Manimatronic Records

Manimatronic Records is still in its larval stage.

We will present to you, sonic stimuli for the Manimatronic Age.

Manimatronic Records has been a well kept secret for the past couple years... Actually, Manimatronic Records was founded by Jason Hellewell and Steven Chambers years ago, when we were both musically hopeless. We made it up as a fake music label we would tell people we owned, just for our own amusement. We even went to great lengths to come up with a story for where the name came from. We based the name on a fake religion we made up that (in a sense) worships the Manimatron, an all powerful artificially intelligent deity speaking through us to liberate us humans from our flawed nature. Well, as we both pursued our musical and creative talents, Manimatronic Records became a long running inside joke. Eventually, after successfully producing our own music, we decided to turn Manimatronic Records into reality. We have many ideas to fulfill, the technology to make our ideas possible, the talent to support them, and very talented collaborators to help us make them happen.

We at Manimatronic Records feel it is best not to reveal all of our secrets to the public at once. Perhaps the public just isn't ready (or perhaps we aren't... or both rather). Since our work is constantly evolving, and since we are currently a non-profit production company, we have decided to update those few people who know about us via the internet. Most of our past and current work will be available for download and we will be posting journal entries with up-to-date info about our current projects as they progress.

Journal Entries

UPDATE 11-24-2005: Current, future, and unconfirmed projects

I haven't blogged in a while, so I decided it was time to reassure my little fan base that I haven't fired the give up shot. I really have been keeping busy and good things are on the way.

First, I have just about completed my portion of the score music for the film "The Wino Warrior", Directed by Todd Wilber. I contributed some music to his previous film, “The Rich Victim”. The other portion of the Wino Warrior soundtrack will be done by my good friend and collaborator, Sohrab. There will also be a few very talented guests adding parts to the score, but I don't have a list of their names at the moment. The music is really epic, strongly influenced by Ennio Morricone (composer for “The Good the Bad and the Ugly” and literally hundreds of other great films). From what I’ve seen and heard, both the music and the film will turn out to be quite amazing (considering it is a low budget indie-digi-picture). There are a lot of devoted and talented individuals involved in this movie, so I am very excited to see it all come together to completion. I won’t give away anymore details for now…

Next, a bit of disappointing news. The fate of the Yuletide Wranglers is unknown at this point. We aren’t officially broken up or anything… So far, we have completed 3 albums for the past 3 Christmas seasons. I was pretty excited about making our 2005 album a real barn burner. Due to conflicting schedules, projects, lives and various other circumstances, we haven’t been able to get together to get the early start that we originally wanted for this one. The first Yuletide Wranglers Album (2002) was literally written and recorded in 3 days, so there is still hope that we will be able to come up with something this year. However, I am sad to say it won’t be the Wranglers album we imagined it would be. We already have a few songs written. It is just a matter of coordinating recording sessions and fine tuning them to perfection. I’ll keep ya’ll informed if I see a new Wranglers album on the horizon.

For my next big solo work (under the name Automaton Immortalis), I’ve started writing all new material from scratch. I’ve devised a new compositional method that is working pretty well so far. I won’t be sharing any of it for a while, because my method involves multiple revisions. I will be working on all of these songs at the same time (sort of), and they will all be completed roughly at the same time. Within the span of a week or two if all goes well. It will take a while, but I’m very confident in my new method. All of my new material will be mixed in 5.1 surround sound and I plan on coming up with the funds to get the entire work authored in high resolution dvd-audio (dual disc if possible). It will be available for free in low resolution mp3.

There may be other projects in the pipeline, because there are a handfull of other musicians I would like to colaborate with. If anything happens, I'm sure I will blog about it.

So there you have it. Mark my words, 2006 will be a big year for Manimatronic Records.

-Jason

Update (4-28-05): As you may or may not know, ManimatronicRecords.com has been down for quite a while do to a conflict with our previous domain host. I have finally decided to get off me arse and get it working, since we are beginning to work on a new big project. I will try to keep the site as up-to-date as possible, but since no one really comes here it’s almost like I’m just entertaining myself. At least the website is a good place to keep MP3s available to the public, since we still haven’t had a commercial release yet. Feel free to download our entire catalog if you actually have time for that sort of thing. Free music is like free sex in my opinion, except music is disease free. Why not take it if its there for you eh? Don’t hesitate to let me know whether or not you like it.

