Raven

Experimental electronica by Peter Hollo

Here's some electronic music I produce as Raven.
Please note: These tracks are made available here for personal use only. They may be broadcast on radio with proper credit noted, but they may not be redistributed in any form.
Most of this stuff is really old. Just sayin'.

For pointers to what sort of music I'm into, it's probably best to check out my weblog, or these days the playlists of my radio show, Utility Fog.
The music is mostly sample-based experimental electronic music in a drum'n'bass/jungle/hip-hop/dub/post-rock vein. Hopefully this will serve to confuse anyone who wants to pigeonhole the music too much. If you want a genre, call it "postfolkglitchrocktronica". Well, yes - don't.

You'll note that since "I carpet bombed the old school" (original version) I've started encoding my mp3s at 192kbps. I don't really think anything less than that is reasonable audio quality, but those older tracks can stay as they were. Actually, the REALLY newer stuff is encoded at LAME VBR alt-standard, so there. Note that these tracks go in reverse chronological order: the most recent material is at the top, the oldest guff goes at the bottom.

Huge thanks to Keith-Hrvatski Whitman at the Reckankomplex for kindly including the Raven Progress Report promo CDR in May's "media favorites..." section for, er... 2003? Most chuffed, was I. You used to be able to see May's front-page here, but it seems to have gone bye-bye.
The very cool Norman Records of Leeds, from whom I mail-order a large proportion of the music I get, mentioned same Raven CDR in their News & Reviews section from the 25/4/2003 - prefaced with "This week we've loved the following records lots and lots". Yay!
The excellent Sub Bass Snarl (aka Seb & Luke) have played Raven tracks quite a lot on their 2ser show the Paradigm Shift, as you can see from the old playlists (fancy new ones here, too new to include my trax as yet).

The most recent tracks I've done aren't even that recent any more, but anyway, without too much comment, here are two tunes.
First is a remix of my wonderful friends Gauche, who are on something of a long hiatus at the moment. I remixed a track from their first EP, and called the remix:
Gauche vs Raven - Loosening the Blindfold (4.08MB)
Probably prior to doing that remix, I did a ridiculous breakcore mashup of the Pet Shop Boys with some ragga samples thrown in. It's:
Raven vs PSB - Domino Dancehall (Babylon Boys Breakcore) (5.27MB) (don't sue me!)

I recently completed a remix for Inga Liljestrom (known as "Inga"), who's been recording her debut album with the gals of Magnus Music. This track hasn't been released yet - not sure when it'll be out. It's an edit of a couple of live takes I did in Ross Bencina's wonderful program AudioMulch. The programming of the beats was done in Acid Pro 4.0, and then I setup various wav-files and VST effects in Mulch and went crazy. Sometime late last year I purchased an Evolution MK-225C USB MIDI keyboard, which has 8 knobs plus a pitch bend wheel and mod wheel, all assignable - the result being that you can twiddle the virtual knobs on a whole bunch of VST effects and other elements in AudioMulch all at once. Eventually a structure developed, and I did many many takes until it all fell together just as I wanted it. I'm very happy with the result - stuttering vocals and strings meet breakcore beats.
Here it is:
Inga - Stolen (nabbed! by Raven) (5.82MB).

