The Stuff

After 8 nights of strumming, plucking, tapping, twisting, clicking, typing and sliding, the new Milkshake Daddy album is complete. The album is titled Secret Lives of Probes, Satellites and Rovers and it is a concept album. The album was created as part of the RPM Challenge; the challenge was to create an album in the month of February — I accepted the challenge and completed on time.

Tracks:
1. Launch!
2. Voyager 1
3. Voyager 2
4. America, I Love You (USA 193)
5. SKYLAB
6. Kaguya
7. Communication (Satcom 1)
8. Hubble
9. Good Life! (Opportunity and Spirit Rovers)
10. Sojourner Rover
11. Sputnik 2

Listening:

You can listen to select songs on the Milkshake Daddy MySpace page or the Milkshake Daddy RPM page.

Getting the album:

The album is free to download, share, burn, remix, etc, but not to resell. Here is a link to a zip of the album. Listen to the songs in order — it is a concept album.

Why record an album?

Why not?

In spite of having no musical talent, I do enjoy making music. It might take me 10 years between recordings, but the interest is always there, but not the passion or drive. This time around, the RPM Challenge provided me with a reason to record something. My long time friend Leif had joined the challenge, and that was another reason.

What is the Milkshake Daddy?

Back in the mid-1990’s my life revolved around partying, and enjoying music and B movies, in particular Funkadelic and blaxspoitation films. I’m a huge fan of Dolemite, and the Milkshake Daddy was more or less a “pimp name”. Around 1995 I was unemployed for a while and started to experiment with guitars and drum machines. I recorded about 2 hours of material — in retrospect, I came up with 3 good songs: My Ass is In Good Shape, and two versions of a Funkadelic-inspired song called Ephedrine ( trucker speed ). They’re on the MySpace page.

Back in the future, 12 years later, I needed a band name for the RPM Challenge. My standard aliases — Dan Century, Last King of Seabright, Dan the Fan, Lord Sesshomaru, P. Destruction, That Bastard! — they weren’t as good as The Milkshake Daddy, so I used that.

What kind of music is it? What does it sound like?

It’s happy and positive love songs in the vein of the Beatles or Beyonce. Just kidding. The music is experimental. The closest genre to it would be ambient electronic music, but there is definitely noise, jazz, hip-hop and 80’s rock in the mix. You won’t hear music like this on the radio, unless the station is WFMU, a college station or maybe an obscure satellite station, but it does exist.

I designed the album to sound like what all the information and experience coursing through the circuits of the satellites and probes might sound like if it was transformed into music. I think of the Mars rovers as having more human personalities, so those songs are low-fidelity pop songs. Some songs you might find uplifting (Hubble) or cheerful (Good Life), while others are intentionally sad (America I Love You and Sputnik 2).

Moments might remind you of Nova or Carl Sagan specials, Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Black Flag, or Devo.

Technical information

Instruments:
A Korg Electribe MX was used as a keyboard, noise generator, and drum machine.
A Boss DR 550 was used as a drum machine and bass.
A Gibson SG was used for the guitar parts, either filtered through the Boss or a POD. Both the Guitar and Bass PODs were disappointing in their inability to produce a loud enough signal to produce a nice recording.
A Schecter bass was used for bass and to make the sound of the rocket launching.
The Women Take Back the Noise bent circuit boxed set was used to generate noise.
Other: a Polaroid camera, various sounds off the Nasa site (public domain) and various speech synthesizers were used.

I used a PC to record some of the speech synthesis, but 99.9% of the recording was done on an 2005 iMac using Garage Band. Garage Band is good for stuff like podcasts, but I was disappointed by it’s lack of features (I was unable to do fades and panning during the mixdowns), and it makes these awful ear-shattering popping noises every now and then. Steve Jobs owes me damages for hearing loss. I used a PreSonus Firefox to get all the sounds from the machines and in the Mac.

What next?

No immediate plans for recording music, but I am inspired to do more.