KMS II finds a different tone than KMS I, which was very piano focused, and KMS 0, which was made with GarageBand. The songs feature drums and synths that hop from left to right, manipulated sounds, and it all leans more towards an electronica style. I wrote many of these songs in New York City, during the winter and spring of 2011, and I finished them in El Paso, during October. I’ve grown tired of the repetitive patterns that make up most tchem songs, and although KMS II is still very repetitive, I did start looking into making more melody and beat variations – the percussion in “Always in My Thoughts” is an example. I plan for my next works to be much more dynamic than what I’ve done so far. I’m unsure if this KMS series, which is intended to be theatrical, will continue past these songs. It’s probably time to start thinking of how they might fit into a musical of some sort.

In 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010, I had collections of orphan songs that did not fall into a particular concept (2011 does not have one). Valerie is the 2009 collection. It’s a short collection, considering that this was also the year that I wrote KMS I and Manhattan, among other albums. It was an active year for me, musically, and otherwise – it is when I moved to New York City. I named the album after my cousin, Valerie, who introduced me to the joys of music when I was young – the album picture is not of Valerie, but her son. I used one of these songs, “Chiquis,” in that video I made of Coney Island, during the Blizzard of 2010:

There isn’t a lot to say about this album, except for what I wrote on its bandcamp page: “The music to these pieces is lost. These were MP3s that I had saved. They are basically some things I came up with messing around with FLStudio (when it was still called Fruity Loops). I’m sure some of these synthesizers use ready-made arpeggios, and some of the effects were the preset ones. I doubt I’ll ever come back to these songs.”

1. James Blake – James Blake

It took me a while to actually sit down with this album, but once I did, James Blake went on repeat for many times a day and for many days. Its repetition, weird vocals, and its deceitful simplicity hooked me more than anything else this year, because it all seemed to run against my expectations – of James Blake, and a lot of today’s popular music. It almost feels like a blue-eyed soul album, but stripped of its flash, and focused onto the bass level. My favorite track off the album is “I Never Learnt to Share.”

2. Big Troubles – Romantic Comedy

I felt nostalgia for Romantic Comedy on my first listen, as though it was one of my favorite albums from the 90s, and I hadn’t heard it in years. The album is packed with wonderful pop songs, perfect for singing along to, and the melodies are ingenious. My favorite track off the album is “Minor Keys.”

3. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake

I’ve always tried getting into PJ Harvey, through different points in her discography, because I loved her in Desert Sessions. But nothing ever sprung out for me… until Let England Shake. This album cements the theory for me that PJ Harvey is an excellent songwriter and singer. My favorite track off the album is “The Glorious Land.”

4. Crystal Antlers - Two-Way Mirror

I want to see Crystal Antlers live, probably more than the others in my top five, because of how exciting Two-Way Mirror is. These songs are not just well-written, but they have a highly-charged energy that attacks me and wakes me. They have a neo-psychedelic sound, but they also remind me of bands like Les Savy Fav. My favorite track off the album is “Dog Days.”

5. Battles – Gloss Drop

I didn’t like what the lack of Tyondai Braxton might mean for Battles, but luckily, Gloss Drop still delivered most of everything I loved about the band, prior to Braxton’s split. The album does such a thing where when I hear its percussion, I want to be a drummer; and when I hear the guitars, I want to master the guitar. My favorite track off the album is “Wall Street.”