My mates over at Entropic kindly asked me to do a remix last year of one of their tracks. They're a quartet with a jazz lineup (bass, guitar, drums, keys) who do live electronica basically - some housey grooves, some drum'n'bassy grooves. Oli, their bass player, works at Vitamin Records, who distribute FourPlay's CDs as well as Entropic's (and I work there once a week too). Another connection: Entropic's and Vitamin's websites, as well as FourPlay's, are all hosted on the same machine as the mighty Frogworth Corp.
This is the first track in which I really started taking AudioMulch into my stride, methinks. Although the Inga remix (above) takes it all the way, here I began recording long streams of processed audio through Mulch. All the sounds in this remix come from the original four instrument separations, but virtually everything is chewed up in some way. The original track has a kindof jump-up funky house feel (if that makes sense), which doesn't really appeal to me at all. So I took the most 2steppy bit I could find and sped it up, and then chopped it into something resembling a jungle beat. The resultant loop then got loaded up into AudioMulch and fed through a buffer-override plugin, making it stutter and loop, and occasionally take off on huge sinewave sweeps. Very tasty, especially with a subtle bouncing delay giving it all space. A nice drum fill made for some great breaks now and then.
The bass gets fed through a similar effects chain at one point. I took a nicely dischordant bit of organ and put it through a viciously granular filter in Native Instruments' Spektral Delay.
Then Ange & I hopped on a plane to New Zealand & Melbourne...
The track was due to be mastered the day after we returned, so I popped out my laptop every time we got to a new destination and continued fiddling. At some point I realised to my consternation that I hadn't used the guitar at all. I took a one-bar loop of reggae off-beats and put it through some effects in AudioMulch to create a dubby soundscape, and I think it really makes the track. There's also some crackly chewed-up guitar to finish things up.
Now you can see whether that long and laboured explanation is anything like what it sounds like:
Entropic - Hardware (Raven experiences Hardware malFUNKtion) (6.73MB).

I'm still working on my second FourPlay remix, of our probably-up-and-coming single Trust. It's a kind of mutant glitchy 2step thing, with me of course bringing out the junglist elements of that 2step genre. Although it doesn't belong in the reverse-chronological scheme of things, being unfinished, you may download it for your pleasure and edification here:
FourPlay - Trust (Raven's "one wrong 2step remix") (5.52MB).

I remixed my mate Tim Koch for his second remix album, Please Don't Tell Me That's Your Remix on Aural Industries. As with the original track, it starts in swingtime, and then goes into crazy drill'n'bass in the middle. I've used some intense granulation effects in AudioMulch in this one - and you can also hear some excessively processed cello; I paraphrased the bassline to begin the piece, and then improvised a melodic line in the middle. It's all contrasts, this piece. Hope it works...
The remix album has been out for a little while, and is utterly fantastic. Jet Jaguar's mix is awesome, Adrien 75 (of Carpet Bomb) turns in a winner, and there's lots of other worthy stuff. I strongly recommend buying it if you can.
For the sake of completeness, here's my remix, correctly titled unlike on the CD:
Tim Koch - Boybie Socks (Raven says soy-lin rocks) (5.69MB) . Please do not consider this an alternative to buying the CD!

A little after I did the first FourPlay remix, an opportunity came up to appear on dumpHuck's Beat & Squelch 4 - chansons d'amour pour mon robot comp, which, like the previous Beat & Squelches, is a fundraiser for Amnesty International - all tracks are donated free of charge. I didn't have anything in the works at the time, but had been wanting to update my "carpet bombed" track (see below for the original version). So I chopped a whole lot of the synth samples up into tiny bits and manually created some glitchy effects - to be honest I didn't know what I was doing, but I think I managed to create something quite lovely anyway. The majority of the track remains as it was, but there are some important additions which improve it out of sight.
Here it is, with its original title (the parenthetical comment was too long to fit the artwork, and got unceremoniously turned into an ellipsis (...):
I carpet bombed the old school (but a glitch got in the werks) (4.64MB).

I did a remix of my band FourPlay, on our remix album Digital Manipulation. It was a labour of love, and I'm still extremely fond of it - clicks & chops in the vocal soundscape at the beginning, earnest & occasionally convincing drill'n'bass beats, some granular effects courtesy of AudioMulch... Some of this really ain't bad at all! The CD's been out long enough, so bugger it, here it is:
FourPlay - Lilli Pilli Drive (glitch'n'bass evolution) (8.76MB).

Here are the old mp3s I've had up here for ages, with charmingly out-of-date explanatory blurbs. You'll laugh, you'll cry.

I carpet bombed the old school (2.79MB). This track is one link in the IDM email-list remix helix. You can find the entire helix to date at http://www.remixworld.com/idmrmx/. It's setup so each artist remixes the previous track in the chain. It's a helix because it consists of two chains, which crossover every 4 links, so every fourth artist gets to remix both the previous tracks, combining the chains. A fascinating idea, and coming out with some really interesting results along the way, some truly world-class music! I only hope my track is befitting of being included amongst the other stuff...

