Sean Ongley

Category: Audio

  • Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    Remembering the Boxlift Loft Sessions

    We had completed our year at Portland State University as professional music students, in the summer of 2008. Branic was a music composition major, I was a hard working punk just taking classes and refusing to follow the curriculum. In fact, I should have been enrolled for the 2009 school year when this concert happened, but I never went back.

    He invited me to perform something as an opening act for Thollem McDonas, on December 8, at his music studio at the artist loft building known as Boxlift Lofts, so named because it has an historic elevator that was employed to shuttle Ford Model T cars around.

    Branic liked my piano stylings and thought I’d make a good shadow to the mastery of Thollem McDonas. That was smart curating, actually, showing the master and student dichotomy on Branic’s baby grand piano in the intimate setting, for an audience largely comprised of college students.

    I had something different in mind, however. I wrote a piece of music for saxophone quartet and I wanted to have it performed by some of my favorite local players. The recording of that was rough, and we didn’t execute the composition perfectly, so it never was released, until now, as a piece of the archive and memoire. Just stream the audio player immediately below.

    Saxophone Quartet Performance 12-08-08

    On baritone sax, I had Doug Haning, on Tenor, Peter Bryant, on alto sax, I had Ben Kates, on soprano, Jefrey Leighton Brown. I am conducting. At the end, I move to the piano for a simple percussive part.

    If memory serves me, I left the equipment at Branic’s loft and we scheduled a session in the near future. I climbed in through the fire exit and got a solo jam done before he got there. In fact, it is inaudible, but that jam, the first track, basically ends with him climbing through the window. I recorded him solo, and then jammed together. It is all very ambient and stripped down.

    The album streaming at the top of the article via Bandcamp is the result of those sessions. Not too bad.

    The recording equipment, again, if memory serves me, was a Marantz digital field recorder and Audix microphones borrowed from KBOO Community Radio. I would have worked on it in my home Pro Tools 5 rig, and probably mastered it in Adobe Audition 1 at KBOO.

  • A Sunrise by Imra

    A Sunrise by Imra

    That was me and songwriter Kelly Slusher. She since changed her name to Avaleya Kelly. We were in love so we produced a love album together. The EP entitled A Sunrise is now available here to stream via Bandcamp, but it turns out that it has been available on Spotify and Apple Music for, I don’t know, a long time. 

    Originally, we published with CD Baby and sold CD’s. That was how you heard this album: You bought a CD. We sold maybe 50 of them. CD Baby helps with digital distribution, and they put it on Spotify, years after the fact.

    Within a few months of becoming steady partners, fall of 2008, Kelly and I produced this EP and set up a west coast tour. Kelly came up with the name, Imra. It sounds like an esoteric deity and we liked it for some reason. It was very common to post a few songs on MySpace, contact local venue bookers directly on the social network, print a CD-R album in conjunction with CD Baby, and hit the road just like that. That’s what we did.

    “Sweet Love” opens the album, and I think it’s the best track on it. It was Kelly’s song, but I totally transformed it from her acoustic guitar version. Although I maintained her chord changes, everything is built on the Arp Odyssey and her electric bass. When we finished this song, it seemed more like a band than a Kelly Slusher song.

    “On and On” is a beautiful tune, I think, and it was also a Kelly song. We kept the guitar version, recording it in a room with natural reverb, adding the synthesizer later, it is my second favorite cut on the record. Then we wrote three songs strictly together, and those are the three in the middle of the album.

    This album contains valuable ideas and vibrations meant for opening space for a relationship. On the other hand, it can be of benefit to one’s relationship to the whole world, not just romance. The truth is that in the two years Kelly and I were together, we slipped into the dark side and never recovered. We fell prey to our own fears and all that junk that challenges those initial impulses of mutual love and respect.