6. Death Grips - Ex-military

7. The Field - Looping State of Mind

8. Panda Bear - Tomboy

9. The Strokes - Angles

10. SBTRKT - SBTRKT

11. M83 - Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

12. The Kills - Blood Pressures

13. Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks - Mirror Traffic

14. Elbow - Build a Rocket Boys

15. Lisa Hannigan - Passenger

16. Girls - Father, Son, Holy Ghost

17. Feist - Metals

18. WIM - WIM

19. tUne-yArDs - w h o k i l l

20. Beirut - The Rip Tide

21. Florence + the Machine - Ceremonials

22. TV on the Radio - Nine Types of Light

23. Kurt Vile - Smoke Ring For My Halo

24. John Maus - We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves

25. Bon Iver - Bon Iver

26. Youth Lagoon - The Year of Hibernation

27. Gil Scott Heron & Jamie xx - We’re New Here

28. Deerhoof - Deerhoof vs. Evil

29. St. Vincent - Strange Mercy

30. Gang Gang Dance - Eye Contact

31. Nils Frahm - Felt

32. Zomby - Dedication

33. The War on Drugs - Slave Ambient

34. Gui Boratto - III

35. The Antlers - Burst Apart

36. The Horrors - Skying

37. Curren$y - Weekend at Burnie’s

38. Robag Wruhme - Thora Vukk

39. Gold Panda - Companion

40. Cold Cave - Cherish the Light Years

41. Radiohead - The King of Limbs

42. Thievery Corporation - Culture of Fear

43. Hercules and Love Affair - Blue Songs

44. The Rapture - In the Grace of Your Love

45. 6th Borough Project - One Night in the Borough

Bryant Davis and I continued working together, via the Internet, after completing Fashionmasters’ Splits from this July. We used the same process (hence the name of this new work) from Splits: We each created our own songs, or made our own field recordings, and sent them to each other for wonderphonic manipulation. Luis Domingo, once again, came aboard with artwork for the project – the Splits artwork evolved with colors. Laura Simpson joined Fashionmasters as a video artist, providing some visual madness to the song “Thunderlips,” from Splits. And the entire thing was released on Pandafuzz (thank you, Pandafuzz)! Click the album artwork above to listen/watch the new project!

Also, once again, here is Splits:

Fashionmasters will return.

Over the years, in the way that people find friends they “can talk to,” I have found friends that I can talk to on a musical level. I’ve recently encountered a great desire to record these conversations and share them with the world, and the vehicle for this free archive is something that I call Good Chemist. And in my circle of creative friends, perhaps the most senior member is Chris Ray, a schoolmate of mine from high school. He would come over sometimes, and we’d record these improvised sessions on our guitars, or guitar and piano, and on to other instruments and experiments. It was mostly all for fun. We would only share our recordings with our good friends, and the only live performance that we attempted ended in embarrassment, despite having had an excellent practice only a few hours earlier… That’s the strange dynamic of music… Well, recently, Chris Ray came to me with a sketching in his spiral notebook, something that came to him like a dream: It was like a petroglyph on a cave wall, one character singing with a guitar, and another character operating machinery: It was The Kid & the Chemist. On the morning of November 7, I hooked up my Kaossilator Pro to the Motif ES7, and I recorded five different beats for us to use. In the afternoon, Chris came over and we went to eat hamburgers. When we came back, we tried out each beat, making samples with an electric bass guitar and an electric guitar and some vocals, and then we improvised some songs and recorded them on the spot. We even made a video recording of the final song (as seen above)… As always, you can go to Bandcamp and stream the album, and you can download the album for free.

Mania and Depression are a collection of orphan songs from 2008. One album does not necessarily represent mania, or the other one depression, but I did arrange the songs in accordance to where they fit best, as far as mania and depression. “Good Omens” was the first song that I wrote in 2008 and it is a song that prophecies a good year – I don’t remember 2008 too well, but it certainly was not a bad year. “God” is not a religious song by any means, and I’ve always thought of it as “the single” to this collection – which is not to say that it is the best song of the collection. “Hip Cats from the School of Post-Post-Modernism” is a nod to my fellows from UTEP’s creative writing-scape. (A very special nod to my noble beat-priest, David Scheier.) “Jump Across the Golden Ocean” is, in some respects, a kowtow to Koji Kondo, that magical composer from the Legend of Zelda video games – really, all of my music is in debt to him, among some other fine musicians and muses. There are a couple of songs on here written for beagles, not humans, and only beagles will understand. Other electronic musicians might notice that this was the year when I discovered the arpeggiator, what it does, how it works, and the consequences of its addictive qualities.

tchem scholars might recall the song “Broken Chandelier” from 2009′s Little Fi. Here is the song in its original and short form… I wrote “Fever” during the darkest time of my life, when under the boot of a local epidemic’s variation on the stomach flu, which gave me delusions at bedtime and had me vomiting chicken mole into the toilet for some nights. “Your Wife on the Television” is a reference to Fox’s horrific game show, The Moment of Truth, where the operation of the game was to dissolve your marriage by admitting to having an affair in front of a national audience, and then you would win money for your divorce. The Interzone in “Interzone Lullaby” is none other than Bill Burroughs’ nightmarish place from Naked Lunch, which I had painfully read before writing the song. “You Might Get Married” is a tune for you to whistle when you feel lonely, so that you may feel even more lonely, because it is not about you getting married, but about that person that you want to marry getting married to somebody else… and that is the most honest depression out of all the depressions.

