337is (three three seven is): Recent Episodes
337is (three three seven is)
heart-open & earth-honoring synthesist & field-recordist journalist & dreamtime walker visualist & connector The seemingly limitless manifestations that are observed during improvisational performance of electronic audiovisual materials drive me to seek collaborative interactions between compositional systems, machines, and myself. In holding space to facilitate an emergence of indeterminate phenomenon through analog synthesis, feedback systems, and field recordings, I share elements from multiple sources to celebrate shapes, patterns, and spaces. I hold BAs in Art and English from Andrews University, and am currently enrolled in the Electronic Integrated Arts MFA at Alfred University. I was an artist in residency in 2017 at Signal Culture in Owego New York and in 2015 at Sachaqa Centro De ARTE, San Roque Peru. My visual works, and live electronic improvisational performances, have been featured across Peru, at The MuseumsQuartier in Vienna, and throughout the Midwest of America.
Note: Much of the work here is subtle in nature and I encourage you to listen via headphones or using a decent system whenever possible. Most computer speakers will not reveal the tracks fully. Unless otherwise noted in the track description, everything is recorded direct to stereo track live and on the fly with no overdubs. Thanks for stopping by and listening!
View video for this piece here:https://vimeo.com/1055001377?share=copy#t=0This improvised composition is an audiovisualization for synthesizer which considers two consciousnesses and imagines awaking between one and another. I can't firmly state which of the two is more asleep and find myself more interested in the peripheries of the two states. I'm familiar with these edges as they often cue me into Dream.I followed these steps for this piece: Step 1: You are going to record a piece of music intended for someone to listen to almost immediately upon waking up. Think about your mornings, and what a more optimal morning might entail.Step 2: Consider a scenario in which someone wakes up and, rather than look at their work or check the news, they take a period of time to just get centered. Think about how long you might want this to take, say three minutes, or five minutes, or twenty minutes.Step 3: Consider the stages of awakening, from quiet to loud, from slow to fast (or a middling pace), from simple to complex. Perhaps the sounds go full circle, returning to where they started.Step 4: Consider what sound at the end — a gong, a bell, a bird call, etc. — might signal that the waking process has concluded.Step 5: Having reflected on the topics brought up in the instructions thus far, record a track that might guide someone slowly into consciousness upon waking each morning.More on the 684th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Early Bird — The Assignment: Record not so much an alarm as a guided wakening — at https://disquiet.com/0684/
Resonant/reverberant space is something I've thought about a lot since high school, but I never have dragged mics and equipment into a concrete stairwell or washroom before today.I work at Alfred University in New York and our division of Expanded Media in the School of Art & Design has a four story stairwell which feeds the back of house to two of our galleries and the sonic/video arts studios. I set out four Tascam DR-100 field recorders and captured the sound of my wallet being dropped from the highest point to the lowest. In the accompanying artwork you can see two pictures of this stairwell (one from the bottom looking up [the bottom left picture], and one from the top looking down [the top right picture]). My calves always tighten up a bit at the top.For the less reverberant space, I chose an old storage closet we're in the midst of transforming into a vocal/studio booth. It has rubberized floors, and a much lower drop-ceiling. I placed the quartet of recorders in the corners of the room, and then dropped my wallet from a much shorter height to the floor. You can see two images from this room set up in the other half of the cover art.All of this for less than five seconds of audio total. In the first two seconds you'll hear the initial hit of the wallet, followed by a second quieter hit after it bounced in the concrete stairwell. At four seconds you hear the other room with a much more muted single drop (which to my ears sounds a bit like a champagne cork popping, but I've had champagne maybe twice in my life so I probably don't really know what that sounds like.)More on the 683rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Space Shot — The Assignment: Combine reverberant and non-reverberant — at https://disquiet.com/0683/
