tamara nicholl – Aaron J. Trumm

Yellow And White

August 11, 2008 by Aaron

aaron trumm, amalia ortiz, bluebonnet poetry slam, conroe, san antonio poetry slam, shaggy, tamara nicholl, techno music, third option, yellow and white

Yellow And White, by Third Option

This was one of my slam poems that I used a lot. I ended up retiring it from slam as I got better in slam, because it actually doesn’t fit the form well enough to consistently get great scores. It doesn’t have the right rise and fall of energy pattern for slam.

But my ‘ol buddy Spec always really liked it. 🙂 We did it as a three voice poem at the National Poetry Slam in Providence, RI in 2000. It was me and Tamara Nicholl and Esther Griego. It worked alright but wasn’t great. It’s just not “slammy” enough.

I actually wrote the poem to this music, which is rare on this album. I had basically the whole track minus any vocals already done, and me and Tamara were travelling from Albuquerque to Houston in the middle of the night (maybe we left Albuquerque at 1AM or so). We were also going for some visiting I guess, but what I remember is that we were going to go to the Bluebonnet Poetry Slam in Conroe, TX. That was in the year 2000, I guess.

Tamara was sleeping and I kept playing the track over and over and over and over for about 5 hours while I “wrote” this poem by saying lines, memorizing, rearranging, memorizing. I had to just keep doing it over and over because there was no other way to write it down. And Tamara really would wake up barely enough every once in a while to randomly tell me to slow down and watch out for cops. For some reason she was really worried about getting stopped.

I considered trying to do the poem in the slam, but I wisely opted against using a new untested shaky piece. I actually blew up the spot with what I did do (not sure what it was in the first round – probably this year 2000 poem called No Apocalypse) and was the “flash point” poet. The first poet to get a really high score and blow up the room, but then everybody after that gets higher scores.

I remember they had it in this honky tonk bar type thing, with all these golden Christmas lights strewn about, which really gave the place a down home, cozy, yet glamorous, “i’m a superstar out in the world” type feel.

At that slam is where we met Amalia Ortiz and Shaggy, who were then married and the leaderz of the slam in San Antonio. They invited us to feature in the San Antonio slam, which we did. Later that summer, they brought the first team to come from San Antonio to Nationals, and they got 2nd place! It was amazing!

I was always proud of how tight the drum and bass mix in this song sounded. There’s also a spot in the middle where I had a distorted vocal that didn’t quite sound right, but I figured fuck it, I need to get done, and I cut that corner and left it. Well of COURSE Tamara noticed that VERY thing when she listened, which at that time was a VERY frustrating thing, because it meant going back for another 8 hour mix session, since we were using analog equipment – you can’t just recall a mix on an analog board. You try, by having photos of the knobs and notes galore, but it just doesn’t work that way.

Anyway, this is the song Yellow And White, available, of course, on the CD Cult Of Nice 🙂 – and obviously – there is still always free stuff available at www.thirdoption.com/free-music

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Get the CD Here

B-Movie

August 7, 2008 by Aaron

aaron trumm, b-movie, cult of nice, nquit, piano, poetry, scary movie, tamara nicholl, third option

B-Movie, by Third Option

This one has more pieces of the “Cult Of Nice” essay, read by Tamara.

A thing I like about this one is I had all the drums and everything decided, and then we were mix the song and we were like “the snare drum is weak can’t we do something with that?” so I tried running it through a guitar distortion thing, and it totally changed the nature of the snare drum, which totally changed the nature of the whole thing.

I like this one. There’s something so different and badass about it, where it sort of seems like somebody else did it. But then it has this flute sound that really reminds me of the first Third Option Frosted Mini Wheats thingy.

Man. There’s this organ in here and everything. And these little pitz pluck strings. And delayed stuff. And man I used to be so creative!! 🙂

I suppose I still am. Hmmm. Does creativity go away due to becomming cynical?

There’s so much shit in here. Somebody once said it stressed them out. I dunno I guess it’s supposed to in a way. Not that I ever try that stupid thing where you hate something or something is so tedious and the artist goes “you’re SUPPOSED to hate it! that was my goal!” Oh PULEASE you lying sack of arrogant.

My aunt was talking about a movie the other day with us, and she said (paraphrasing) “I guess if the director was trying to get us to feel the feeling of being in the south at that time and being so incredibly bored then they succeeded, but I just got the feeling that he didn’t notice he was making a movie”

*laughs and laughs*

Anyway enjoy being maniacally stressed by B-Movie. I think that’s the right title though. She talks about the monster creeping up through the toaster and I think it sounds sort of B-Movie ish. In fact I think I was in a very loose way emulating the sound/style of a soundtrack that I was engineering on, that the son of the owner of the studio, Steven Romano, was doing.

