RIO Drop-In Centre

Great news everyone!

An up and coming band from Puerto Rico will be finally releasing their debut album this year. I have some conection with the basist, Agustin Criollo. He's a very nice guy and has a very interesting taste in music. A fan of RIO, Canterbury, Krautrock, Fripp, Wyatt() and many other genres,bands and persons so you can imagine what their sounds is like.

If anyone want a listen or a little bit more info on the band then check out this websites
http://myspace.com/astridproll
http://www.astridproll.com/


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To be released on August, 2006 under Noisex Records / Carbono Musica

Astrid Proll

debut CD






"A hallucinating journey of epic proportions through frenetic rythms and blissfull noise. For those who enjoy King Crimson, Porcupine Tree, Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Neu!..."

-Frecuencias Alternas

Nice to hear good impresions on the band so soon! I don't believe it will be that hard to find IMO. I shall look for information about this as soon as possible. I also read in some article about the band that they have a 14 minute epic on the album. I haven't heard all of the songs on myspace since I'm waiting to be surprised when I'll buy the album. The same goes for The Mars Volta's new album too.

Spread the word! There's a new band on the block!

First to answer your question James, no unforunately Diana is not on this album. Do you know which album this is off? From reading the linear notes, it is quite apparent all the tracks were hand chosen by David Tibet himself in hope to give the listener the greatest insight into the bands sound/ideas. So saddly enough I don't think a cover song would have been high on his list when he put the album together.

Chamberry, I have given this band a listen and for me it was a bit of a mixed reaction. I will not go into too much detail about the songs, but I will give you my first reacitons.

It was a bit of a shakey start with the first two tracks 'Torso' and 'Resistencia', they really did nothing for me. To me they sounded like straight forward generic post-rock/space rock with no high points to the songs. With the next song things started to get somewhat more interesting, though I find the song to be a little uneven. As James stated Proll 1 would definately be the highlight out of those songs and definately shows the most potential.

This seems to be a solid effort from a new band, and I can definately see there is a lot of potential for the band to go on and produce some interesting material. So I will be interest to see what the whole album has to offer. That 14 min epic sounds nice as I think some of the problem with these songs is they really need to expand their ideas to a fuller extent.    

Yes it does seem strange why the band would put the best song as the last track, it is just a gift for people with short attention spans to listen to the first few song then get bored and miss the good stuff.

Thanks to Cesar Inca's suggestion in the addition part of the forum, it made me remember a band I encounted about a year back but never followed on with my research, used to have an album on my computer which was quite interesting. The band is Doctor Nerve. This is what Cesar Inca had to say about them

Cesar Inca wrote: DOCTOR NERVE SHOULD BE HERE RIGHT NOW!!   This amazing American ensemble, that takes the standards of RIo to a higher level of complexity and bizarreness via the patent use of avant-garde disharmonies, aggressive guitar riffs and rhythmic vibes, wind instruments' polyphonies, a mixture of visceral construction and adventurous improvisation. They shouldn't have been left unnoticed here for so long, and they certainly don't deserve to be so overlooked... especially now that the doors are wide open for so many so called prog-related acts (let alone that mixed bag that now has come to be the art-rock category). Alert to all avant-prog experts in ProgArchives!!      Kind regards.

If people are interested it is worth having a listen to some of their song on the Cuneiform website, where there are 4 songs for your pleasure:

www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/drnerve.html

hello people

Yes Bone are definately a worthy mention in light of the mention of Doctor Nerve. This is also another band I ran into coinsidingly when look for Doctor Nerve Material a while ago.

The band a very free form sound, which spans mainly from their live process of recording things. Once again there are many influence from Dr Nerve, but I think this is always going to be the case; Nick Didkovsky has a rather distinct guitar tone. Also this music is far removed from anything I have heard from Soft Machine.

The groups latest effort 'Uses Wrist Grab' was released on Cuneiform records, you can find sample here:

www.cuneiformrecords.com/bandshtml/bone.html

Also I don't think we should be short noting the other member of the trio, drum of Forever Einstein. Unfortunately I have never heard anything by this band, but have heard nothing but good things about their debt album.

This is a little excert form an interview back in 2003, which goes into a little detail about the band and how things were records, composition and other interesting factors. I cannot quite remember which site this came off so I will have to post it directly up here.


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"I'd like to know how the Bone collaboration got its start - and could you talk about the technical way the data were transferred, overdubbed etc.?

