Thursday, November 29, 2012

ALBUM(S) DU JOUR #2: Experimental Music From A 3-Year-Old Girl

These free/name-your-price download albums come from a Land Down Under. First, it's:

 STINKY PICNIC

featuring 3-4 year-old Indigo Loki Aurora singing about butterflys and elephants, joined by her father A D MacHine, who, I thought at first, was sampling and looping her voice, but in fact it's all done "live with a loop pedal and a studio full of junk - drums, guitars, saucepan lids, violins, toy pianos, bells, etc etc." Any music featuring 3-year-old girls automatically rules, but daddy did a nice job crafting this adorableness into a very listenable bit of rock minimalism. Was kinda puzzled on first listen, but by second spin, I loved it. Pick to click: "Molly Malone."


8-year-old Louis Amos (drums, vocals) and his uncle Troy Naumoff (guitar) are

ELECTRIC FENCE

In contrast to the hynotic minimalism of Stinky Picnic, these two offer up a 28-minute slab of live noise rock maximalism. What it lacks in cuteness, it makes up for with big-boy brashness. Louis sounds pretty self-assured for such a young 'un, knocking out songs with titles like "Dragon Vomit." There's more Electric Fence towards the bottom of this page. Uncle Troy sez: "Louis pretty much writes all the songs...we start our 'sessions' by me asking him for an idea, be it a song title or melody which he'll hum or sing to me.
Then he gets me to record guitar parts (or bass lines - all on baritone guitar, drum patterns, keys etc.) which he hums to me." The parents these days!  The idea of my
older relatives dong something like this with me when I was a kid is pretty unthinkable.

This nice person who sent this to me adds: "i know these chaps, and both projects are definitely led by the kids (the grownups have many musical projects themselves already, including Dead Ants Trio/ Dead Ants Rainbow which featured both of them)."

Thanks, nice person!

3 comments:

A D MacHine said...

Wow! Ha - we're famous! Thanks for the feature!

But I've gotta say, Stinky Picnic is not a matter of me "sampling" Indi and "making music" out of what she does by "adding" stuff. We jam it all out live with a loop pedal and a studio full of junk (drums, guitars, saucepan lids, violins, toy pianos, bells, etc etc etc). These songs are all jammed out real-time, by both of us - or Indi will come up with a lyric and a tune, and I'll try to play that on an instrument. I do the editing (very minor, mostly trimming), and I do the uploading - but we create the songs you hear 100% together. Just so you know, because your review makes it sound like it's me doing all the creativity, with Indi as mere source material.

Regardless - thanks so much for the feature! Love what you do, and was delighted to be told that our little band is interesting enough to be mentioned on such an esteemed blogsite as yours.

ADM

PS: It's a mandolin on 'Ellie the Elephant'.

PPS: A new album is in the works! For some reason, there seems to be a focus on extreme noise this time round... yeeehah!

Mr Fab said...

Great to hear from you, my fellow weird music dad! I was just guessing as to your working method. But I will add your description to my post.

Let me know when the new album drops, eh?

Ivan T. W. said...

Incredible stuff, I'm mostly jealous because I'm pretty sure this was the plan I had with any daughters I eventually sire. I remember when I was a teenager I had my at-the-time very young cousin sing into a mic while I used an echo/delay to screw with the results. I seem to remember it freaking her out. People don't even understand experimental music when they're young!