He was actually doing the soundtrack for Bubba Hotep, which may be a movie you heard of. I was engineering for him. It was very dense stuff. Unfortunately the movie makers went behind his back while he was working on it and paid somebody ELSE 20,000 dollars to do another score, and that’s what they used. I don’t know, maybe he took too long or something. What a rip.

Anywho, you don’t need to go behind my back or pay $20k to get you some FREE tracks from Third Option – just go HERE and get em! 🙂

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Get the CD Here

Cult Of Nice!!!

August 6, 2008 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, cult of nice, nquit music, piano, poetry, spoken word, tamara nicholl, techno, third option

Well. I kinda got done with Artistic Apocalypse.

So I think I’ll move on to some Third Option.

So here is the title track/opening track to the Third Option album Cult Of Nice which me and Tamara (Nicholl) worked on at Rock Romano’s Red Shack in Houston.

The album is based on this essay that Tamara wrote in college about dark heroes and the cult of “nice”. It’s really an incredible piece of work, I think (the essay). There’s actually clips of her reading the essay in the album, in this track, in fact. She’s doing a poem called “Airborne” in the beginning. Then she reads from the essay. “we have cast what we have named as dark aside”

I love the end of the Airborne poem, when she goes “soon, we will not be accustomed, to Earth”, and the beat rips back in. FUCK that’s cool.

This song kicks ass I think. I like it. This is one of those songs that people have heard and said “why aren’t you famous” to which I replied, “because it doesn’t work like that” or “i dunno why don’t you go spread the word?” or something.

It seems like I’ve talked about the intro somewhere before. I left this space on the tape and improv’d the intro, knowing that I would have to stop sooner or later when the beat, which was already on tape, came in. My buddy Larry Lines was engineering, and we rolled, and I did the thing, first take. And I somehow knew exactly where to lay my last chord so that the beat came in perfect. No we did not slide that around or edit that. I just happened to land it perfectly the first time.

I came in to listen and we heard that and Larry got all excited and punched me right in the arm. Fuckin A!, he was saying! We loved it!!

Hey – thanks for reading this as always – feel free, my friends, to go get some FREE THIRD OPTION STUFF right HERE! 🙂

— Aaron

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Get the CD Here

Still Phase Motion Mix

June 21, 2008 by Aaron

mix, nquit, nquit music, phase motion, poetry, slam poetry, spoken word, still, tamara nicholl, techno, third option

“Still Phase Motion Mix” by Third Option.

It seems like I was probably moving from one mix to the next, tweaking the next one based on the last. But I don’t necessarily remember. Sure I do! I was! Dammit! :)0

Well what can I say about this version? It’s a little different. It’s – a …uhm. Here’s the thing, how about we just listen to it?

Now that we’ve done that, what do YOU have to say? I mean hit me up, you know? aarontrumm @ nquit . com – tell me what you hear here. Oooooh hear here!!

And as per the usual, I’d love to give you free stuff 🙂 So here’s some free stuff right in this link! 🙂

– Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1327″ text=”Download Still Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

Still Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix

June 20, 2008 by Aaron

ambient, classical, fusion, murphurd's slow and unrequited love, poetry, spoken word, still, tamara nicholl, techno

Third Option’s “Still, Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix” is above…

Ok. Lot to explain on this one! First of all, Murphurd. For those of you who know me as Murph, Murph is actually short for Murphurd. I got the name Murphurd freshman year in high school, damn near the first day. I was new to town. I was in science class, I asked this dude Andrew (I think) if he had a pencil. I was mumbling. I mumbling often then. He said “murphurd?”, you know how people do where they repeat the gibberish you sound like you’re saying? You say “are you here for pizza?” and they say “what? hurforpeets?” Well “do you have a pencil?” was somehow “murphurd?”. Like three times in a row. Finally I just gave up and said “yeah, Murphurd”.

From that moment on, partly because the dude didn’t know my name anyway, he just started calling me Murphurd. He never knew I was asking for a pencil. He just thought I was being a weirdo, all the more reason to name me what I was saying. I often WAS being a weirdo like that, (still am), and so it made sense, even though ironically, weirdo I was not being that particular time.