Working with Martin Howse's TOAD circuit for this as the description of "resonant, clanging and metallic sounds" made me think of bells. By virtue of patching it with other ERD modules to allow chaos a more firm grip on the proceedings, I imagined the resultant sputtering to be in some sort of alignment for the deconstruction of a peel o' bell."TOAD can also model a mass-spring-damper system, or series of damped oscillations, which also can be used as a state variable filter.Here the equation is: x’’=1/m(-(Dx’ + sx) with m as mass, D as damping coefficient and s as springiness. This is a simple equation to begin with, and can produce resonant, clanging and metallic sounds.x represents the vertical displacement of the spring, x’ is the first derivative of x (which would be speed) and x’’ is the second derivative (which would be acceleration). We patch the equation by feeding the lower derivatives (x’ and x) produced by the first two integrators into the collector. Paying attention to norms, this can be seen in the next diagram. We can use the first multiplier pair as VCA for our input"Disquiet Junto Project 0682: Unring a BellThe Assignment: What if you could?There is just one step to this project. The idea that one cannot “unring a bell” is a fairly common saying, at least in English. But what if you could? What might it sound like? And what use might the unrung bell serve in the making of music. Please record a track in which you try to unring a bell.More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/
I couldn't help myself. Long Live Oswald!Rinsed and rung back with GRM Envolution. Not available for download for hopefully obvious reasons.More on the 682nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Unring a Bell — The Assignment: What if you could? — at https://disquiet.com/0682/
Recorded June 20 2022 @ 43.62237° N, 70.20818° WWhen visiting the Portland Head Light near Cape Elizabeth Maine, the sound of the surf below the lighthouse enticed me to listen closer so I crept downward slowly passing through geologic ages as I descended. The bedrock supporting the lighthouse belongs to the Cushing Formation which "is more resistant to weathering than the neighboring rock formations, and is why it forms such prominent rocky headlands and islands." Other types of mineral material is present amidst the formation, likely deposited through volcanic activity:"Certain minerals from the Cushing Formation, carefully collected, processed, selected and analyzed in a US Geological Survey laboratory, have been dated at approximately 471 million years old (±3 million), which is in the Ordovician Period. This means that the volcanic eruptions that produced the Cushing Formation occurred before the Himalayas or Alps had formed, before the Atlantic Ocean existed, before the dinosaurs lived, and before the first land plants had evolved. The volcanos that must have existed near here at that ancient time have long since been eroded; all that is left is a layer of volcanic debris preserved in the rocks."I could personally see and touch the time lines literally carved in stone with striations, fractures, and deposits intermingling like they'd always been there together. But the various rocks and minerals had found their way to this spot at differing points spanning hundreds of millions of years. The descent felt like I was going deeper into deeptime.At the bottom I encountered a beach of basalt and gneiss stones all larger than my hand. Growing up near the Great Lakes in Michigan, I'm used to some wave action at a beach, but here, near the ocean, the tides produce significant swells and motion and I was stunned to hear these large rocks moving around and bumping into each other creating mesmerizing sounds as the surf rearranged them on the beach swell after swell. The rocks vibrating together can be heard more clearly after the 1:10 mark of this recording and close listeners will also hear evidence of humans and sparrows talking along with the ever present fog signal marking time. You can read more about the Balsalt Dike geological feature that creates the conditions for this auditory phenomena in the following link (which is also where the quoted material above comes from) :https://digitalmaine.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1297&context=mgs_publications#:~:text=Seen%20best%20on%20a%20clean,to%20the%20minute%20mineral%20fragments.More on the 643rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Stone Out of Focus — The Assignment: Make music inspired by a poem — at https://disquiet.com/0643/This week’s project is based on a text by Yoko Ono, originally published in her book Grapefruit60 years ago, back in 1964.
More on the 636th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Left (1 of 3) — The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio — at https://disquiet.com/0636/
Audiovisual processing, composition, and Field Recoding by Leslie Rollins (337is).
Obscure & Relevant 2021, (CC BY-NC 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
Source sound material gathered from field recordings shared by:
[disquiet0516] outside in #1 https://soundcloud.com/howthenightcame/disquiet0516-outside-in-1/comment-1554004735 Courtesy of howthenightcame
Radio Info (disquiet0517) https://soundcloud.com/user-130801280/radio-info-disquiet0517 Courtesy of user-130801280 (Noodle Twister)
More on this 518th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Inside Out (Co/Exist 3 of 3) (The Assignment: Combine sounds of nature and civilization) — at: https://disquiet.com/0518/
This is the third and final stage of a three-part project sequence. You needn’t have participated in either of the two preceding stages to do this one. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0518-out-and-in-co-exist-3-of-3/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
Audio field recording captured by Leslie Rollins (337is).
