DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

While transcribing I Have the Conch I realized that it owes its heritage to Phil Collins’ spectacular and awe-inspiring Apocalypse in 9/8 groove, which I will transcribe for posterity here.

     1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+
9 HH xxxxxOxOxxxxxxOxOx
- SD   o o   o  o o o o
8 KD oo o ooo oo o ooo 

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3
• Genesis: Foxtrot (Amazon)

I developed this a few months ago, scribbled it on a 3x5 card, learned to play it and promptly forgot all about it. I happened upon the card yesterday, learned to play the groove again, and it kept me up half the night, cycling through my brain.

Mathematically, this is a beautiful thing: a one-bar kick and snare rhythm played twice, but the second bar is permutated backwards one-sixteenth note in time. The ride pattern is an ostinato, a1e, with an accent on the downbeat.

The groove has a smooth, syncopated feel to it, because the kicks and snares in the second bar all fall on the upbeats — but the rhythm itself is a duplicate of what’s happening on the down- and offbeats in alternating measures. Heh.

    1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a   1e+a2e+a3e+a4e+a
RC  Oo oOo oOo oOo o | Oo oOo oOo oOo o |
SD    o O       O o  |  o O       O o   |
KD  O     O O O    O |      O O O    O  |

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3

I found a small tupperware in the back of the fridge today. (Isn’t that an ominous opening sentence?) Inside were about a dozen cloves of roasted garlic, taken from inside last week’s turkey. The smell was overpowering. The garlic was intact — this isn’t a fuzzy-food story — but the aroma was a lot bigger than I expected. I am Pandora, with some regret at having opened the box.

So I’m about 10 batches into this new starter, and I can’t tell any difference from the raisin-based starter that’s now no doubt growing like the Blob at our local landfill.

The bread isn’t bad, but it’s depressingly just the same as all my sourdough loaves have been this year… mild flavor, with a tendency to spread in the oven.

I guess I could go back to commercially yeasted breads, if the smell didn’t make me vomit.

Many of the drum rhythms on this site were created spontaneously on a drum kit. In contrast, this beat was constructed to fit a song written by a friend of mine, who is, as I type this, madly mixing tracks for his debut solo CD.

This groove is a simple transposition of a bass line to drum kit. I like the way it percolates beneath the song. In that context, the snare shouldn’t leap out as much as it does in these electronic simulations.

Patronize these links, man:

• Virtual Drummer loop
• MIDI
• MP3