    Our love and determination carried us a long way. As with anything on this blog, I’m not running away from the things that went wrong. I won’t tell you all the stories, but I’ll admit that I’ve brought problems into relationships that a more mature, more secure version of myself today would not bring.

    Not all relationships are meant to last either. The pain can just be in the attachments that we feel for it and our egoistic clashes to hang on or make the other person wrong to justify leaving the relationship.

    This blog post is just to get the album up in here. We put a lot of work into Imra. When I have more content from us put together, then I’ll write a memoire piece and compile a portfolio page for Imra. For now, I just want to make sure this album is available to stream. I still think its a pretty good EP.

    A Sunrise Photo Shoot
    In the Bunkhouse Studio
    Kelly practiced Mudra
    Sadly I’ve lost the photographer information for all of these photos. I am sorry.
  • My Interview with the Late Daniel Johnston

    My Interview with the Late Daniel Johnston

    Featured image via 20Watts

    My radio interview with the legendary Daniel Johnston for KBOO in 2009.

    Looking back, I am still amazed that I landed this interview. It is simple however, I was the first producer at KBOO to reach out to Daniel Johnston’s manager. That is really how you find opportunities in life: Timing. His manager was his brother, Dick.

    Something I don’t mention in the script here, when I got him in the interview chair he had a momentary freak out, running out of the studio. I hope to this day it wasn’t me. Because it was like he felt threatened by me. He was famous for living with schizophrenia.

    Imagine my panic standing in Studio 2, all prepared for the interview, and for a moment I thought it was over before it had even started. His brother ran after him, calmed him down, and we got a good fifteen minutes in, including an in-studio performance. Somehow, the guitar came in too quietly on the board and its signal was lost. With tape, you really have to push the gain.

    It is silly that I ended up using cassette tape as my medium. Listening to it now, I feel like it wasn’t worth it, but then again, I did something unique with this radio piece and I had the freedom to do it at KBOO. For what I contributed to the station besides 11 minutes and 26 seconds of noisy airtime, listen until the end for the call sign.

    Johnston has been recorded plenty of times in super high definition since he was made famous in the 1980’s. To come to him a scrappy young man myself with a cassette system for an interview seems like exactly what I should have done, granted we were in a studio with professional standards.

    There is more to the reason I used cassette than that. I believe the session files were intentionally disappeared. All KBOO producers had space on a network drive, and my Adobe Audition files with Daniel Johnston went missing from my folder. I still had the cassette. So I passed it off like it was a creative decision.

    My personal legend is that ultimately I had no choice, because the original media was both digital and cassette, but the digital disappeared. A likely story, akin to my dog ate my homework, you might say. Let’s just say it was the ghost in the machine.

    If memory serves me right, I was stuck, and I tried to make it work with digital noise filtering and other things, including some reverb. It is sonically one of my worst pieces of radio or any audio that I’ve produced. But you get used to it.

    It is a simple piece, I read an intro script to lead in the interview. After the short talk, we go to his concert that night with a field recorder. It was at Berbati’s Pan, I talk to some fans and a musician that I knew and yet whose name I didn’t get down because I was an amateur journalist. I think his name is Ryan. After the concert, the out segment is the performance that I captured in the studio.

    Nobody arranged to get a picture with myself and Johnston, in front of the studio, or anything. This is a real oversight by myself and the whole organization. But we got the audio. Here it is, in my archive.

    It could have been more awkward. I think I approached him very rationally, but I was thrown by the fact that his mind was elsewhere. He may literally be fighting off the flight response the whole time. There is a sense also that he is still trying to make it. He doesn’t seem self-conscious to the fact that everything wrong about what he did is what made him famous. One can only have compassion for the mindset of a man you cannot understand.

    Rest in Peace, Daniel Johnston. You really were a prolific songwriter, and a gift to musicians for generations to come.

    See the original post at KBOO right here.

    See the photo spread from which I obtained the featured image.

    See what else was happening that week via Portland Mercury.

