Get that fresh clean feeling!

Pretty ambient music, no? You folks seem to respond better to the ugly pieces than the pretty pieces, but that’s not stopping me. Nyeh.

This is bit #1 of Project Codename: Vistas. Essentially, I decided one day to create an ambient album, and thus far I’ve completed one track and done a lot of work that’s not done yet. This is it. It’s not fully mastered, and the beginning and ending times have issues, I know. Deal.

If you can come up with a name for it, I’d greatly appreciate any suggestions you can come up with. This whole “pretty, reassuring” phase I’m going through is fun, but I’m totally out of my depth.

 

 Vistas 1 [5:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My most recent project, more or less, has been the production of Scouts, Remastered, written by Nobilis Reed. The short version of events is that he’s doing a full-cast, full production redo of a novel he wrote a couple of years ago, and I’m the idiot who offered to do all his editing and sound design and mixing and stuff. It’s fun, and also a lot of work.

So, I’m editing voice tracks the other day, and one comes through completely mangled. All noise. I don’t know what happened, and neither does the guy who recorded it, but once that was resolved, I listened to the ruined track again. It was interesting noise, if you can believe that. (If you listen to this podcast, you’ll probably believe anything.) So I says to the guy, I’m keeping this track for Braindouche!, it’s interesting noise and I’ll make something out of it.

This is the result.If you’ve been listening a long time, you’re probably familiar with Instant Space Orchestra, an ambient piece I did a couple of years ago. This piece is essentially the same sort of music, using the same techniques, but with a couple of extra years of experience and some additional tools at my disposal.

Oh, the title? The original source track is a bunch of lines for a character named Shirley.

Also, I realize the track is probably a little too long, and I didn’t trim the silent lead in. Considering this is basically a one-note fugue, I’m just going to call it minimalism and move on.

All in all, I’d call this a couple of hours very well spent.

 

 surely [8:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Holy Crap, it’s episode 100! I can’t believe it!

For episode 100, we have a fantastic little piece by Tom Reed, a Texan who makes his living torturing innocent teenagers with math, and who for no discernable reason has become the official Bitstripper of the podcasting community.

And his episode is right on target, if you know what I mean.

You can find him verbally abusing podcasters on twitter, and go check out his bitstrips here.

 

 Episode 100 - This Version by Thomas Reed [3:16m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

OMG, it’s episode 100! On Christmas! A gift for everyone!

For episode 100, I bring you a piece called Your Holiday Eyebrow Trim, recorded and assembled by one Mister Paul Potts. He describes it as “not so much a piece of audio art as it is an experience”.

I’ll tell you what it is: it’s a surprisingly compelling binaural recording of a man at the barber shop, and utterly fantastic. You absolutely must listen to this with headphones on, or you won’t get it.

And, as a little bonus, Paul finishes out this piece by singing that classic Coulton Christman Carol (say that 5 times fast), Chiron Beta Prime.

Awesome.

 

 Your Holiday Eyebrow Trim [16:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A little Christmas cheer for you.

Wait, what the hell is this Acoustic Tea shit?

Ok, so, for the better part of a year now, Dani and I have been working on launching a little side project, made of audio stories and maybe later books and stuff. It’s called Acoustic Tea, and tonight it’s finally fired. If you head on over to the website, you’ll find the exact same story posted over there, along with all the basics you’d expect in a site. Dani read it, I produced it, and J.E. Ignatius McNeill, aka @dreamrock wrote it. And the music is from Magnatune, and completely awesome.

It’s actually kind of awesome how the story happened. I was searching high and low for a “seasonal” story to read for Acoustic Tea, either public domain or Creative Commons. I wasn’t finding anything, so I lamented as much on Twitter. @DreamRock responded “I can write something for you. Gimme a week or two.” And he totally did and totally blew my mind in the process.

Anyway, as far as you’re concerned, Braindouche! is still going to be exactly what it is, but Acoustic Tea is going to function as my “professional audio portfolio”. Because, I mean, you guys understand that I can’t send potential clients here out of the gate unless they’re real special people, right? The Normals aren’t going to get it. So that’s for them. And I needed another project, right?

Right?

Merry merry.

 

 Good Will [6:45m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Can you believe we’ve been hanging around here for two and a half years, through 99 episodes of this garbage? I never did. My biggest goal for this show was to hit episode 26, because that would be a “full season”. That feels like a long time ago.