Obscure & Relevant 2021, (CC BY-NC 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
Living rurally has its perks except for when one is listening for sounds of civilization ... need something of the "natural world?" No problem! I'm swimming in it. Need some industrial sounds? A little more challenging ... especially when I travel to an even more remote destination in the hills of Pennsylvania to be with family. I wasn't sure what I was going to be able to capture for sounds of civilization as Amish buggies count as traffic noise, but they don't really have a predictable rush hour to make recording them easy. So I was surprised and delighted when I saw this family working their corn field on the side of the road just out of town. I stood less than 10 feet away from their machines as they drove by and looked at me like I was a bit of a fish out of water. I waved at them and they waved back. Mission accomplished!
More on this 517th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Inside Out (Co/Exist 2 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of civilization) — at: https://disquiet.com/0517/
This is the second of a three-part project sequence. You can participate in all three parts, or any two of the three, or even just any one of them. Part one began on November 18 and ended on November 22, part two began on November 25, and part three will begin on December 2. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0517-inside-out-co-exist-2-of-3/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
Field Recording captured by Leslie Rollins (337is).
A migrating flock of Canada geese surprised and delighted me when I was in the field capturing video footage of a pond surface near my home in Alfred New York. I didn't have my rig completely set up and ready when I began to hear them coming in the distance and kicked into audio field recording mode with the gear I had. The video is rough as a result, and the audio is a bit as well. But, it captures the moment nicely with their sounds and splashing echoing off the surface of the water.
More on this 516th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Outside In (Co/Exist 1 of 3) (The Assignment: Record a minute or two of nature) — at: https://disquiet.com/0516/
This is the first of a three-part project sequence. You can participate in all three parts, or any two of the three, or even just any one of them. Part one began on November 18, part two will begin on November 25, and part three will begin on December 2. Thanks to Alan Bland and Mark Lentczner for having proposed the project.
More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0516-outside-in-co-exist-1-of-3/
There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to marc@disquiet.com for Slack inclusion.
Audio synthesis improvisation performed and captured by Leslie Rollins (337is).
Obscure & Relevant 2021, (CC BY-NC 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
Thanks to @timedroplet for the inspiring image.
Audio synthesis improvisation performed and captured by Leslie Rollins (337is).
Obscure & Relevant 2021, (CC BY-NC 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
During the Peace Walk on Sunday, June 7, 2020, all who gathered took a knee in front of the Berrien Springs High School while the walk’s student organizers read out a list of names of black lives taken through brutality and murder by police and vigilantes . After each name was read, the crowd of over 1,000 people responded with cries of "I can't breathe!" When the students reached George Floyd's name on the list and read it out, again the gathered people cried out "I can't breathe" and then fell silent for eight minutes and forty-six seconds—the length of time that Derek Chauvin kept his knee pressed to the neck of George Floyd while murdering him. During this silence, the sound of an arial drone could be heard buzzing overhead, along with the distant hum of vehicles on the village’s streets.
Two days ago, PLATO & the Western Tradition (who have been creating as a Postmodern Improvisation Ensemble for more than 30 years), raised their creative voices in search of justice and equality by posting this original track:
https://soundcloud.com/plato-3/plato-no-7336-against-brutality
In this contribution to “Weaving Indra’s Net” I have explored a new node through the addition of a field recording I gathered during the Peace Walk. In listening to this new strand you can hear the calling out of each name, but miss the real-time immediate response of “I can’t breathe”. The first time you hear the full call and response of a name and “I can’t breathe” comes after the reading of George Floyd’s name. This is immediately followed by the 8:46 section of amplified ambient silence, where in the first moments you can just make out a voice commenting that “someone has a drone.” Gradually PLATO’s meditation rejoins this amplified silence. After the 8:46 portion, an electronically re-coded version of the crowd’s responses are heard one after another in trio form to conclude the piece. The left channel is sped up by 13 percent and the right channel is slowed by 13 percent, while the middle channel plays out in real time at exactly the pace of the unified crowd responding.
