decide which of the best two to use, so (typical Metlay decisionmaking here) I said, "Pan one left and the other right, crossfade a little reverb, and play them back together." Lo and behold, it worked! It's worth noting here that this song produced the only injury of the session; Joe got so excited when he heard Arthur's solo that he came running into the room to hear the playback, tripped, and fell down a flight of stairs. Joe: "Aagh! I think I sprained my ankle!" Me (immediately): "Which one, sustain pedal or volume pedal?" Joe: "Uh... ...volume." Me: "Oh, that's okay then." (Oh, for maximum enjoyment, I should point out that the central section with the piano solo is subtitled "David's Shout;" he taught the brass fanfares to Joe by singing them at the top of his lungs, and it is agreed by all concerned that shouting along with the brass lines highly enhances the experience. All together now: Pa Pa-TAAAAAAA, pa-TA-dah! ;) Erratica "Erratica" comes from the _Saturnalia_ sessions, with EPS, D-70, Wavestation, Xpander, K2000, Prophet VS, and Casio MG-510 MIDI guitar. The drum track is Adam's mutation of an EPS sample set and a bunch of his own noises being played back by UpBeat, a quirky little rhythm playback program for the Mac that, according to David Zicarelli (who was called in to rescue it from the inept hands of its author), has never worked properly. In fact, Adam has done wonders with UpBeat on several tracks here, and this was his first time out with it. The EPS also had some lovely scraped-wok-lid samples transposed to hell and back here as well; this technique, based on what it did to some Gyuto Monk loops that we ended up not using, was called "gyutosmurfing." Nick played the fake-scat-vocal lines and chords (Wavestation and D-70), I ran the arpeggiated VS and played the Xpander lead against William's guitar. The piece was NOT sequenced; it was set up as an arpeggio loop and played live to MIDI clocks, which clocked UpBeat and the WS as well. (This method of working anticipated the setup for _Ballistic_.) For its release on _Ballistic_, no new tracks were added, but an extended intro which had MIDI guitar tracking problems and a long fade with echo feedback were deleted to tighten up the main body of the song. Even with this tweaking, "Erratica" almost got away from us; it was the one piece that managed to sneak onto the master DAT without gain normalization, a noticeable but not fatal 5 dB down at the peak. This was caught in the final CD mastering process at Europadisk, and William's guitar now screams very nicely indeed, thank you. Collateral Damage One of the weirder things Nick brought with him on DAT from the UK, besides snippets of old TV themes and celebrity speeches, was the audio track of a fight scene from a Hong Kong martial arts movie; literally two minutes of nothing but rapidfire kicks, punches, sweeps, grunts, and shouts. He recognized the value of this stuff as percussive material, and John 3, fired up by the idea, took it from there, building up a piece with the working title of "Chop Socky" over a period of several days. John 3 loaded the tape onto his Syquest and used the K2000 to build up a drum map of various sounds, grouped by length and tonal content to form analogues to traditional drums like the kick and snare. I practiced with the resulting map until I felt I could play a convincing drum part, and recorded it into Cakewalk Pro on John 3's laptop PC; a little quantization and another pass of drums by Nick in the middle break gave us a vicious percussion track, like a cross between an MTV jumpcut video and a game of Mortal Kombat. Joe and Nick put down a simple set of basslines and chord changes, and it was Carl's idea to "Shaftify" the beat by playing a frantic hi-hat line on the K2000 into John 3's sequencer and laying down a vintage analog not-quite-out-of-tune synth lead. We drove the final stylistic nails in with a wah-wah guitar part courtesy of John 4. The result was a bizarre cross between hiphop, cheesy 70s funk, and a video game; sort of what you'd expect if Isaac Hayes were to record the theme for a bad 1970s blaxploitation Kung Fu movie and forced Keith Emerson to record a solo over the mix with an untuned Minimoog. The sickest part of all is how wonderfully catchy the end result is; we were catching each other humming the melody line and saying things like "Hyohhhh-WUH!" a lot afterwards. Liquid Murder One question I get asked a lot is, "You go out of your way to help people identify the styles and techniques of the various Team members, but you rarely talk about your own stuff. Is there anything out there that's mostly YOU?" Well, "The Hinge Of Fate" on _Bandwidth_ started as an idea of mine, but I regard "Liquid Murder" as a much purer example