What is "The Merchants of Disquiet Minds?"

A few months ago, some friends and I decided to try a little online musical experiment. I have delved more deeply into the world of digital recording and mixing quite deeply in the last year. I use a program called Reaper which is the absolute bomb IMHO. It allows me to do pretty much anything I ever wanted to do back when all I had was a 4-track cassette deck, a synth, guitar and one really crappy mic. Oh if only I'd had this tool in the early 90's. Might be that rockstar I always wanted to be then. LOL

Anyway, software gushing aside, the program allows me to do many, many things to audio. There is also an excellent book written for users that gets into a lot of audio mixing theory and practice along with direct instructions for how to apply these things in Reaper. The book is called ReaMix. Look it up, it's worth it.

No seriously, I'm done pimping for Reaper now!!

So my buddies and I decided to see what would happen if a few of them just started sending me random clips of audio and let me assemble it into something new. We agreed on a tempo and a key, but beyond that, anything was fair game and I would try to use as much of it as possible. Nobody heard anything the others were doing either, that way they wouldn't be influenced by what someone else had already recorded.

I got a rather eclectic range of banjos, bass, accordion, middle eastern drumming, guitar, harmonica and a spoken piece that was a friend's audition for a Batman audio drama!

The result is a bizarre middle eastern/ banjo/slasher flick/thing. We have called the group for this project "The Merchants of Disquiet Minds" and the piece is entitled "Hush, Bruce"

Enjoy! And please let me know what you think!

Credits:

Mike Chambers - Electric Guitars, Djembe, Undead Squeezebox and Banjo
Aaron Einhorn - Spoken Word
Chad Wilson - Bass Guitar and Harmonica
Tim Brown - Digital Sound Wrangler and Overlord