Hugh invited me to do a collaboration CD a number of years ago. We didn't know whether it would be electronic by nature (for example, using Midi sequencers and synthesizers), or something else. Eventually the idea of the project consisting of all live playing became a very strong driving force. Hugh and I were both accumulating the software and hardware necessary to do live multitrack home recording, so recording live guitar and bass became an easily solved problem. But the idea of playing with a drum machine was horrible, so I suggested John Roulat play drums. John and Hugh were both enthusiastic about this idea, and the project became a "live" trio.

Technically, I can trace for you how my pieces were typically produced.

Composition
I composed my music in JMSL Score (http://www.algomusic.com), which is the staff notation/music editor package in JMSL. With JMSL Score, I put lots of black notes on "staff paper" for the band to play, just the way I compose for Nerve for example: everything written out. JMSL Score uses JSyn as its sound engine (http://www.softsynth.com), so it can play back guitar samples, bass samples, and drum machine samples directly from the staff notation. I work on these pieces in a "traditional" way until they sound like they are ready to go.

Rehearsal
JMSL Score can export a WAV file (this is a standard audio file format), so I export a mix of the piece as WAV, and print the score. I converted and posted the WAV as an MP3 on my website, and sent the paper score to Hugh and John, who learned it on their own time by hearing the piece online and reading the score.

Recording
To produce the recording, I exported the guitars, bass, drums, and click tracks as four separate audio files. I imported these into multitrack digital audio software (Vegas Pro in my case, Hugh uses something else), and started recording multiple guitars. Once the guitars were good to go, I'd send the band a rough mix of the piece, with live guitars and synthetic drums and bass, so they could get more inside the work. Soon, Hugh would ship me a data CD with audio files of his bass playing (just the bass tracks, isolated), which I would simply slip into place in Vegas Pro, replacing the synth bass. We went into a real studio to record John's drums. The studio was Barking Spider, where engineer Marty Carlson also has digital multitrack recording. He imported my audio files into his system, and John played along with the "live" guitars, drum machine track (usually muting this), click track, and bass tracks. This never would have worked if John wasn't such a brilliantly unique drummer - someone who can rock out along with a click track and prerecorded music and not flinch! He just locked in and rocked out. It was stunning to watch!

Mixing/Final Production
John and Marty sent me a few versions of drum mixes, which I imported into Vegas to mix in with the guitars and bass tracks. I posted rough mixes in mp3 format to the website so John and Hugh could send feedback. Finally we spent a night at Barking Spider with my laptop plugged into Marty's sound system; a very clear listening environment I could trust. We fine-combed every mix directly in Vegas, changing the eq here and there, raising and lowering levels at a very fine grain. After another week or two at home, making minor adjustments, I had final mixes of all the pieces which I assembled in sequence, burned a CD and sent it to Matt Murman at SAE Mastering, who added another layer of sound production to the project – he's an excellent mastering engineer. He took the project up another level.

Hugh's pieces began looser than mine. For Big Bombay for example, he sent the bass track and some synth swells as audio files, and a lead sheet for the guitar melody, then gave us lots of creative room to do with it what we wished. The first version I produced was extremely noisy, with no melodic or otherwise recognizable guitar at all. He protested mildly and I added the written guitar melodies and the solos. This kicked the piece into a stronger orbit. It was a good example of long distance collaboration. Perhaps the most radical collaboration happened on Danzig. Hugh sent an old recording of a midi sequencer playing the piece, which sounded like a gentle little synth keyboard. So I recorded guitars over that, keeping it gentle and lovely. John added gentle and lovely cymbals sparkles here and there. Then we sent that to Hugh, and he sent back this massive multitrack fuzz bass chorus which was completely astounding! A big multivoiced beast roaring in this heavy harmony and free rhythmic style. This demanded a complete revision of the approach to guitar and drums, and I was so inspired I added the soaring improvised guitar melody, and John added the big cymbal swells. The piece found itself in this way and is one of my favorite tracks."

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Hope this is of some help and interest to people.

Have a good time in Ireland Joren. Whereabouts will you be staying?

Joren wrote: Thanks. The first day we will arrive at Dublin Airport. From there we will probably travel southwards and visit some other places. We're not sure yet... it also depends on where we can find a place to camp. We will spend the last few days in or near Dublin, hopefully indulging in Guiness and/or whiskey.

^Tullamor Dew is highly recommended.

Joren wrote: eugene wrote: ^Tullamor Dew is highly recommended. For a moment, I thought you were talking about a RIO-band. Anyway, I'll try as many beers as possible. It's impossible to remember all those brands though...

Edited by eugene - July 26 2006 at 17:39