———————————— Please seek out organizations committed to demanding justice for All and support them with your action and donations. There are many possibilities for this including:
https://www.gofundme.com/f/georgefloyd
https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory
https://www.naacpldf.org ————————————
This recording includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 7336, ‘Against Brutality.’
If you would like to participate in the “Weaving Indra’s Net” project, please see below:
PLATO & The Western Tradition invites others in the Electronic Music Community to participate in the creation of an on-line compilation called “Weaving Indra’s Net.” Here are the “rules”:
- Download from @plato-3 any of the improvisations by PLATO & The Western Tradition that capture your attention.
- Use some or all of what you download as a part of your own music making.
- Post your piece to SoundCloud, and post the SoundCloud link on Plato’s FaceBook page: www.facebook.com/PLATOandTheWesternTradition
- Please comply with our Creative Commons attribution requirement (see creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) by including in your description of your piece this language: “Includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 2811, ‘Limitless Geometries’”. (You should substitute the number and title of the piece that you are using.)
- PLATO will organize and maintain the compilation as a playlist titled “Weaving Indra’s Net” on the PLATO SoundCloud site.
Please post any questions or comments on the FaceBook page listed above.
Audio synthesis improvisation performed and captured by Leslie Rollins (337is).
Obscure & Relevant 2020, (CC BY-NC 3.0 US): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
An exploration of GRM Tools Band Pass filters using a field recording featuring a Sandhill crane calling. My home state of Michigan has proposed a hunting season for this magnificent bird, and the thought of that possibly passing sickens me. The mix was originally in 5.1 and I'm not thrilled with the stereo conversion. More for me to learn and play with I guess. While this may not be the most gentle sounds to lull one back to sleep, it'd totally fit for me. Bird sounds always relax me, and these sound like they're deep in the night.
More on this 350th weekly Disquiet Junto project (Selected Insomniac Works / The Assignment: Make very quiet music for very late at night for very fragile psyches) at:
https://disquiet.com/0350/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0350-selected-insomniac-works/
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet to join in.
Unaltered Field Recording with Sinusoidal Partial Editing Analysis and Hand-Drawn Resynthesis 2018
Audio portion of improvised audiovisual composition. This audio drove movement, shape, and color variations in the resultant video (see Video link above for the full combination of sound and vision.)
@disconcert_1 has added a rich and gooey additional layer to this and you can enjoy the mumblings and twitterings here: https://soundcloud.com/disconcert_1/ritual-of-the-second-chair-w-337is-disquiet0316
I love these multi-part Juntos and scrambled to get something together in time to participate. I recorded a brief awakening of my altar with my singing bowl, shacapas, and bell. I recorded a slow motion video at 240 FPS on my iPhone, and used Sennheiser Ambeo binaural recording headphones to capture the slowed sounds. I focused primarily on creating sounds on the left side of the mic array, and I mastered to mono focusing on the left image to leave plenty of room for the full trio.
More on this 315th weekly Disquiet Junto project (First Chair: Record the first third of a trio) at:
https://disquiet.com/0315/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0315-first-chair/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
NOTE If you're interested in more details on the process of assemblage I used for this head here for further information/discussion: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0302-gronkytonk/
More on this 302nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Gronkytonk: Record a single in the genre introduced in Malka Older’s novel Infomacracy) at:
https://disquiet.com/0302/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0302-gronkytonk/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Photo associated with this project is by Michael Banabila. It’s used via Flickr thanks to a Creative Commons license:
flic.kr/p/EqsRd5
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
If you want to see what all of this ruckus is about, visit the Video page linked above. The video is the end product. This audio is simply a stepping stone for getting there.
