Wobbly - Limited Party
01 - Limited Party 1
02 - Limited Party 2
03 - Limited Party 3
04 - Limited Party 4
05 - Limited Party 5
06 - Limited Party 6
07 - Limited Party 7
Bonus Tracks:
08 - Taped Ascent
09 - Alternate Party 2
link to zip file of all 9 mp3's
Original sounds sourced from multitrack recordings of the track 'Automata' by Eats Tapes: Marijke Jorritsma & Greg Zifcak, originally released on the album 'Sticky Buttons' on Tigerbeat6
Track 7 originally released on 'Eats Tapes Remix Party' on Tigerbeat6
Track 4 originally released on 'Ghos Busters III' on Record Label Records
Mixed 2005
Finalized 2006
Mastered 18 February 2016
Eats Tapes hit the Bay Area live music scene hard in 2003/4, playing a bizarre sweet spot combination of circuit bent noise and 1992-channelling, Mentasm-flashback hard techno. Rave music was usually a DJ's game, but ET gigs were very live, Greg hovering over a pile of half-disassembled channel strip preamps, cassette walkmen and oscillators, Marijke tending to a pile of small analog synths and a midi-driven Nintendo, and they'd play everywhere from select harsh noise basements to massive Oakland raves. Greg and Marijke are wonderful people to boot; all of the people they asked to remix them for the 'Remix Party' ep were good friends.
At the time I was working as a test engineer for Digidesign and had just begun working on the as-yet-unreleased VENUE live mixing console, which had the ability to create and recall snapshots capable of storing every parameter on every plug-in you had in your session, regardless of timeline position. This gave you unprecented power over your effects & softsynths from your console. Old news to Ableton Live users, but coming in the form of a console it was great news -- at that point, most manufacturers were making 'controllers' not mixers -- not designed for improvising, rather they were designed to for programming & composing out set tracks. The VENUE console was laid out for front of house mixers at stadium concerts, but with all the DSP onboard, it was basically a hotrodded waveform synthesizer. All of this is to say, I ended up with several hours worth of stereo improvisations on the basic set of Eats Tapes sounds. Even after baking them down to highlights and layering a few new instruments on top, they still had a kind of flow and easily formed a suite.
'Alternate Party 2' is the result of a legendary Pro Tools bug that impacted shipping code over a Christmas update in 2005. Beat Detective users found that under the hood, Pro Tools was saving their sessions in a completely corrupt state, having nothing to do with the session they had open. They'd only discover the bug upon closing and reopening that session, usually hours later, to discover every single audio region in their timeline was now pointing towards random positions of the same audio files. It sounded unbelievably wonderful if you had tiny rhythmically edited regions -- a danceable chaos patch. I was one of three testers that begged them to implement this exact error into the code as a controllable feature. The product managers responded as they always did to requests for randomized editing functions into Pro Tools -- a mix of total confusion and outright contempt. (One of my favorite quotes in response -- 'The name of this program is PRO Tools. Our customers are people who know what they're doing.') 'Alternate Party 2' is the session for 'Limited Party 2', with the original rhythm track swapped out with a capture from the Session-Save bug.
As these tech-heavy liners imply, I was having too good a time making this to release it, but rediscovering it now, it has enough of a reason to exist: I made it for friends. Here's how it was left in 2006.
For Greg & Marijke
