The album “Construct Deconstruct Reconstruct” is available from a dozen online retailers including: iTunes, eMusic, Amazon, Napster, and Rhapsody. The 7 songs clock in at 30 minutes and include: Ashanti, First Impression, Horn Birds, Step Forward, Westside 102, Coconut Radio featuring Ulysses Castellanos, and Every Body.

Listen to the album! (Click right corner to “pop out” the player)

Liner Notes

The song and video for “Coconut Radio,” featuring vocalist Ulysses Castellanos, were a few years in the making. “Construct Deconstruct Reconstruct,” represents a five-year period involving dozens of demos and multiple “constructions” of each track. This collection is the cream from my first five years making electronic music in a predominantly left-field, hip-hop/downtempo style (from 2003-2008).

“Deconstruction” refers to taking the sounds apart and repositioning them, much in the same way that I use micro-sampling—a jazz chord is chopped and re-pitched to provide a new melody. Most of the beats are a combination of loops and programming, where the accenting percussion, including congas, cowbells, tablas, berimbau, tambourines, shakers and ride/crash cymbals are a series of one-shot samples individually placed in the arrangement timeline. Many of the songs were composed in Acid, the original looping software. A few bass lines were recorded with a Fender Jazz bass and most of the final mixing was done in the marvelous creative environment of Ableton Live.

I met vocalist Ulysses Castellanos two decades ago, at the end of the 1980s, when I got involved in the Pickering “Coffee House” scene, an hour east of Toronto. I maintained a friendship over the years which allowed me to ask if he would lend his vocals to the track which became “Every Body.” Originally intended as a tribute to my mother, and entitled “Wonderful Woman,” Ulysses wrote some tender lyrics in Spanish and sang his heart out in his apartment while my Tascam USB interface dutifully recorded the vocals to my laptop. Somewhere along the line we got distracted by some other beats and Ulysses went on the mad-genius improvised-rant which became “Coconut Radio,” a rallying cry against music commercialization, and an exploration of “psychic radio,” a primitive place and time when “birds were our phonographs” and “rocks falling were our discotheques.” The vocals to “Wonderful Woman” are awaiting a “reconstruction.”

The album starts with the downtempo tune “Ashanti” (110 bpm) and moves into the heavy hip-hop beats of “First Impression.” The hip-hop continues in the 90-100 bpm range, bringing ambient elements and reggae/dub vibes in the form of “Horn Birds” and “Step Forward.” An innovative Toronto graffiti video (shot with cell phone) was released for the next track, “Westside 102.” The album closes with the experimental sonic anarchy of “Coconut Radio” (120 bpm) and the driving 136 bpm Afro-Brazilian house tune “Every Body.”

Interested in the concept of open-source collaboration via the remix and mashup? You should check out “RadioCocoRemix.com” where you can find links to hi-quality “Coconut Radio” audio files, remixing tools and archival documentary movies. An audio-video voyage awaits!

Mikooshka

July, 2009