The Cold Red Eyes of Home

I published my first kindle post yesterday. The Cold Red Eyes of Home is a short story about a man who builds a robot and they have adventures. I chose this story as a test, to see how the publishing process works, but hope to follow soon with more titles. I'm working on a serial story called The Interrogators, and am looking into ways to have it also available as an audio book or podcast. Not sure about the details on that yet. I may publish a collection of essays at some point, if I can find enough of them about. Some of my favorites were written to the Robitron discussion list over the past eight years or so. Some spelunking may be in order to locate them. Luckily, there is a search feature on the messages there. On Amazon.com, you can download free kindle reader software for macs, and there is a free kindle reader for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. I found that useful to me for testing, but now I am interested in getting a kindle. The Barnes & Noble Nook is an interesting device as well. I guess at some point they become like so many remote controls lying about the house.

Finally finished with the setup and distributing of Fabric and Dreams. Now you can get everything from 128k free MP3's to lossless versions in FLAC from our website at FluxOersted.Com. Coming in the next few weeks will be CD on demand from Amazon.com, but apparently it takes them some time to set that up. This makes my fifth offering from iTunes, but we're about to retire two of them, and consolidate our material somewhat. If you're even the least bit interested, you should check out Fabric and Dreams, it really is our best album since Inference Patterns. I didn't know until recently that our best selling single was "Timothy Leary's Dead." It's on The Visitor album. It is a weird and kooky track but I guess the name says it all.

I've been working on a new album titled, Fabric and Dreams composed of songs that I've written over the past year or so. I feel like this is some of my best work. Some of it was written under duress, during times of stress. Other parts were written using some of my latest software tools. It's been a good year for writing.

The entire album is available for free at FluxOersted.com. I decided to release it for free as a normal mp3 file, and then later to make higher resolution copies available in stores and from other pay-optional sites like bandcamp.com. Strangely, the artwork may take longer to finish than some of the songs.

I went the extra step to register the album with ASCAP though on my web page I am using a Creative Commons license so that people can do what they want with it. You can download it, share it, remix it, and nobody will complain, especially me.

Now, on with the show . . .

In the 1970's Radio Shack sold a Moog synthesizer that they branded as "Realistic MG-1 Concertmate." It is essentially the same synth as a Moog Taurus or the Rogue with a few differences. One of the more interesting features it has is an auto trigger that you control the frequency with the LFO. It also has a continuous filter setting that would be like playing a Juno 6 with hold button on.

I've got one of these and it has suffered the ages rather poorly. The plastic end caps were held on by hot glue and these have popped off or are loose. I swapped the actual keys with my Moog Prodigy to restore the Prodigy. So the MG-1 has some broken keys. At one point, I tried to lower the pitch by an octave, and inadvertently changed its tuning so that the frequency change between an octave was off.

I bought a nylon tuning kit consisting of a set of plastic rods that fit into the little groove of an electronic trimmer pot. I have been successful in re-tuning the MG-1, but it has some other problems keeping pitch, possibly from the old broken keyboard, or some component on the main circuit board I'm not sure.

I still really like sounds it makes, so I'll have to keep working on restoring it now that I've become reattached to it again.

New Release

Flux Oersted has released a high definition digital album called Subterraneans on BandCamp and in an abbreviated form on the Creative Commons site Jamendo.com.

This is a very representative album in terms of our style and productions. Some of the songs were originally rendered on 4-track tape, with newer recordings made entirely in the digital domain.

This is all part of a plan we have to start offering 192kb/s MP3's for free, but also offer FLAC, and other lossless or near lossless formats for a small fee. The difference would be lost on most computer speakers, but if you've got a nice sound system, or listen to headphones, you might appreciate the higher fidelity recordings.

Our apologies if this gets cross posted several times.

Flux Oersted featuring Dutch Cartoonist
Photo by Robert Cambron

Dutch Cartoonist

The latest outcrop of mirth from IMS is Flux Oersted's Dutch Cartoonist, featuring Jools Aspinal. Jools has kindly sketched out a few songs for their new release: Solid Mercury EP. This is a 7 song EP that is available for streaming, and free download from FluxOersted.Com. There will be an upcoming album before long, adding more material to the EP's songs list.

What's it like working together with Jools on the EP? "I'm liking the variety of sounds we're getting. I felt like Flux Oersted had fallen into a rut of 80's synth voices and couldn't get up. We're still using the same equipment, just trying to broaden our horizons," says Robby Garner, founder of Flux Oersted Music.

What kind of equipment are you using? "Mainly a MacBook Pro computer and a buttload of software."

What is the inspiration for your music? "I've done a lot of research for this album, reading from history books and women's blogs in Afghanistan. It's all about pain and the release that manifests itself as a crusty stain of synthesizer music."

Do you get much feedback from your fans? "No, not really. They are just download statistics to us. The occasional influx of money from MP3 sales says we matter to some people, and every once in a while somebody clicks 'like' somewhere. We produce music for ourselves. The rest is like a side effect."

What do you see in the future for Flux Oersted and Dutch Cartoonist? "I think it is about 1 o'clock. That will be next for us."

Hear the Solid Mercury EP at Flux Oersted Music