Friday, July 12, 2013

SUMMER OF SEX & VOODOO

     RITES, the latest Bedtime for Robots release which is now being widely distributed as a full length Mp3 album (however, you can also purchase the tracks separately), is a celebration of both the flesh and the spirit through the medium of digital touch-screen music technology. I spent the past several months, as winter slowly dissolved into an overcast sea of heat and humidity, sitting in the moon room of the Log Cabin each night with a bottle of Chilean Carmenere wine and my Iphone and/or newly acquired Ipad in hand, Sennheiser headphones wrapped around my shaved melon, and candles and incense burning all about the cabin. At night, when properly candle-lit, the 60 year-old cabin resembles the quintessential "cabin in the woods" depicted in various horror films and can cast some pretty ominous shadows, a perfect backdrop for a dark ambient obsessed soundscape artist.






 With my mind properly lubricated, images of writhing, praying, naked bodies, danced in my head while the rest of the cabin's inhabitants (my girl, her 5 year-old daughter, and two cats) were nestled in their snug little beds. My several years worth of piled up books on the occult, witchcraft, voodoo, and other various ancient religions laid the groundwork for the ritualistic imagery, brought to aural life by pulsating sequencers, tribal drum and bass samples, backward voices, and melodic, vintage synthesizer sounds. I wanted to create an album that would evoke dark sexual imagery as well as provide a soundtrack for night drives through desert highway rampages. I believe that RITES delivers on both accounts and I hope you enjoy the ride as much as I enjoyed creating it. The album is slated to be available through countless media outlets including Itunes, X-Box Music, Spotify, Pandora, E-Music, etc. As of today, I know it is available for under 8 bucks at Amazon.com, and even cheaper at CDbaby.com. You can also check it out, along with the vast majority of the Bedtime for Robots catalog at LastFM.



1. We Bleed for the Sake of Bleeding
2. Lucifer Slam
3. The Possession Will Be Televised
4. Sweet Lamblood
5. Loa in the Trees
6. Rites
7. World to Come
8. Walpurgis Night

all songs written, performed, recorded, mixed and mastered by Michael Ferentino copyright 2013




Thursday, July 4, 2013

An Ode to the Greatest Electronic Album Ever Recorded

   
     




       By the age of ten, I had a healthy music appreciation education thanks to my extremely talented father and cousin. My dad contributed his ridiculously extensive knowledge of 50s and 60s doo-wop, Motown, R&B, rock & roll, and pop standards and often quizzed me on the artists and years of these amazing recordings. I tortured my little sister in much the same way. However, in the spirit of classical conditioning I would dole out noogies for every wrong answer she gave. Today she is quite the music aficionado thanks to her twisted older brother. My cousin, Robb, an incredible bassist and songwriter, and 6 years my senior, contributed his excessive passion for “classic” rock, which at the time was considered cutting edge music. I was the only 10-year old kid on the block who intimately KNEW the deep tracks of Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Rush, Queen, the Beatles, the Stones, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, and the Clash to mention a few of the artists exposed to my fledgling brain. I spent all my allowance money from doing odd jobs around the house for my mom and dad on vinyl album after album.

                    me in the center age 12; Dad with microphone; cousin Robb far right playing bass guitar

     By the time I was in high school I had already expanded my musical horizons to include classical music, metal, new wave, Prince (a genre unto himself) and early hip hop. However, the most important musical discovery for me, a kid who grew up playing guitar and learning Yes and Van Halen songs note for note, was my discovery of electronic music. My initial introduction to the genre was thanks to one of my father’s co-workers who felt my dad needed some stress reduction. The cassette my dad passed on to me without ever having listened to it was an incredibly dreamy and hypnotizing album by French artist, Jean Michele Jarre, a 6-part electronic suite called “Oxygene.” I instantly fell in love with this music which was far removed from the majority of the structured stuff I devoured for half of my young life. Every time I played this album I escaped in my mind to desert islands, outer space, and other uncharted mental territories. However, as much as I owe mad props to “Oxygene,” the album that initially led me deep down the whirling path of music deconstruction and synthetic web-weaving, this is an ode to my next discovery of the electronic genre, an album I have listened to over 7,000 times without exaggeration; an album that quite literally changed my life and helped to mold my future as an artist.