of my style these days. The percussion pattern is a looping algorithm in MAX playing the UltraProteus, courtesy of Nick; I triggered it from the TR-707 master clock and built up a chord progression using the synched arpeggiator of the Prophet VS. My part went down to ADAT in stereo, and others then overlaid parts: bass stabs and chord beds from Joe and John 3 and guitar thrashing about on the floor in a pool of its own blood from John 4. The piece came together very fast, and might be a bit sloppy in places since people were trying to play to changes I was making up as I went along, but the power and immediacy of the piece has left it one of my favorites. Hot Tub Party in the Gene Pool "Hot Tub Party in the Gene Pool" is from the _Beta Test_ sessions, and features myself on Xpander, David on Casio FZ-1 sampler and one or two other synths (my EX-8000, I think), and John 0 on guitar (it's the Casio MIDI Guitar used by William on "Erratica;" the instrument changed hands between the two 1992 sessions.) This tiny bit of guitar work is the only extant CD-recorded guitar by John 0, who jumps in and out of the Team at odd intervals as his schedule permits and until recently lived an almost hermitlike existence (well, from an Internet standpoint anyway ;) with his wife and infant son in Northern Ohio. His personal archive of multitracked guitar and electronic pieces is astounding, and we are negotiating putting some out on CD. (John 0, ever unflappable, merely responds, "Are my five years of silence over yet?") The percussion is a mixture of "Tekno Perk" sounds for the FZ-1 and a heart-stoppingly loud recording of an old manual typewriter; the KA-CHUNK gives a visceral explanation of where the words 'carriage return' come from. Short but to the point, and brutal. Let's Go Tease the Fire Ants! In this piece, the membership of the Team elected to honor the academic electronic music tradition from which many of us received our formal training. We've done a lot of music together, from ambient soundscapes to more conventional rock and jazz forms, but have never taken time to plan out a purely avant-garde 20th-century classical electroacoustic form before, and we relished the challenge. The underlying principle of the piece was straightforward: we wished to establish a complex yet evolving relationship between rigidity and stochasticism in the various elements of a musical piece (timbre, rhythm, meter, melody and harmony), so that strictures would be applied in some areas while easements were allowed elsewhere over the course of the performance. This would cause a structure whose basic elements would alter form and fluidity over time in accordance with a program that was itself designed to be fluid, thus allowing for the same set of initial conditions to produce different results each time in a manner similar to, but far more complex than, the Markov chain method of creating melodies from a familiar 'seed'. In conjunction with this central code, a set of available timbres and metatimbres assignable from the software was created; this soft palette would be called up in a nonrigid manner in the course of the performance. Subsets characterized for convenience as 'male' and female' were given slightly differing rules for selection, and these were expanded by the code into a vast difference. The various subparts of the song were given certain base measures for control of variables, with an overall weighted average (Poisson statistics) giving a figure of merit we referred to as the 'rigidity' or 'hardness' of the structure. The code was designed so that certain threshold levels of this average could force interrupts and restructurings of less hardened parts of the code, so that a structural member of sufficient rigidity could effectively penetrate the rest of the composition, essentially 'tearing off a piece' of the existing code and replacing it with the new instructions, planting the 'seed' of the penetrating Markov chain. Simple rules for the degree of chaos or excitation of the timbral structure allowed for repeated penetrations of this sort to lead to the song's climax. Afterwards, all agreed that the experiment was very effective in going all the way with the initial concept, and despite its occasionally turgid form it serves as an admirable contrast to the freeform works characterizing the rest of the album. In a deviant, minority opinion, Eirikur has always held that this track does not belong on the album. He maintains that the amount of planning, compositional structure, and sheer expressiveness in this piece requires that it stand on its own, preferably not near him. Aqua Regia (Zap 23) New Year's Day 1995 was an experience we aren't likely to forget any time soon. We had a chance to perform live at