30/01/2012

jjj unearthed soundbyte thing

we got a group e-mail from jjj unearthed today -

>

Oh hey!

As you already know, your tunes are getting love on triple j Unearthed.

Well, now we want your voice on the digital airwaves as well!

All you have to do is record yourself, (or your whole band), at home and upload the audio

Then, like magic, your intros and greetings will play out on triple j Unearthed radio and online before we spin your playlisted track!

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Things to keep in mind:

* Tell people who you are, what band you're in (if you're in one) and where you're from!

* Win the listeners over! (there's lots of them, and you could be their new best thing ever.)

* It doesn't matter how shitty your microphone is, we can fix it at this end.

* Have Fun, Be weird! Sound excited! Say whatever you like about your band!

* Tell people what the song is about, why you wrote it... basically any interesting fact.

eg: "Hey! it's Dominic from the Fighting League, we're tropical street punks from Canberra! And this track "Foursquare" is about bein' man enough to protect your chick, if you're not man enough then you just better talk tough..." (actual real life example!)

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Hit me back with any questions you may have and most of all: give it a go!

>

any ideas? any free time?

27/01/2012

portraits by boom blip blip

i know it's not technically telafonica, but it is sam and i, and all the portraits i'm doing for the half of the works that i instigate are based on telafonica members, so here's some shameless self-promotion...

23/01/2012

a few tangents

a bunch of videos to watch in your spare time, hopefully giving some ideas. blake and i went and saw tuneyards on friday night which was, in and of itself, pretty incredible. more on that a bit later. but we talked through some ideas a bit. one of the things i was telling him about was the following clips, taken from ableton live's website. it's the band caribou, showing how they use ableton live in concert. i quite like the idea of each person in the group having access to ableton live, and it kind of functioning as a communal brain that everyone is able to manipulate in some way. don't worry too much about the technical aspects if they go over your head, other than to say we wouldn't need to add too much to our gear to be able to function in this type of manner.

the first clip is an explanation, the second is just a live perfromace where you can see them actually doing it...





another thing we discussed was the idea of limiting the actual instruments we use in order to create a cohesive sound across an album. i was listening to lcd soundsystem last week and realising that he/they alaways use the same sounds, same drum sounds, drum machine sounds, synth sounds, guitar etc, but push those around in the arrangements, so that it's cohesive yet still has a diversity. tuneyards did a similar thing - just drums, bass, ukelele, 2 saxes and voice - but used incredible arrangements (and incredibly funky grooves) to keep it interesting. here's an example...



we actually have the man and woman power to do this kind of thing without even needing to rely so much on layering loops. and the sax playing was pretty inspirational - cherry. :) blake also brought up the idea, which i like greatly, of untethering us from a reliance on the laptop driving the music but rather, us play things and the laptop serves us (through looping, processing etc) which fits in with the ideas from the caribou stuff above.

none of which actually helps in determining what these new sounds will actually be, but possibly all being in a room together playing while we are in the making it up phase might be a good option - or, at least, actually writing songs first and then arranging/producing them, rather than the other way around which is generally how we function at the moment.

16/01/2012

and another...

this one was only written a few days ago, but it's about a release from quite a long time ago, the free netlabel EP version of morpheme that the electrolyt label (andreas of lipstick/sunstroke militia fame) put out a while after the full album was originally released...

"behind Sydney, Australia-based Telafonica are Adrian Elmer, David Hughes, and Marcella Hughes. (Adrian Elmer, for instance, is at the moment more known as a prolific reviewer at Cyclic Defrost, one of the coolest webzines all around the world). However, 6 years ago Telafonica functioned as a combo mixing up bouncy yet mesmerizing electro beats with slowly evolving indie scaffolds which are infiltrated with somewhat sound, hirsuit layers. After many laps on it you can admit all these 5 tracks are on the ball. A classic (whose longer version is available at Bandcamp)."

- Borealiscape - Recent Music Heroes Blog

http://agier.blogspot.com/2012/01/telafonica-morpheme-2006.html

old review

i found this old review via the gate today. it's about the first show we did at the gate in may 2010 - it's quite amusing...

First up on the bill last night was Telafonica. They style their music as “traditional (&non) song structures utilising live instruments, soundmachines and computers” while asserting that “the pop song lyric book is never far from hand“. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the stuff they played. To me it appeared to be an attempt to get as many unusual instruments and sounds as they could and mash them together into something that wasn’t particularly musical. Throw in some seemingly nonsensical or meaningful lyrics and there was the performance. The only real satisfaction I took from them was the pre-produced beats they had which were pretty jazzy and almost funky.