So, anyway, what is this big project? If you’ll notice on the menu to the left, there is a link the “Inferno Demos.” This is our newest and most exciting project I have worked on thus far. It will be an incredibly epic concept album based on Dante’s inferno. I will be adding demos to the site to be downloaded so people can see what kind of progress we are making. We are in a very early stage at the moment. We are still trying to figure out if we can do the whole thing on a single CD or if we should just break up the whole story into 3 parts so we can present the story with better accuracy and intricacy. We do however, know roughly how we are going to sequence the whole thing from beginning to end. This is the part that I am absolutely thrilled about because we will be structuring it so that it truly feels like a decent into hell and madness.

I will give you a basic idea of how it will be structured, without all the intricate details. First of all, I will be doing sound design for sound effects that fit with each chapter of Dante’s Inferno. Everything from howling wind, tortured souls, snarling beasts, raining fire, etc… We are also trying to outline it so that everything from the overall mood, the atmosphere, the progressions, and the cadence/impedance of tones all seem to get more and more chaotic as you get deeper into the Inferno. As an example, the beginning (Canto I) will be very melodic and tonally pleasing to the ears. As we descend into the Inferno the music gets more rhythmic, heavier, and more unsettling. Towards the center circles of hell the music will become less like music, but spastic riffs and distorted/processed tones. At the climax, where we are basically in the belly of the beast, it will pretty much be a collage of chaotic noise that will make your stomach churn and your mind bend in ways you never imagined (think revelation #9 by the Beatles, but more insane and more hell oriented.)

The idea to create this concept album was originally brought up by Josh Price. Apparently it has been an idea of his for awhile, he just never pursued it and didn’t really have anyone motivated enough to help him do it. When he told me about it I was immediately intrigued and actually jealous that I hadn’t thought of it before. It took us a while to actually get the ball rolling, because we had other projects in mind. Once we actually sat down and thought deeply about the concept, the more epic it became in our minds and the more motivated we became to actually start doing it. Since then, we have been tossing around ideas and now I think we have a definite idea of how we want to do it. We still have a lot of work to do at this point, but we are so obsessed with the idea that we are making a lot of progress.

We haven’t agreed on a name for the band yet (which is less important at the moment), but we are a 5 piece band altogether. We have lead guitar (Josh), rhythm/noise guitar (Cody), bass guitar (Danny), Drums (Sohrab), and myself doing sound design/sequencing/computer aided synthesis/recording/production. There is no lead singer because this will be an entirely instrumental, and fucking epic, concept album.

Well, that is all I am going to reveal for now. I’ll post again when there is more news to share.

-Jason

Update (7-20-04): The first entry is nearly impossible to write without spilling all the beans on projects past and present, so I will start out with only a brief description of what we are currently working on and what we have planned.

For starters, the Space Opera (still unofficially titled) has been my #1 focus right now. Steve and I have been working on some new material for the project, but it is still in it's early stages. We are still outlining themes, figuring out structure, and coming up with the lyrics and dialogs/monologs . We know the concept we are shooting for and we want to make it work perfectly before we start hammering out final recordings. Right now I'm not giving any details as to what our themes or concepts for our music will be, since we are always subject to change..It will involve the universe, space travel, and manimatronics. The main technical idea behind the Space Opera will be that it is going to be mixed in surround sound. When it is completed we plan on performing it in surround. This idea is our motivation to get the project moving forward. I have already mixed 4 instrumental tracks to experiment with and I am very happy to say that it is working out exactly as I planned. When we are ready to post samples of the Space Opera, they will only be in stereo (obviously). I Expect to post one or two new tracks in the next few weeks, whether they are completed or not. I can say, the Space Opera will be THE project to give Manimatronic Records public recognition. Until this project is finished we won't be doing any promoting what-so-ever. The Space Opera will come like a "thief in the night." heh heh! So stay tuned....

The 3rd album by the Yuletide Wranglers is also about to begin production (which is why I am concentrating so much on the Space Opera right now) We plan on doing out first recording sessions sometime in august. At the moment, we are just tossing around ideas and I am taking notes on how to improve production techniques to make this years album even better than last years. We are planning on an epic opening track and less interludes and voice acting between songs ( as funny as they were, we found most people didn't get the inside jokes since most people never heard the first album). The stories will be told more in the songs rather than from around the campfire. We've discovered the perfect Christmas cover song for this year, that we were ashamed to have over looked in the past. Of course I'm not telling what it is..

Anyway.... more Manimatronic news will be posted as soon as I make some.

For questions, comments, or suggestions please contact Jason Hellewell.

jasonhellewell@gmail.com