     In 1967, a German art student named Edgar Froese formed an experimental art-rock band which he dubbed Tangerine Dream. The band, which went through a number of personnel changes over the years, released 5 albums during the period of 1967-1973, known affectionately as the Pink Years. The music, which began as an experimental amalgamation of guitars, drums, flutes, and early sound generators, slowly evolved into a more “structured” combination of traditional rock instruments largely influenced by a combination of progressive rock, jazz fusion, and musique concrete. Ultimately, it was Tangerine Dream’s next period, the Virgin years, after signing with Richard Branson’s newly created Virgin Records, which would culminate in the discovery of sound which, along with country fellowmen, Kraftwerk, eventually influenced the electronic  explorations of artists from David Bowie to Afrika Bambata, Grand Master Flash, and the entire British new wave movement in the late 70s/early 80s, the techno movement in the 1990s, and, most importantly, the darker side of ambient music. Unfortunately, they also ushered in the bland, watered-down new age music genre and eventually fell victim to the uneventful and largely boring genre themselves for the next 30 years onward. However, Froese, along with Peter Baumann and synthesizer/sequencer auteur, Chris Franke, managed to create a handful of wonderfully original and beautifully crafted electronic masterpieces before succumbing to the more marketable new age drivel period, a ceaseless period that drones on like a hive of tired, uninspired, honey-drunken bees.



     Of the aforementioned Virgin years releases, the album that stands out as the game-changer was the first of these releases, 1974s “Phaedra.” From the moment I first heard the slowly fading in of dark, deep space synthesizers and bubbling sequencer of the opening  title track, a nearly 17 minute epic that can hardly be accurately described in words, I was whisked away forever to the furthest reaches of the Universe and to the deepest depths of the ocean. According to Jim DeRogatis, author of several articles and books on experimental and psychedelic music,"The creation of the album's title track was something of an accident; the band was rehearsing in the studio with a recently acquired Moog synthesizer, and the tape happened to be rolling at the time. They kept the results and later added guitar, flute and Mellotron performances. The cantankerous Moog, like many other early synthesizers, was so sensitive to changes in temperature that its oscillators would drift badly in tuning as the equipment warmed up and this drift can be heard on the final recording." The album, despite its unconventionality and experimental nature, reached #15 on the U.K. charts back in 1974 and helped solidify the band's vast reach and international notoriety.


     After hearing the title track, which encompasses the entire first side of the cassette and vinyl versions of the album, I was completely blown away and could not wait for side 2. The opening track on the second half of the album is an aptly titled dream sequence called "Mysterious Semblance at the Strand of Nightmares." It's dark, lush, and driven by the tape loop orchestrations of the unmistakable Mellotron. My entire family has been instructed, upon my death, to place a pair of headphones over my rigor mortis infused ears with this piece of music playing in eternal rotation via whatever prevailing media is available at the time of my demise. The battery, if a perpetual one has not been discovered by that time, is to be replaced regularly to ensure that my corpse receives a continuous supply of this incredible aural energy. Again, I am not going to attempt to describe the music as I am a firm believer in the Steve Martin or Frank Zappa quote (whichever source you believe): "talking about music is like dancing about architecture." I will just say that if you have ears and a brain to process the incoming sound waves then you must hear it for yourself. The next piece, "Movements of a Visionary," is exactly that: a moving, visionary piece of music driven by the sequencers which defined this era of Tangerine Dream's music. The album closes with a short, mysterious, hollow track of exquisite beauty called "Sequent C," leaving its listener in a desolate valley between enormous mountains of echoing ambience.It's the perfect close for the most important album in my life as a musician and explorer of sound. Like I said, I have listened to this album over 7,000 times. It comforts me during times of torment and uncertainty; it lulls me to sleep when i am plagued with insomnia; and it provides the backdrop for my studies in medicine. Most of all, it inspires me to continuously explore the possibilities of electronic music and to never lose sight of the fact that machines in the hands of passionate, creative individuals can be as life affirming as the beating heart of the most human of humans.


Discover Tangerine Dream's masterpiece, "Phaedra."