The next album will be titled “Suspending Belief.”  It’s almost all recorded and mostly mixed.  We’ve been playing a few tracks from it live for a while now, and we’ve got a few more in the pipe.

Yesterday, it happened again, to another friend, DJ and tireless promoter of local music.

Mike Carlson, a guy who I’ve known as a DJ in Madison as long as I’ve lived here, watched his house burn down yesterday.   Thankfully, nobody was hurt, but preliminary estimates put the damage at over a quarter of a million and the human damage is more – his family are now without a home, clothing, and belongings. Mike’s lost the records and CDs he uses to ply his DJ trade.

Mike, both as a DJ and as the owner of MCAudio, has been a fixture of the Madison music scene for decades.  He’s also a genuinely nice guy.  I don’t know a DJ or a band in town that he hasn’t helped.  Certainly, he’s the guy who spun Null Device discs before anyone else would touch them, regularly throwing our poorly-recorded cover of “Wicked Game” into big night sets. Last time I saw Mike, it was sort of by accident – Wendy and I had wandered over to the Great Dane for a late snack and drink, and he happened to be DJing. He came over to our table, bought me a beer and an apple turnover (!) and talked excitedly about new dubstep records he was getting in the store. He’s always enthusiastic about music, and about the people who make music, and you can tell he’s a guy who loves what he does and loves sharing it with others.

Every few times I see him, he tells me “you know what I’m really digging these days? That acid jazz.” I usually joke that he has so much vinyl that he’s merely rediscovering stuff he’s owned for years and just forgotten about. I won’t be able to make that joke anymore.

A few people have already set up donation points on paypal:
http://www.paypal.com and send money to mikeandfamilybenefit@gmail.com

If you’re in Madison, you can donate a nonperishable food item at MCAudio on University Ave.

UPDATE:

Dane101 is on this.  So is The Onion AVClub.

And there’s already a Benefit tonight at The Inferno:

Tonight (1/27) at the Inferno (1718 Commerical Ave.), a benefit show for Mike Carlson. No cover at the door,  taking donations of both non-perishable food items and money. Starts at 9:00 p.m.  DJs Eurotic and Alan!, + more.

One of those has been confirmed now. Null Device is going on a short tour with our compadres/former guitarist’s band The Dark Clan.

June 25th-July3rd

Dates to follow once they’re all confirmed. Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Pittsburgh, B’more, DC, Richmond are all in the works. A few more waiting for finalization.

If all goes well, we’ll have some brand new album goodness by then, too.

Null Device is 15 this year.

FIF-FREAKING-TEEN.

Officially, anyway. There were pre-95 noodlings, and our first album on a real label didn’t come out until 2003. But 1995 is when Dr. Goedken and I started writing together, and when we started getting rather serious about making music.

Lots has happened in those fifteen years, and a lot of things have changed. It’s been pretty fabulous so far, and we have no plans to stop anytime soon.

Happy 2010!

I gave it a shot.

It’s not my finest work, certainly.  The vocals are a little weak, the lyrics are a bit…um…but considering the whole thing was recorded, start to finish, in the span of about 4 hours, it’s not bad.  From recording dhols and dumbeks, to programming the beats, to orchestrating the chorus and the vocoders – everything was done on a chunk of saturday afternoon and sunday morning.  I’m rather pleased, especially given the bulk of the entries were of the singer-songwriter variety – not unexpected, since you can’t beat a guitar and voice for expediency in sketching a song – so the fact that I multitracked and arranged a 3-minute pop song in an afternoon makes me feel pretty danged good.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monitormix/2009/11/these_people_recorded_a_song_i_2.html

The Dark Clan has just released a single on their bandcamp site, called “Real Vampires Don’t Sparkle.”. Just in time for New Moon!

The b-side is the “RPatz Nonstop Dub” by Null Device. It bears zero resemblance to the source material, but is good fun and dancetastic to boot.

Check it out, as we shamelessly ride on a pop cultural tsunami.

Welcome to The Zipstream, a semi-regular new column in which The A.V. Club will round up new local albums, mixtapes, and EPs that Madison-connected artists share via such channels as Bandcamp pages and upload sites. Got something you’d like us to consider? Email sgordon@theonion.com.

Null Device, Recursions
Eric Oehler, the multi-instrumentalist/vocalist/leader of electronic-music project Null Device, doesn’t seem as angry or theatrical as some of his pals in Madison’s industrial and goth scene (OK, the Inferno and Reverence Festival scene, to be more precise). Nor is he smug and incurious enough to just oontz and bleep his way through chintzy, simplistic dance-pop. On the new odds-ends-remixes compilation Recursions, the band persists in exploring its fascination with the melody and instrumentation of the Far East, which pairs surprisingly well with its dark-yet-slick electronic pop foundation. The aqueous thump of Indian percussion sets the beat of opener “Return” before a electronic percussion and dense layers of synth and guitar lock into it.