Bryant Davis and I call ourselves the Fashionmasters. We make music – though most people might call it “noise” instead. Our first recording, Live in Manhattan – 2010, came out of nowhere… we performed it without ever having written any music together, and without ever having played together before. This was the first meeting of our musical minds. (To contrast) My solo work, tchem, is sort of like the translation of the events in my life, the score to my life. The songs are planned and worked on so that they can represent things. Since the first recording, Fashionmasters serves a different purpose for music, something like spontaneity… Bryant and I don’t know what’s going to happen. In a way, its purpose is to surprise us.

Our second recording, named after New York City’s 2-Train, goes into the unknown in a different way than the first album. We rode the subway and recorded everything we heard, in the train, in the stations, and on the platforms – anything could have happened. Afterward, we connected the audio we had just recorded to our effects and pedals and an amplifier, and we played the audio, manipulated it, and re-recorded it.

And now, I present our latest work: Splits. I graduated from the New School and left New York City, separating Bryant and I. If we were to make a new Fashionmasters, it would have to be done through the Internet… So, the way that this new album surprised us differed from the first two albums: First, Bryant and I recorded our own individual tracks in different ways; then, we sent the tracks to each other (this being the first surprise, since we didn’t know what the other wrote); and finally, we changed each other’s tracks into their final state (this being the second surprise, since we couldn’t control what happened to the tracks we wrote). Luis Domingo joins the Fashionmasters as the album artist.

Listen for more Fashionmasters in October of this year…

Harlem

Williamsburg

Before leaving New York City, I wanted to record videos in my favorite neighborhoods so that I could recall their atmospheres back home. I spent most of my time in Greenwich Village – my school was there – so that one was the first set of recordings. I lived in Harlem, so naturally, that one was easy to go out and do. And then I had some business to attend to in Williamsburg – a show – so I did that one too. Unfortunately, I ran out of time, and I didn’t get to record some of my other planned montages – Financial District, Lower East Side, Central Park, TriBeCa, Brooklyn Heights, Times Square, and maybe some others… Hopefully, in the near future, I’ll return to New York City and live there some more. Then, maybe, I’ll be able to complete this set… Otherwise, I’m considering a similar thing for El Paso, but I’m not sure, since El Paso isn’t really a place where one walks around and sees things.

Which came before…

These are photos of the band Battles.

Battles – April 27th, 2011 by Timothy Michel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I wrote Lessons in Physics in two weeks, mostly in a hall at the University of Texas at El Paso by some physics tutoring sessions. It is my most electronic album, despite almost all of my albums being electronic. I say this because it was written for electronic sounds, whereas other albums mostly use electronic sounds for a lack of instruments and musicians. This album has a subheading of “The Lost Album,” because I’ve lost the written music. All I have are these recordings, which are not very good in quality – though, it is perfectly fine for listening. Mylo and Boards of Canada are big influences.

A Happy Place is also comprised of lost music. All that exists are these non-perfect recordings. This EP is my Station to Station in that I cannot remember writing these songs – though, unlike David Bowie, I’m sure the reason is not cocaine. Despite my memory, these have always been some of my favorite songs, because of their optimistic and happy sound. Most of my music tends to be dark and filled with conflict, but these seem to be in… well… a happy place.

High Glamour came out of an overwhelming Massive Attack influence, which can be heard in many of the songs – so much, that I feel I must credit Massive Attack a little, though these are not cover songs or rip offs. “Sound Check” comes close to one of their songs, but I can’t remember which one… “Bone Structure” is most definitely coming from “Inertia Creeps,” and “Love Shadows” is heavily influenced by “Future Proof.” Other songs are simply tchem through and through.

Some time ago, I tried recording an album with vocals in it. It wasn’t to my liking… Light and Dark are those songs without the horrid vocals (there were other songs, from other collections, too). I should say that there are three types of tchem songs: (1) computer-written, (2) instrument-written, and (3) instrument-focused. Most of my songs are (1) and (2). All the four works posted here are (1), which means that I wrote them without using instruments (by ear). These groups tend to sound like each other, though they are often in different emotional places. Light and Dark is sort of a transitional album – life was just going onward to new things.