Thursday, June 18, 2009

Ice Cream Cone Live

The first live Ice Cream Cone performance was in 2002 at the first meeting of dorkbot sf, the San Francisco chapter of the dorkbot.org.

Since the meeting was in the garage that my bedroom was attached to, I just had to drag a couple of PowerMacs out on a dolly.

More on the event here: http://dorkbot.org/dorkbotsf/archive/200206/

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Ice Cream Cone - "Die Drei Von Der Tankstelle" - 2002

In 1992, inspired by the rap music, I began experimenting with sampling. My tools were a single turntable, a radio, and a Macintosh running Macromedia's SoundEdit 16. This work flow remained unchanged for ten years, and the apotheosis of the process culminated in this 2002 album. During a lengthy period of unemployment in the San Francisco Bay Area, I found myself surrounded by rapidly aging Macs, retrieved from the refuse of Macromedia, where my friend and landlord worked. I took it as a challenge to myself and to this hardware to create an instrumental hip hop album, in the vein of DJ Shadow or RJD2.

SE16 is a remarkably primitive program to make music with. It's only real function is as an editor of sound files, and it offers no sequencing or live mixing. It won't communicate with any MIDI devices and it won't use any VST effects. However, it does use multi-tracked sound files, so the crux of the process is the mix down. Record a segment, edit it, copy and paste it into a pattern, and mix it onto another track. Repeat. Copy a drum break, loop it, mix in some more snare sounds, some electronic kick drums, a strange clicking noise on top of it, then remove the original break sample. Some of these songs were begun years before they were finally mixed. In fact, for a long time I was sure that none of the songs were "final" versions, and it's taken a few years of letting go before I can accept them as finished products of their time.

Some of these songs were dedicated to people, and some were created with collaboration in mind. Some of the tracks were even used on other people's projects. I have burned a few dozen CDRs and mailed off a handful, but have become too detached from the project to put much more effort into distribution. I eventually released them all to the Internet at large using a NC-SA Creative Commons license, mainly so that people would stop asking me about using them. They are generally free for consumption and collaboration.



all tracks conceived, composed, produced, recorded, and mixed by the Rev. Al Deaderick in the year MMII at the Unicorn Precinct XIII


Creative Commons License


MP3 files are hosted by a generous bandwidth donation by the Hanford Consortium.