Of course Murphurd quickly shortened to Murphurd, but the honors class kids I went through all of high school with would be just as likely to call me Murphurd. All you cats who came around AFTER high school, when M.C. Murph and then just Murph were my stage names, you wouldn’t call me Murphurd. But cats from high school, they certainly might.

On to the word “slow”. Well, I thought this was so cool. I took I think the whole mix of the original Still track, minus vocals and played it back with this hard drive recorder called the Darwin I was using. The Darwin had a shuttle wheel, where you could hold it and turn it to play or fast forward or rewind. You could hold the wheel in one spot and have your audio play back at 2 times the speed, or 4, or even slow. If you held it right in the right spot, you could play a whole song back at the same screwy speed. Nowadays you can just tell some software to slow down or speed up something, and you could then too, but the software and computers were more expensive, and all I had was this Darwin machine. So I was playing it back with the wheel and did it slow one time, and it sounded neat. So what I did was, I put another Darwin on record (ok ok I had two – and they were like 3 grand a piece I admit) – wait did I have two at that time? I put SOMETHING on record at regular speed, and then I held that shuttle wheel in the exact right spot for like 10 minutes and recorded this mega slow version of the tune. Well it just so happened that the speed was a perfect multiple – I think a quarter – of the original speed. So what I could do was, I could bring in the normal speed song later and have it be perfectly in sync. And I put vocals in different spots, re-recorded the poem with me saying it, etc. We used this mix (minus the vocals, ’cause we were performing them) to start our Third Option show most of the time, actually. I always thought it was a neat mysterious intro. It comes on slow so you could sort of start it early and come to the stage just in time.

Anyway the result is the Murphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix, and that slow down process is why it’s a 10 minute long version. I guess I felt like I should use the whole thing *eyeroll*.

Oh I didn’t explain the unrequited love part. Well, at that time, there was a Third Option act, and we hadn’t done the Cult Of Nice record yet, and we were in Albuquerque and going all around doing our shtick, and the act was a duo, me and Tamara. But at that time me and Tamara weren’t dating. There was this kind of 9 month period between the time me and my girlfriend before had broken up where I was all about the getting with Tamara but she wasn’t all about the getting with me.

I guess sometime during the creation of the Still EP, we finally started moving that direction. I actually remember the date when we first “went beyond friends” (to put it politely), but not exactly where we were in the production process.

The point is, eventually, I named this mix the Unrequited Love Mix – I think because I did the whole thing in a sort of all night binge of disturbed creativity that was disturbed due to the unrequited love situation.

So it was quite a bold thing to say, seeing as how the subject of disturbance was IN THE BAND. Sort of like a Mama’s and Papa’s story I heard once.

Last piece of trivia: If you were to buy the disc, there’s a typo ion the cd packaging. It says “Muphurd’s Slow And Unrequited Love Mix” (missing an r in Murphurd).

Love to y’all! Hey, here’s some free Third Option stuff, in case you didn’t get it yet 🙂

– Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1327″ text=”Download Still Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

Still Fade To Black Mix

June 6, 2008 by Aaron

annie nightingale, bbc radio I, fade to black, piano, poetry, spoken word, still, tamara nicholl, techno

Something I really love that I might not expect someone like me to love, is remixes. I don’t mean somebody sampling somebody else’s song and turning it into some mashup. That’s a new thing that people are calling remixing but it’s not. Remixes, to my mind, are new versions of songs that take the original multitrack audio and make a different version of the mix. It’s not something you think about when you think about rock n roll live music and you think a recording is just a document of some player’s sound. But really nowadays, and for a long time, the mixdown is a key part of the creative process and there’s WAY WAY more variability there than one might think. You can even have a band play a song once, and totally change the character of the song, right down to actually changing the song.

You can do this without even rearranging by cutting, pasting, editing. But then when you DO start cutting, pasting, editing, you also start into the notion of rearranging, which is an old old concept. Arrangers in classical music are old-school remixers. They take the basic “themes” of a work and make an original arrangement of it. In some cases we have music from composers like Mozart or Beethoven or whoever and it’s not actually clear what the arrangement should be. So the arrangement is the arranger’s creative contribution. But it’s not a new song (or symphony or whatever). It’s still considered the same song. It still has the same title. But there may be a footnote “Mozart’s Lost Sonota, arranged by Johnny Applebaum”.

This is what I think of when I think of remix. The track I linked above is still “Still” (no pun intended) but it’s a different version. The Still EP is 5 of these, and I totally remember where I first learned of this concept of the “maxi-single” in electronic music. I was interning at KUNM 89.9 FM here in Albuquerque, and my job was to organize CDS and take home duplicates. Well there was one CD, I forget the act or title, that was just that: an electronica act with one song (which I presumed was a hit from their full length CD) remixed in various ways.