- Samuel Law
(the full review of the show is here)

15/01/2012

more future

so i was discussing this whole 'sound of the future' thing with bec and it appears i probably should clarify what i exactly meant by that. i think it basically means anything that is new and not-before-heard. of course, once it's created, it's no longer of the future but the point is, no-one seems to be really actively trying to make actual sounds that have not been heard before anymore. so, when i say, making the sounds of the future, i don't mean trying to predict what might happen in the future. rather i mean making things that aren't buried under the weight of the past.

i've also been thinking that the reason for it being largely absent in the last 10 years is that the technology of sound generation hasn't actually progressed in the last 10 years. during the 90s (and, i guess the 80s, but that was before my musical times), new ways of actually creating sounds were being developed really quickly. new forms of synthesis were invented, so whole new actual sound worlds came into existence very very regularly for artists to use that didn't previously exist. which made it very easy for artists to sound like nothing that had come before and, therefore, making their music easily 'futuristic'. but that technology hasn't changed much since then. processing power has definitely increased (exponentially) but not the actual sounds. so artists can't really rely on their technology to make the future anymore. so it has to come from somewhere else.

bec and i have been watching ken burn's 12 part history of jazz documentary over the last few weeks. one of the things that has most struck me is that all of the progression was based on using the same instruments in new ways. and the plotted path of jazz's development is basically just jumping from one innovator of an instrument to another. the technology doesn't change, but you can hear how each progressive style would sound alien to the people immediately before it, even though the instruments are identical. i think that is where some of our keys might lie. i'm actually quite excited at the prospect of mixing some very un-rock and un-electronic instruments (squeezeboxes, ukulele et al) with very electronic rhythms. and i'm also toying with some jazz inspired ideas of rhythmic progression which abandons the rock/electronic mode of a solid, stable rhythmic pulse. that's where my musical head is at. this week, at least.

06/01/2012

jjj unearthed

got an e-mail today to say that we have been added to triple j's unearthed radio station playlist. they've also got us as one of their 3 artist spotlights. i assume that lasts for a week.

http://triplejunearthed.com/#

05/01/2012

futures

so, now that the album is out and we're heading towards the end of the remix eps etc, no doubt all your minds, as mine is, are thinking about what our next album will be. as promised a few days ago in the car on the way home, this is a post to find out what people might think would be a good direction to go for the next major piece of work.

i have literally dozens of half finished songs/pieces of music (for bec's benefit) on my hard drive but, rather than just keep making things as they happen, i thought it might be nice to do something we've never really done which is to plan out a bit of a direction before we start. we may well use lots of things that already exist, but pushing them in a uniform direction would be good, i think.

soooo...what are some ideas people think we might pursue? some key words maybe? artists to look at? could be to do with the sounds, the lyrical themes, anything. should we all pick up new instruments and make a garage rock album? a folk album? an acappella album (raw or processed)? an all electronic instrumental album? something combining some of those?

would love to hear what everyone thinks...

02/01/2012

jjj unearthed

a few nice reviews of heartbeatings for those with heartbeats from jjj announcers on telafonica's jjj unearthed page.

Heartbeatings For Those With Heartbeats
rating: 4/5
What a voice! Really nice percussion and soundscapes too. It's great to hear a band with heaps of ideas - who can still deliver a killer melody.
Dan Buhagiar, triple j

Heartbeatings For Those With Heartbeats
rating: 4/5
Telafonica seems to exist in a different headspace to most other bands. So many different ideas and sounds compacted into a mutant indie-pop song.
Dom Alessio, triple j

would be nice if that translated into some jjj airplay but it hasn't so far!

01/01/2012

I Can Hear There's A Peace In The Dark Remixes



The I Can Hear There's A Peace In The Dark Remixes EP is available for free (or pay what you like) download via Bandcamp.


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Released January 1, 2012

The Sleeping With The Fishermen Remix project took a break in December, 2011, so that the album itself could be released. I Can See There's A Peace In The Dark sees the remixes flow once again.

First up is Australian legend, Dave McCormack (Custard, The Titanics, The Polaroids) who picks out the quirks of the track, ramps up the joyful, playful bits and presents a blissed out, summer groove. All artists were given free reign for their remixes - told to do whatever they like with the tracks. Canadians, Sally Paradise, go all out and actually cover the track for their version, creating a luxurious dream-pop with grainy synths, lazy guitars and canyons of reverb. Old friend Karoshi continue their run of sublime Telafonica remixes, glitching up, vocoderising and looping some vocal lines in a half-time stutter of moody atmospheres. America's Docile takes the harmony vocal and turns it into the main melody of a completely new chord structure, filled with piano and arppegiating synths to create music that could be soundtrack the emotional crux of an indie film.

If you would like to create your own remix of I Can Hear There's A Peace In The Dark, the original stems can be downloaded for free at tiny.cc/peace-in-the-dark. Download these, create your own remix and send it to contact@4-4-2music.com. We will post all remixes on another Bandcamp page and split any 'pay what you like' earnings 50/50.