News : Plan B

News: Feb, 2012

music box (formerly known as Plan B) will be playing the Noise Steady Festival in Paris at La Villa Mais d'Ici on March 24th. I'll loop jockeying with my new and ever improving music box. I'll be playing some new songs as well as some Plan B classics from Like A Ship Sailing.

March 24, 2012
Noise Steady Festival
Térébenthine, music box, Marie Marie Cells + Guests
at Villa Mais d'Ici
77 rue cités, 93300, Aubervilliers
M. Ligne 7 Aubervilliers-Pantin 4 chemins
9PM

News: May, 2011

I'm engineering a record for the french indie rock band Social Square. This is our second time working together. They decided to document the process this time. Check out the videos! Good times!

Social Square in the studio, May 2011 - DAY 1:
Social Square in the studio, May 2011 - DAY 1 from Social Square on Vimeo.

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News: March, 2011

There was recently an article written about me in the Ball Of Wax fanzine. It explains what is a Loop Jockey and why I like it. check it out: http://ballofwax.org/2011/02/glocal-scene-loop-jockey/

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News: January, 2011: This is rapper Fannie Sosa I've been working with...

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News:Dec 1, 2010:

My friend Tom B opened up a new website and posted some old videos he made for songs off the "Like A Ship Sailing" Album. Check out his work. Booya!

you-vs-yr.com

Plan B - Rich and Greedy by Toome B.

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News: Nov 18, 2010

Plan B, Udon Juan and Fannie Soso rocked a Hallowween party a couple weeks ago. Good times all around. Me on my loop jockey table, Leigh on Bass and that's Sofia rap queen extravaganza.

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News: August 16, 2010

My friends Gian de Feo and Roland Benedetti documented some loop jockeying. Building up my skills.

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News: July 1, 2010

NEW PLAN B SINGLE RELEASE AVAILABLE

Release available for download now on Brushed Golden
Available on iTunes, Rhapsody, Puretracks, appliedSB, mTraks, Napster August 17, 2010

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News: June 28, 2010

COMING SOON NEW PLAN B SINGLE!

CROW'S NEST

http://www.fourthcity.net/artists/?a=30

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News: May 27, 2010 Side Project

Since I moved to Paris I've been working on a side-project with my friend Leigh Gable. It's called Thee Very. I play live drums/electronic drums and Leigh plays bass and sings. We recently asked our friend Robert to play keyboards with us. It's a raw and stripped down live band using influences from hip hop, afrobeat, pop, indie, etc. here's our myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/theeverymusic

We'll be playing shows in Paris soon. Check it out.

We played a show back in march. here's a quick little video clip(sorry the audio is totally blown out :):

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News: April 26, 2010 New Studio

We've recently moved back into our practice/recording studio in Alfortville(a neighborhood just outside of Paris). I'm sharing the recording studio with Renaud Person, a french sound engineer who lives in Paris. He calls the studio Organic Studios. I just broke in the new studio this weekend recording a local band called Social Square. I recorded 3 of their songs. It was a lot of fun. They'll be sending the recordings of to Barry Corliss at Master Works in Seattle for mastering.

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News: Feb 24, 2010: Loop Jockeying

Loop Jockeying is my new drug. Well an old favorite in a new package. Leigh and I have each been working on our looper set ups for a while now. I was using a guitar pedal looper before, but it's gotten a bit bigger since(see below).

When I made the first Plan B album Like A Ship Sailing in 2000 - 2001 I was hugely inspired by hip hop and the creativity that gave birth to that movement and also various indie rock bands. I have always been compared to artists like Boards of Canada and other electronic artists, but my biggest inspiration for combining my love for hip hop with my love for indie rock was David Pajo's first 2 solo albums 'M Is The Thirteenth Letter' and 'Aerial M.' They are both mellow, a bit somber, beautiful albums that use looping. Plan B sounds nothing like David Pajo or much hip hop out there, but we're all using loops. The album was a studio project. I never thought how I would perform it. But after the demo's started getting passed around, I was asked to perform. Shit! How? I had a Macintosh "wall street" Laptop at the time(actually it belonged to my work). Ableton Live hadn't even been released yet at this time. I had protools, turntables, my instruments, myself and Bill to play trumpet. So I invited Leigh Gable to come play standup bass with me. I tried playing the keys and drums live, but it didn't have the same ambiance as I'd made in the studio; and i couldn't play everything i wanted to at the same time. I didn't want it to sound like a rock band. I love the snips of sounds cutting off, the layers of melody, etc. I needed a looper, so at first I went about trying to use Protools as a looper; muting and unmuting and effecting. It was more like science than live music. Boo. Then Ableton Live version 1 came out. "what a great idea!" Still I felt a bit microwaved, and didn't quite satisfy. Then my friend Andy Rohrman introduced me to Reason. Also a cool and powerful instrument. All this going on while the album was being released and tours were being toured. I started experimenting with these new tools while touring the u.s. and europe. I was discovering new sounds and new ways to produce music. All was good. It lead to the release of Plan B "I'm The Captain, Where We Going?" in 2007. An album written and recorded completely on a laptop while touring.

After touring and learning all this great new stuff about computers and all I was fascinated but somehow unsatisfied. I set out to make laptops satisfy like playing drums satisfies. i wanted to "rock" my laptop. physically play my laptop. if you've ever seen a laptop musician perform than you can probably relate that it often looks like they are checking their email. there is so much sound coming out of a laptop that there is no real "playing" going on, it is just re-sequencing or djing, or presenting music. so i launched a project in 2005 called "The Laptop Orchestra." See www.laptoporchestra.com for details. My concept was more like a laptop big band, but i wanted to divide the laptop musicians into sections like they do in orchestras. anyways, i wanted laptop musicians to play together, communicate and be spontaneous. The project lasted for a year of intense experimentation and at this time we were unable to succeed with the technology available at the time. there was too much latency. the laptop was not really an instrument. it was a production tool.

Now it's 8 years later and I'm driven back to my original impulse. All live recordings, captured and looped and patch worked together on the fly. No computers. No software. No pre-built sequences or pre-made loops. It has to be spontaneous and live.

So today my instrument is an analog looper using an mpc500, Mixer and several aux effects. I can play songs live, as immediate as playing the guitar. I'm calling it loop jockeying. Now we're talking...

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News: Feb 20, 2010: New site!

Hi welcome to my new website. Simple is pretty sweet.

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