I loved how I became familiar with the original song, and then I was hearing the same song, but with this new take. All of the Still stuff is completely modeled after that CD, for example, where I’ve gone back to the MIDI file for the song, and for the Fade To Black Mix, all I’ve done is use different synth settings for some (but not all, which I think is key/neat) of the parts. Like the former piano line becomes a vibraphone. It gives the song this whole different character.

I also love the idea of DJs or big fans having access to these secret other versions of known stuff. And usually there’s a bunch of different versions of something laying around just because in mixdown, a lot of times you do different things and decide later which one makes the cut on the album. If the versions are different enough, releasing them as remixes seems like a great use for them and a great well of extra content. That’s where I wouldn’t think I’d like the concept, because I’m not necessarily into being so desperate for content that you dredge up the same stuff over and over (like greatest hits albums – which are really just artists who have a contract to fulfill and no more material). But since I like the discovery process in a remix/new arrangement, I do like it in this case.

Of course, the other cool thing is remixes are this great way to collaborate with other artists and reach new audiences, especially if you can get Big Name Electronica Artist or DJ X to do the “Still Paul Oakanfield Scratch My Back Mix”

Anyway I enjoy remixes.

Ok. I’ll do some remixes while you get your free Third Option stuff, click here to do that! 🙂

– Aaron

[purchase_link id=”1327″ text=”Download Still Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

Still

June 5, 2008 by Aaron

annie nightingale, bbc I, piano, poetry, still, tamara nicholl, techno, third option

Ok so I got done with Frosted Mini Wheats and now I’ll just move right on to Still.

So Still was just one of the songs on Frosted Mini Wheats, and I probably said before that it was vastly different before Tamara came along. It wasn’t called Still, for one, because Still is the name of the poem, and the poem wasn’t there. And actually it really was completely different, the song that was in that spot. Tamara had ideas, which gave me ideas, I wrote new baselines, rearranged, wrote new beats, had Tamara do the poem, did bits of the poem myself, cut up the vocals, had us both sing – goddang what DID I keep from the other version? God only knows and no mortal man will ever find out because all those MIDI sequences and audio files were destroyed or lost.

That’s really stupid and bad, actually, because now with that record, and Frosted Mini Wheats, AND Cult Of Nice, I don’t have multitracks, I have nothing. I have no way to recreate and do a version without vocals or any kind of tweaked version if somebody wants it. That’s stupid stupid stupid. Oh well.

Then. Well. I’ll use the next couple blog posts to chatter a bit about the remixes of Still.

Meantime, as always, if you haven’t gotten some free Third Option stuff, click here to do that! 🙂

[purchase_link id=”1327″ text=”Download Still Here” style=”button” color=”blue”]

Still

May 8, 2008 by Aaron

aaron j. trumm, frosted mini wheats, poetry, still, tamara nicholl, techno music, third option

Oh Still is very important in the realm of Third Option! Still was totally different and not as cool, but then I met the poet Tamara Nicholl, and she wanted to record some poems, so I said ok hey I’ll record you if you let me use the samples. I was working on Frosted Mini Wheats at the time, of course. So I recorded her, and put some samples of this short poem “Still” into the song that was then called – i don’t remember – something else ;). Then she listened and had a ton of suggestions and ideas about it. So I rearranged it with her and we had her do this singing, and I did some singing. So that eery vocal is multiple takes of both of us. The reason it’s so eery is because Tamara has a tin ear like nobody’s business. God bless ya, Tamara, love you, but goddamn that girl cannot sing. But somehow that’s exactly what the thing called for.

Ended up doing a maxi single of Still with 4 remixes. Sent some copy, either just Still or maybe the whole maxi-single, to Annie Nightingale of BBC Radio 1 in England. She’s like the premier techno/dance DJ in England. She broke Daft Punk is one thing she did. Well that was probably our biggest “success” as Third Option. She loved Still. She invited me to put together a 30 minute mix set, which I did, and it aired on BBC I in – June of 2002? Is that right? Something like that. Maybe 2001? I don’t know.

That was wicked fun. They called me up from London and everything. It didn’t turn us into superstars though. That’s one of the times that I learned that just having some airtime on a big radio show doesn’t really do anything for your “career” if you don’t have the rest of the infrastructure in place.

Now then – since you’ve been so kind as to read these little rants – why don’t you treat yourself to some free music? 🙂