Not-Jamaican Hall in Bugtown, thanks to the timely intervention of my good friend Matt Howarth. Matt keeps a pretty tight rein on who performs at the Hall, preferring more established acts like the Bulldaggers or Conrad Schnitzler, but I twisted Matt's arm into letting us set up and do a quick Zap or two for the hell of it. Since only the most hardcore music fans were out that night, everyone else still recovering from the New Year's Eve festivities of the previous night, there wasn't a lot of risk in the gig, and the audience that showed up for the essentially-unadvertised show were all NJH regulars, a bit jaded but open for just about anything. We didn't have anything rehearsed, and we didn't use any backing tapes or prepared sequences; all the sounds and patterns were programmed and triggered live. There were eight of us on stage: Adam running the Procussion and Morpheus from his PowerBook, Nick playing the Wavestation and UltraProteus, Joe and his VFXsd, John 3 on K2000, John 4 on electric guitar, Eirikur on Chroma through about three fuzzboxes in series (Joe: "Five. I tripped over them." Me: "Five PEDALS, if you include the flanger and Hush pedal. Shaddap." ;), myself on Xpander, SY35, Cyclone and Vortex, and DAC running the board live and throwing processors and EQ into the mix on the fly. We were greeted by the crowd with some enthusiasm, and settled into a nice groove. Our first attempts at Zaps were okay, but didn't really take off, and after about an hour the crowd was starting to get surly. Finally, though, we struck it lucky: Eirikur started in with some crashes of buzzsaw noise that evolved into a moving structure, which began to gather momentum as it swept the rest of us up and turned into a half-hour improv Zap that may have been the best free music any of us has ever done. We thought that only about ten minutes had passed when we came out of it, but our watches said otherwise, DAC was soaked in sweat, and the crowd was going totally berserk. We were too wiped to play an encore, and our gear nearly got smashed and burned in the fight that broke out when we tried to leave, but I wouldn't trade that show for anything. Some of the band members regard "Aqua Regia" as the set piece for the album; at just a few seconds under 30 minutes, it does command a lot of attention. But I look at the rest of the record, which would still have been nearly two hours of great music even without it, and regard it as a nice bonus to an already immensely satisfying trip. It just gets better on repeated listenings, and it will probably set the tone for any future live gigs the Team plays. Epilogue: Until Next Time A project like _Ballistic_ can't just end; it needs a proper farewell. DAC and Eirikur gave me editorial feedback as I recorded this, the only piece on any Team album that is completely mine, to round off the project. It utilizes the World Service's signoff transmission in combination with the SY35 and the UltraProteus. The Ultra's patch is available on the Number 5 Patch Card from E-mu ("Trance Tracks", #9216), which was programmed by Steve Verity and is now on sale at most E-mu dealers; it's called "Atomic City." I think it helps end off the record on just the right note, especially with the filter cube morph axis remapped to follow the SY's vector envelope. --- MAKING THE PRODUCT Because we took copious notes throughout the tracking, mixdown and assembly of the album was very straightforward, taking into account the problems we had getting crossfades to work right (hint for all you Sound Tools II owners: use linear rather than equal-power if you can possibly help it, and if you can't, doublecheck your final peak levels). The Masterlist software made auditioning various song orderings easy (well, not impossible), and we were able to punch up a final listing and let it spool off onto DAT three times while we broke down the studio around the computer and DAT machine. Once the masters were recorded, the rest of the job fell on me and on Jonathan Lyons of Lyons Digital Media, copmpleting the artwork and putting together a promo package that would help sell our catalog handily. The CD artwork was actually begun while the band was in Tallahassee, with artist photos taken by a local studio and basic concepts tossed around and settled upon. The final album has a double gatefold with a full-color tray inlay card, and combines all the data we'd like preserved on the album with tasteful, contemporary but hopefully not too terribly dated graphics. It's packaged in a slimline jewelcase and contains an order card for trying the rest of the Atomic City catalog. The premastering of the DATs was done at Cyberdisk in New York City, and the crossfades were cued by hand by the recording engineer based on the guidelines