Show Notes
Too much time has passed since the last Binaural Banjo episode, and I confess that many things have me contemplating the future of this podcast. I've been making lots of music lately, but my ideas and the way the tunes come together don't generally fit the vibe of the podcast.
That said, I do have a tune in the works that will make a good episode and hope to have it online within a week or two. Plus I've been working with some great musicians on collaborations that hopefully will come out on Creative Commons netlabels by late spring or summer.
In the meantime, I decided to take the Bandcamp plunge and release an EP that I've been working on for a while.The tunes were recorded so that bits and pieces could be extracted and used as loops and samples for some other projects. It was supposed to be disposable but I ended up growing attached to the tunes, so I pulled them together into a release:
Straw Men Don't Chase Tornadoes by The Transgender Muleskinner Diaspora
I debated with myself about charging anything, but $3 for 20 minutes or so of music seems reasonable. I kept the CC licensing, so the music can be sampled and used in other stuff same as Binaural Banjo tunes. If you download a copy and like it, please feel free to recommend to friends and family!
More from The Binaural Banjo
A couple years ago there was a podcast episode names A Thousand Ages. I like the name and have recycled it as the title of my latest Petal release - while the phrase is from an old hymn, my use is inspired by Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, a sci-fi classic which begins with a quote from the hymn.
Breaking with the usual guitar and banjo duet approach, this tune includes a couple low synth parts. I've also been experimenting a lot lately with poly-rhythms and overlapping time signatures, looking for surprises and interesting intersections of beats and phrases, and although some of that stuff has come out too abstract for what I like to do with this podcast there is a touch of that here towards the end.
First off, I should say that this tune is pretty dark and noisy. On the one hand, I think it makes some interesting changes from the kind of music I generally post. On the other, I tend to think of the Binaural Banjo as an outlet for my more melodic and light offerings and this tune just doesn't go there. Not for lack of trying - part of the delay in getting a tune up here is the fact that everything I produce lately turns out dark, regardless of how it starts out.
I mentioned in my last post about the end of the lossless site that I was working on a lot of new ideas, and of course true to form here I am posting an episode that doesn't really incorporate any of them. But I got stuck on this new wave psychedelic guitar riff a couple weeks ago and decided to see how well I could mix it into a Binaural Banjo tune.