On the best track, “Travelogue,” the band’s songwriting chases love from Shanghai to Sydney. A powerful ensemble of Asian stringed instruments lends this song some genuine jet-lagged romance, while a fun synth breakdown in the middle makes it feel more like an intrigue-riddled game of international lazer tag. The next song, “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove,” does nearly as well with its sinister sitar drone and male-female vocal harmonies. Speaking of the band’s singing, there’s nothing really wrong with it (and Null Device pens some rather compelling, narrative lyrics), but it’s often the least interesting thing in the mix. One exception is the beautiful Urdu-language guest vocal a friend of Oehler’s lays down on “Twisting And Turning (Club Mix),” which offers another direction Null Device could explore a bit further: Finding some vocals that are as adventurous and category-defying as the music itself. Download here.

(Also, for those of you reading this website on an iPhone or iPod touch, or another mobile browser, you might notice that the interface is different.  I’ve installed WPTouch on this and on the blog to make mobile browsing a more pleasurable experience.  I love modular software.  And thank Stephen Fry for blogging about it)

Remix albums can sometimes be a drag, especially when you are waiting for new music from an artist and get a remix album instead. In the commercial sector of music, remix albums can seem like a thinly veiled excuse to try and squeeze as much additional money out of an overplayed artist as possible. And then sometimes, a remix album is actually a decent album where you can listen to an interesting reworking of a favorite song. Luckily, Null Device’s latest release, Recursions, falls into the latter category.

Recursions features remixes from many songs on their last album from 2007, Excursions, as well as some from their earlier EPs. Although they performed at the Inferno at last month’s Forward Music Festival as part of the Reverence Showcase, don’t be so quick to lump them into the “industrial/goth” category if you’ve never heard them before. They have an acutely diverse range of influences in their music, including middle-eastern folk music, electronica and bhangra. The initial collaborations of the two Erics, lyricist Eric Goedken and multi-instrumentalist Eric Oehler, has since attracted the talents of Elizabeth Scheef (percussion, keyboards) Charles McKenzie, (bass) and Jill Sheridan, (vocals) for their current line-up.

On Recursions, the reinterpretations are sprinkled with elements of the same wide range of influences, from Bollywood club mixes to live acoustic sets. “The Hourglass” was recorded live at the Inferno, it sounds more like an spontaneous musical session with friends cheering drunkenly in the background. The aptly titled club mix, “Twisting and Turning” features gorgeous Urdu vocals alongside trancey beats. Perfect for the Inferno, and a Bollywood dance class too. Recursions also includes an unreleased demo, titled “The Choir.”

As is a common practice in the electronic music genre, Null Device has followed up their 2007 CD, Excursions, with an offering of remixes, revisions, and unreleased demos they have aptly named Recursions.

What makes Recursions somewhat different from most post-CD remix platters is the variety of material that encompasses the past decade of the band’s history. In addition to rewirings of Excursions material by fellow electroheads Stripmall Architecture, Bloodwire, and Bogart Shwadchuck, there is a 2009 version of “Travelogue” from the 2004 CD, A Million Different Moments, and a new rendition of “Footfalls” from 2002’s Sublimation, both showcasing singer Eric Oehler’s continued exploration of bhangra and other musical influences from the other side of the globe. There is a live acoustic rendition of “The Hourglass” recorded at the Inferno circa 2006 that shows a less serious side to them, and a pair of unreleased demos have been tossed into the mix: the instrumental “Think It Over” (perhaps they deleted the lyrics for it after thinking it over?), and “The Choir”, which features former band member Dan Clark (presently in The Dark Clan and other various projects) rocking out on electric guitar. “The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove”, a Dead Can Dance cover and staple of Null Device’s live sets, is presented here in studio form and one might have trouble differentiating it from the original.

Never known to be technophobes (the band first had a website way back in 1994), Recursions is not yet available in CD format and for the moment can only be obtained digitally from bandcamp.com, a website that allows musicians to be flexible with how they dole out and price their material. In the case of Recursions, one has the option to download the songs in several different formats and even choose how many clams to throw at the band; you can donate anywhere from zero dollars and zero cents to your entire paycheck, depending on how much you value what you hear. They are also one of many bands who have beaten iTunes LP to the punch; the download comes with a PDF file that contains all the artwork and liner notes that their website promises will eventually be available in soon-to-be-obsolete physical CD format.