DAC and I provided. As of this writing, the masters have been approved and the CDs are being pressed; we hope to have them back in stock in late April. Anyone who would like more details on the mechanics of submitting a CD for pressing can feel free to write to me; I'd be glad to talk to you about it. --- CONCLUSIONS I've said all I have to say (probably too much, at this point :) about the project, other than that the problems we left behind in 1992 appear to have been laid to rest. We're good to go for other projects in the future, although we have absolutely no idea what form they might take. In the meantime, we have created a double album of eclectic, bizarre, raw, exciting, fun music, and we're going to look forward to seeing how it's received by the emusic world. I hope that having this explanation handy will encourage you to delve into the depths of the album yourself, but even if not, I hope that you all were able to get some enjoyment out of reading it. We had a heck of a lot of fun; it's great when something like this works out well. :) Thanks for listening. Mike Metlay --- POSTSCRIPT: THE 99.44% COMPLETE GEAR LIST We get asked all the time what the gear lists for our sessions look like; since we all have decent setups ourselves, when more than two of us get together in the same room, it gets kinda out of hand. We provided a full gear list on our first record, only to be sneered at by some critics who couldn't understand why they couldn't hear every box on every track; for this release we elected only to thank the manufacturers, producing a list that was plenty long in and of itself. The list of what was actually there, though, has been a matter of curiosity even to members of the Team, since not everyone saw everything at once. Not all of it got used by any means, and some of it only got used once or twice, or was used for composing or practice in the two support studios. If you want to see what was considered "important", reread the text where the individual rigs are discussed; it distills down this master list into practical sets of much-used sound generators and controllers. But just once, just for grins, I decided to type it up from my notes, and post it. All I'll say about it is that yes, it's a freaking huge pile of gear; it represents the travelling rigs or complete setups of ten musicians, so what do you expect? We had fun with it all, and while we could have made the record with a lot less of it, we weren't going to go wear hair shirts for nothing. (Note that the 'rig' listings indicate where gear was used, not who owned it; a lot of stuff moved around and was installed away from its owners.) Anyway: DAC's rig: Steiner-Parker Synthacon; Roland TR-909 and TR-606, Boss PC-2 percussion synthesizer, Korg KMS30 sync box, and a Seeburg Selectarhythm (analog sounds and preset rhythms like Jazz Waltz, Tango, and Teen Beat (!)). Mike's rig: Oberheim Xpander, Oberheim Cyclone, Roland MC-202, Sequential Circuits Pro-One, and Yamaha SY35; two rack cases with Mackie LM3204 line mixer, Alesis MIDIverb and Microverb III, Boss SE-50, Korg SDD-2000 DDL, Lexicon Vortex, Roland TR-707 drum machine, Roland U-220, Sequential Prophet VS rack, Opcode Studio 5LX MIDI switcher/interface/processor; Apple Powerbook 100 (Roscoe) with opcode MIDI Translator 1-in/3out interface running OMS Setup+Patches as programming front end for Studio 5LX, no sequencers or patch librarians of any kind. Nick's rig: E-mu UltraProteus and Korg Wavestation EX with Drum cardset; hotrodded Apple Powerbook 140 (Fritha) with two Apple 1-in/1-out MIDI interfaces running MAX (with Pyrite) and Performer (rev 3.64, the last one that worked tolerably well) under OMS. Eirikur's rig: Rhodes Chroma, Kawai K1r, Yamaha TX802, Kawai XD-5, Kawai MX-8SR line mixer and RV-4 multi-DSP rack, Apple Macintosh IIfx with CD-ROM drive, magneto- optical storage drive, Opcode Studio 5LX and Digidesign Audiomedia II card running Logic Audio and Disc-to-Disk, Electro-Harmonix Mini-Synthesizer, Proco Rat, Hush pedal (the cool blue one), DOD Death Metal fuzzbox, Boss BF-2 flanger, Dunlop Jimi Hendrix octave fuzz. John 3's rig: Kurzweil 2000S rev 3 with 40 Meg RAM and Syquest removable hard drive, and Minimoog Model D; Kawai MX-8SR line mixer with Alesis MIDIverb III and Quadraverb 2; housebrand laptop PC with MIDIMAN interface running Cakewalk Pro; JL Cooper Fadermaster; Studiomaster MA-36 MIDI data display. Adam's rig: E-mu Morpheus and Procussion, Yamaha SHS-10 strap-on controller, Boss SE-70, Digital Music MIDI Funnel, Apple Powerbook 520c (Gloria) with Opcode MIDI Translator 1-in/3-out interface running UpBeat, MAX (with Pyrite), Studio Vision Pro, and MacinTalk Pro speech software under OMS and MIDI Manager. David's rig: Yamaha TG77 controlled by