Nonetheless. Episode 99 means that episode 100 is right around the corner. And for me? That means I’m going to avoid THE HELL out of episode 100. I’m going to post episode 101 and breeze on by like nothing ever happened, and that’s because YOU are going to produce episode 100 for me, my inexplicably faithful listeners. Anyone can produce and submit an episode 100, I will play whatever you submit with a minimum of comment, and I will release as many episode 100’s as I have to until they’re done.

So what do you think? Wanna play? If you want to produce an episode 100, send me an email, podcast at braindouche.net, hit me up on twitter, at-braindouche, leave a comment, or find me somewhere else on the internet. If you have any questions, just let me know.

What else is there to say, really? Here’s to 100 more. Thanks for listening.

 

 Episode 99 [8:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Most recently, I’ve been playing with this track. It’s not done, but it’s at a point where I can share a draft of what I’m working on. It’s pretty music, no?

 

 trancetastic [3:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

So, a million years ago, I met this writer on LiveJournal named Katrina Stonoff. I was just starting out podcasting and I had lots of ideas on how this site would turn out . One thing I thought I’d do is take lots of her blog posts and translate them into produced podcast pieces, because she had lots of interesting stories and a direct and sensual sort of writing style that really appealed to me. It was going to be a series I was going to call Stone Soup on Braindouche!.

None of it happened. Oh, I did some preliminary work on a few episodes, but they sucked. I didn’t have the right equipment, I didn’t have the time to do that much heavy production, and frankly I didn’t have the experience to produce these very ambitious pieces.

The other month, I was going through and doing a little tidying up in my audio production files, and I found one of the old abandoned pieces, and decided to try to finish it. It came together nicely, if a little creepily, I think. It’s worth noting that the whole thing was produced so grungy is because my source files were absolutely terrible, especially the ones I recorded at the time. Since I couldn’t clean them up, I decided to make them very, very dirty.

Anyway, the point is that Katrina wrote all this, more or less, and it’s on the internet somewhere. She currently blogs at Stone Soup, but you won’t find this story posted there — and I’m not going to be the one to tell you where to find it, either. Ask her. She blogs about writing novels and the hats she collects and being a mom to some enormously precocious kids and being married to a nuclear engineer genius and having dogs and, yanno, stuff.

She’s one of my favoritest people in the world.

Concerning the sounds…

The band is Tundra, the album is Aquaduct, and the tracks are I Know The Way and The Basics,off the Contra label, and the link is here. (Incidentally, I found it on archive.org.)

Alan Bainbridge did my voice of God in there, kindly gifted to me via the radiodaddy forum.(I’m trying to find more information about him right now, and I’ll update if I can get him better links.)

Some sounds came from the freesound project, some came from soundsnap.com, and some just got found on very old .WAV websites all over the internet, particularly the animal samples.

Other links of note:

hot glue media: I’m a professional nerd, I specialize in wordpress, Dani does graphic design, and we’ll do almost anything for money.

Sweet Tarragon: We also make jewelry, and we can make it custom for you, for money.

The Sweet Couch Experience: It’s a truism that if you start and stick with one podcast, you’ll have more eventually. Much like Braindouche! is a podcast I made because I couldn’t find any podcasts like it elsewhere and wanted to listen to one, The Sweet Couch Experience is a very simple podcast I couldn’t find anywhere else. It’s simple, a daily dose of cool, weird, cheesy, remarkably bad or simply peculiar audio I found on the internet. It’s a found-sound archive experiment. It’s kind of nifty and I look forward to listening to it every day and I program and produce the damn thing. (It also was kind of broken as of a few hours ago, but I think I have everything fixed and straightened out now.)

It’s past my bedtime. If I’ve forgotten anything I’ll update this later. Goodnight internet.

 

 Standard Podcast [13:42m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A double-bubble today!

Ok, so, you know exactly how many promos for other shows I play, right? None. This is the first. That should be an indication of exactly the height of esteem I hold the Geek Pantheon and Your Moment of Kim. Besides, it’s a killer bit of audio.

Go, be a fan like me.

 

 Geek Pantheon/Your Moment of Kim promo [3:28m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Paul Potts is, yanno, this guy I know on twitter. And he makes music, right?

So he went to make some music one day, and he sampled me as part of it! How cool is that? It’s called Mandeville Ward (Demo), and it’s sort of this industrial song thing. He did most of the music and the singing, the lyrics are by Aidan Galea, and my contribution is a long sample from Not Dreamy. It’s kind of hard to hear, because it’s a bed in the background, but in the beginning, if you listen for that pulsing in the background, that’s me.

How cool is that?

 

 Madeville Ward (demo) [5:44m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download