A few weeks ago I was invited to appear on ABC Radio National's Breakfast show, which is being guest-hosted by Julian Morrow (of Chaser fame) over the summer, to discuss my "album of the year". As listeners to Utility Fog may guess, choosing one album is a matter of some existential pain for me, but I ended up nominating Sufjan Stevens’ Age of Adz, which is just about radio friendly enough to suit a breakfast show :)

They also kindly asked me to bring my cello along, and even though I was perhaps there more as a representative of FourPlay than as Raven, I played a rendition of "It's too fucking hot, but we've still got melody". You can view it on their site, and it's also on their excellent YouTube channel:

I shortened the piece a bit for radio, but you get the idea. No laptop involved in this one, just looping. The full recorded version can be found on the stumble ep.

Here's some of my oldest Raven material.

In 2009 I did a remix of the wonderful Marcus Whale aka Scissor Lock, alongside with remixes from Pimmon, Shoeb Ahmad and Scissor Lock himself. The SoundCloud link has disappeared, so I may put it up myself sometime.

My track "Presumption #1" can be download for free as part of the New Weird Australia Vol 1, a brilliant series of online experimental Australian music compilations. It's a kind of dubstep number with layers of processed cello — listen to it online here.

My track "Amphorae" was released on Sound & Fury's 2008 compilation Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow Vol 1. It's layered cello plus some beats.
Another track of similar vintage, featuring contemplative piano, cello and some subtle laptop processing, was slated for volume IV of Sound & Fury's Passeridae series, an ambitious series of twelve split 7"s that sadly was never completed. It's called "cold afternoon", and you can hear it here on SoundCloud. The flipside is a gorgeous tune by Aaron Martin called "Burl" (now available here).

Please note: The tracks below 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. The notes are really old. Links are probably broken. *sigh*

Note that these tracks go in reverse chronological order.

• In 2005 I remixed a track from the first Gauche EP, and called the remix:
  Gauche vs Raven – Loosening the Blindfold (4.08MB)

  Probably prior to doing that remix, 2003-2004, 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!)

• Here's an unreleased remix (also from around 2003) that I did for Inga Liljeström (known as "Inga"). 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 around then 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 – stuttering vocals and strings meet breakcore beats.
  Inga – Stolen (nabbed! by Raven) (5.82MB).
• In late 2002, my mates in Entropic kindly asked me to do a remix of one of their tracks. They were a quartet with a jazz lineup (bass, guitar, drums, keys) doing live electronica – some housey grooves, some drum'n'bassy grooves. Oli, their bass player, worked at Vitamin Records, who distributed the first few FourPlay CDs as well as Entropic's.
  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 kind of jump-up funky house feel, 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).
• My second FourPlay remix, of our hit single Trust (feel the sarcasm) still hasn't been released. Begun in probably 2002, it was revamped in 2005. 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).

• In 2002 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…
  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)
• A little after I did the first FourPlay remix, an opportunity came up to appear on dumpHuck's 2001 compilation Beat & Squelch 4 – chansons d'amour pour mon robot, which, like the previous Beat & Squelches, was 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).
• In 2000/2001, I did a remix of my band FourPlay, which appears on our remix album Digital Manipulation. It was a labour of love, and I'm still rather 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 even-more-out-of-date explanatory blurbs. You'll laugh, you'll cry.

• [2000?] I carpet bombed the old school (2.79MB). This track is one link in the IDM email-list remix helix, which has long disappeared from the internets. It was 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.

The track is like taking some really melodic electronica from the early nineties ("the old school" IDM ("intelligent dance music")) and giving it an extreme contemporary remix treatment, influenced by the small but amazing New York record label Carpet Bomb, Hrvatski (see next
note), and digital glitch stuff like Mego and Kid606 and Mouse on Mars and many others are doing.
See above for a new and improved remix of this track, released on an excellent local compilation.

• [1999] The Trappist (Raven's Radical Jewish Jungle mix) (1.79MB). Originally a track by "DJ Marzipan" (actually Hrvatski) 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. 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!

• [1998] 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.
• [1998] 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 of the time, 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 µ-ziq can release stuff like that, so can I dammit!

  This track appeared on the limited edition compilation Food to eat music by, released by the one and only Elefant Traks in their very early days, in 1999.