Roland D-70, Alesis SR-16 drum machine Joe's rig: Ensoniq VFXsd 2.0 (also played by Carl; as Nick mutters, "One lousy synth.") Arthur's rig: Kawai K4 John 4's rig: Gibson SG guitar, direct and miked through Fender Twin Reverb amp; Alesis Quadraverb, Dunlop CryBaby and RotoVibe, Boss DF-2 feedback/distortion, DOD FX25 envelope filter, Ibanez CS9 stereo chorus; Bently electro-acoustic guitar. Roving gear (placed where needed, usually Studios B and/or C): Oberheim Xk master controller, Waldorf Microwave and Lexicon JamMan and LXP-15 in road case; two Mackie 1202 line mixers; Alesis Quadraverb; Everex laptop PC running Cakewalk Pro; Stewart PA-100U power amp with Tannoy PBM6.5 monitors, Fostex X-15 four-track cassette deck and Casio DA-R100 DAT machine; Boss DR-220A drum machine, Yamaha QY20, Roland Jupiter-6, Maestro Theremin, Hewlett-Packard 312A selective voltmeter; assorted stands, pedals, and cables DACC's mix station in Studio A: Soundtracs Topaz 24x8x2 mixing board feeding a Crest Audio FA601 PA and a pair of KRK 9000B speakers; two Furman PL-8's powering four racks of signal processing gear, including a Burwen DNR 1201A, two Urei 527A graphic equalizers, an Aphex Aural Exciter Type C, two channels of dbx 563x NR, a Lexicon LXP-1 and LXP-5 with MRC, Digitech RDS 3.6 DDL, Biamp MR/140 spring reverb (the only casualty of the sessions, fried by a too-hot guitar signal), Ibanez DD700 DDL, Symetrix SG-200 dual gate, Symetrix 525 dual gated compressor/limiter, Alesis Microverb II and MicroGate, Yamaha SPX90II (my old one from _Bandwidth_ and _Beta Test/Saturnalia_, sold to DAC in '93), BBE 362NR, Hughes SRS AK-100 acoustic processor, Rohde und Schwarz tunable indicating amplifier, Bruel and Kjaer 1617 band pass filter, Princeton Applied Research CR-4 low-noise detector preamp, and two Krohn- Hite 330M band pass filters; 160 points of patchbay space (four Furman PB40s); an Alesis ADAT with LRC, Fostex D-10 and Tascam DA30 DAT machines, and an Apple Macintosh IIcx (Winky) with 50 MHz accelerator running Sound Tools 2.0 with a Digidesign audio interface and a Seagate Barracuda 4.2 gigabyte hard drive for sound storage. There was also a 1/2 ounce bottle of Tabasco sauce on the MRC that was never moved for ANY reason until the studio was completely taken down at the end; it is believed that this bottle made the Lexicons work right all the way through. As DAC explained, "The careful research we did in FL revealed that the optimal positioning of the Tabasco _bottle_ (just one) should be on the "n" on the Lexicon MRC, with this configuration providing the exact mojonic polarization of the juju particles resident in the MIDI lines which will cause reversion of the inherent hexes and jinxes in the MRC/LXP-1/LXP-5 combo. Once this is done, the rotatory components of the mojonic signature of the swamp-derived pepper sauce will be refracted throughout the entire operating system of the studio in question...not just the audio lines, but MIDI and other control subsystems as well. If you were to use _two_ bottles of Tabasco, and ghod forbid you _should_ actually mount them on the LXPs themselves, this would cause a polarization flux of the juju particles, thereby opening up your entire system to the influx of evil spirits and causing poor S/N ratios, spurious noise, ground loops, and MIDI lockups. Trust me on this one." Nick's response: "Hmm. Hang on; you're running 4.x software in the MRC, aren't you? I'm on 3.01 I think. What version of Tabasco are you using?" And so it goes. :) Greens. No ADAT. -- DAC Crowell: "If you were to // ______ \\ use _two_ bottles of Tabasco, // \ / \\ Nick Rothwell: "Hmm. Hang on; and ghod forbid you _should_ // \ / \\ you're running 4.x software actually mount them on the // _____\/_____ \\ in the MRC, aren't you? I'm LXPs themselves, this would// \ /\ / \\ on 3.01 I think.... cause a polarization flux // \ / \ / \\ of the juju particles, // \/ \/ \\ What version of Tabasco thereby opening up your //__________TEAM_________\\ are you using?" entire system to the \\ METLAY // _______________________ influx of evil spirits, \\ / \ // causing poor S/N ratios, \\ / / . \ \ // Mike Metlay spurious noise, ground \\ \ \ | / / // atomic-city@netcom.com loops, and MIDI lockups... \\ \ | / // http://pd.net/atomic-city \\ A // Trust me on this one." \\ /x\ // Atomic City - P.O. Box 81175 \\ /XXX\ // Pittsburgh, PA 15217-0675 USA -- -- mike metlay * atomic city | Now available from Atomic City: Steve Verity's atomic-city@netcom.com | DIGITAL PLANET (as heard on Hearts of Space), http://pd.net/atomic-city | Joe McMahon's SHATTERDAY, Metlay's BAND OF FIRE, snailmail p. o. box 81175 | and Team Metlay's double-CD album BALLISTIC. pittsburgh, pa 15217-0675 | Email or check out our Web site for details!