  • A Drone for Adam Curtis

    A Drone for Adam Curtis

    “A Drone for Adam Curtis” in A.

    This is a drone in the key of A, for Adam Curtis, the genius storyteller, journalist filmmaker. There are few truth bearers embraced by the mainstream. There are few that step right onto the conspiracy, exposing it, while saying nothing about it. The facts around it are given and you are left to piece together your shattered reality. He is ruthless and becoming more relevant by the decade, as the fake world that he turned over in his documentaries has become more transparent than ever.

    This ambient drone music was improvised on guidelines, in the key of A (for Adam), entirely generated from the ARP Odyssey. The guideline was that wanted to spell out his name. The first tone is A, the second is D, the next is A but the octave up, then I continue spelling out the keyboard, so that the letter m lands on F, in the octave up. Finally, I broaden the harmony with a C at the top and bottom octave. The resulting harmony is A minor. It could be performed in a thousand different ways following this direction.

    Usually I just improvise and then get annoyed that I have to come up with a name. It was nice having a concept in mind for this. And I wanted an excuse to share my appreciation for Adam Curtis.

    His documentaries almost always leave me scratching my head, reevaluating history. The Century of Self and Hypernormalization should be watched by everyone. I don’t believe you can live in this world and interpret media and politicians accurately without seeing these films, or at least taking in the information contained in them.

    I am a conspiracy theorist. But Curtis is not. He is exposing the crest of the wave but doesn’t speculate at all. He will make bold claims, like al-Qaida wasn’t real before 9-11. He lays it out in The Power of Nightmares and backs it up. It is fact. As much as I knew about 9-11, I always believed at least that al-Qaida was real. But then Curtis avoids every trapping of suggesting that the attacks on that day were somehow not real, or as folks say, an inside job. His ability to discriminate fake from reality is what I love about him. So I continue to seek out every film he has ever made.

    It is notoriously difficult to get good copies of his films because they air on BBC and you need access to that network. You can only bypass that with a VPN or piracy. I am including a YouTube account that has several decent free copies to stream, but the quality is definitely all over the place.

    For more free Adam Curtis documentaries, subscribe this YouTube profile.
  • Drone for Rudy

    Drone for Rudy

    Published July 4, 2020

    Above you can hear my latest ambient piece. Inspired recently by a 15-hour Tidal playlist called Autopilot, I realized that I have always loved the ambient genre and particularly find drones to be of utmost value in terms of intellectual concentration. I meditate in silence, but if there is a genre suited to help with that, then it is Drone.

    This is my second piece driven by the Arp Odyssey this year. I plan to make it central to most of the drone pieces forthcoming. There is this ongoing line noise problem within the synthesizer that I hope to resolve the next time around. It is noise music, anyway.

    Typically, I associate the music I make in improvised sessions with activities surrounding that event. I was repairing my new Volkswagen at this time, and I had recently published stories about my old V-dub.

    I bought a non-starting Passat. It is the same model vehicle that I owned before, only this one is 37 years newer than that one. My first was a 1977 Dasher, which was the Americanized version of the Passat. They dashed that marketing differentiation and stuck with the Passat name across international markets. It is also the first Audi and the original modern design from VW. These are now and have always been sweet rides.

    This drone is for Rudy the Dasher, which I sold and have lost touch with long ago. The new Passat kicked ass on a recent trip across Pennsylvania. I took it down the shore yesterday as well. I waited until the car agreed with the name before declaring it, and that name came to me as Sonny. It’s a smooth vehicle, son of the Dasher, but aggressive and rough around the edges, like Sonny Sharrock and Sonny Rollins, two of my favorite musicians.

    Sometimes I think of where I was when something else happened. For example, in 2003, when this vehicle was manufactured, I had just moved to Portland, Oregon, with my 1990 Toyota Truck. By the time this vehicle was taken possession of, I was enrolling in community college. This car has put on a lot of miles and so have I.