The Trappist (Raven's Radical Jewish Jungle mix) (1.79MB). Originally a track by DJ Marzipan from the wonderful Attention: Cats compilation on Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge Recordings Ltd. of Cambridge (a small and fantastic record label from the USA, short form RKK, run by Keith Fullerton Whitman aka Hrvatski), this track was given a rather extreme remix treatment by me. [In fact DJ Marzipan is Hrvatski...] All the material in the track comes only from the original samples in the original track. The drum samples are cut up, sped up, distorted and effected in various ways, as are in fact all the other samples. It's not as Jewish sounding as I'd hoped, although the scales involved in the small amount of pitch-based music in it are Jewish scales. The digital glitchy Mego sound is an influence (especially Fennesz and Farmers Manual), as is RKK's own sound, and the presence in my current listening of other labels/groups such as V/VM, Worm Interface, No Future, Spymania and even Tzadik is evident (some more obviously than others); but on the whole I can't entirely fathom from what murky depths it sprang from. I hope you like it! It was slated to appear on RKK's "RKK13" remix compilation, but didn't appear on the CD version (which came out a good couple of years after I did this mix) - too many amazing big names ended up jumping on board, making for a thoroughly brilliant release in the end, and frankly I would've been a little embarrassed to have this ol' thing among them. Who knows whether the vinyl release will ever appear - seems unlikely at this point! So here it remains.
It's pretty raw - all the programming and mixing was done in Sound Forge, not even Acid let alone Cubase or Pro Tools or anything. The craziness of youth!
The Levee Breakbeats (2.91MB). This is made up of a number of very obvious samples. It starts with the fantastic drum beat at the start of "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. That drum beat is used throughout the piece, but cut up, sped up, and generally fucked up in a jungle/hip hop type fashion. On top of this is overlaid a sample from "Kathy" by the wonderful Australian band The Clouds, who tragically (to me at least!) broke up in 1997. There follows a strangified sample from FourPlay's Corrosion (the only sample that's been cleared - I wrote it...) and then a big and obvious (but somewhat mangled) chunk from "Scarecrow" by Ministry in the last section. It's a big step on from the first liddle track I did (see below), technically-speaking.

Snowblind (1.31MB). I'd better explain the name of the sound file here, "TGUPWEI with music". The very cool drum sample (the sound quality of which is rather lo-fi) is one I found originally in a song by one of my favourite bands ever (perhaps my favourite rock band) Pop Will Eat Itself, called "Harry Dean Stanton". Hence the PWEI bit. However, it's unsampleable as there's too much guitar and stuff around it. A couple of years later I bought a great remix CD of Transglobal Underground (TGU), and on one of the remixes of "Templehead" there was that drum sample, used as a break with nothing around it (but unfortunately quite a bit of reverb). So I sampled it and used it in this piece. The "with music" bit is because originally I created the sound file as just a drum solo (lots of cutting up, speeding up into jungle speeds, reversing and laying on of effects) and then later added the spooky FM-synthesised music, using a software synthesiser built in to Sound Forge. The whole effect is very lo-fi but if Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, and indeed ?-ziq can release stuff like that, so can I dammit!

This track was released on the limited edition compilation Food to eat music by, released by Elefant Traks in Sydney in 1999.
On a historical note, it's interesting that this track continues to be popular among people coming to Raven for the first time. Considering it uses one sampled breakbeat and utilises the simplest in FM synthesis, that's a puzzling yet somehow charming fact. Seems like even with Raven, some people like my old stuff better than the new stuff!

If you like this stuff at all, please do let me know. If you want to sue me for breach of copyright, a.) I have no money anyway, b.) this is mostly unreleased stuff I'm not making any money on anyway, and c.) who's Peter Hollo? Oh that guy, he moved out ages ago, I think he lives in Guatemala now. Cuba? Helsinki? He went that way. Quick, run!

Peter Hollo