The sound was a means to an end for generating the video. If you watch the video, I would suggest watching the piece with the sound muted. The goal of the Disquiet Juno this week was to create a combination which is less than the constituent parts. We were instructed to utilize portions of the first ten tracks on Lee Rosevere's sublimely beautiful release entitled "5 Minute Meditations" and to combine them to create a single five minute piece which was "something even more ethereal, more ambient, more artfully threadbare."
I was immediately interested in not doing anything to the source material except use it to create a video synthesis feedback system. I did this by taking the full ten tracks and putting them on my Thonk/Music Thing Radio Music module. I then utilized multiple random generators to scan through the folder with the samples, pitching them up and down, and staggering their start and reset points. As the results were very mid-range and treble heavy, I needed to get some bass frequencies in play so I parallel processed the audio through my Make Noise QMMG in low-pass mode. From their I ran the results through my Modcan Dual Delay, and then that whole chain was piped into my LZX Sensory Translator. I took the resultant 5 bands of EQ impulses from the ST and they drove all of the synthesis patterns in this piece. Finally, I recorded a pass in mono and then layered a reversed copy of that track in the opposite stereo channel.
This process was incredibly labor intensive as I'd tried two previous methods using just the source material to drive the video synthesis, but the frequency content was too quiet and too narrow of a range to get good results. By manipulating and massaging the material radically, I was able to get something happening in the visual realm. But, I don't love how my processed sounds feel compared to the original. Hence my suggestion to watch with the sound muted. Just know it was Lee's sounds which created everything at play in my piece.
More on this 301st weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Artfully reduce an album to something less than itself”) at:
disquiet.com/0301/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0301-parts-sum/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Image associated with this project is the cover of the Lee Rosevere album 5 Minute Meditations, which was the source audio. The music and image are used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
More from Lee Rosevere, who is based in Vancouver, BC, at
twitter.com/LeeRosevere freemusicarchive.org/music/Lee_Rosevere/ happypuppyrecords.ca
Happy 300th Marc and all Disquiet Junto members! What a milestone! I've spent the past several months in the realms of video synthesis and haven't been creating much in the audio realm, but I couldn't miss being a part of this celebration. For my three instruments I focused on two within my modular (four notes from the Patch Chord driven by a DPO, and a voice of four notes from a Mutable Instruments quartet) and one from my Two Voice (where I used the classic cheat of tuning each of the four oscillators to serve as one of the notes in my chosen four note chord) ... all were played and manipulated live on the fly. I chose the intervals as described in Wagner's so-called "Tristan Chord" and played those four notes using the three instruments. Some have suggested that Wagner's use of this chord signaled the end of Western tonal music. Obviously he did a lot more with it in his opera than I do here.
More on this 300th weekly Disquiet Junto project (3 chords x 100 seconds) at:
https://disquiet.com/300/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-the-300th-consecutive-weekly-project/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Duet for reed-less bass clarinet and live electronics featuring Jason Gresl. You can learn more about, and connect with @jason-gresl here:
http://claricello.com/
Collaboration for reed-less bass clarinet and electronics featuring Jason Gresl. You can learn more about, and connect with @jason-gresl here:
http://claricello.com/
@steve-vercelloni chopped and skrew'd reworking of https://soundcloud.com/337is/breathfolding-for-melodica brings a glorious stompy energy infused with cosmically psychedelic melodies. All the sparkles and tingles are lined up and dance beautifully in his hands. Thanks Steve!
Drone prepared in G with DPO wave folded with VCM. Played melodica in G-minor and used PTG as an envelope follower. Never touched the patch once it was set up and all changes derived from pitch and volume of melodica playing.
Synthesized vocalizations to be played with a manipulation of selections from Joan La Barbara's 73 Poems 1993. Texts by Kenneth Goldsmith.
With a friendly nod to Laurie Anderson, my wife improvises a journey of loss and discovery while rifling through our "other utensils" drawer. Everything referenced here actually resides in this drawer (including the three ice cream scoops and the llama-shaped bottle opener), and this recording is representative of the exercise of searching through layers of ephemera in both physical reality and within one's own mind.
More on this 265th weekly Disquiet Junto project, “Kitchen Music: Record a piece of music that uses items from just one drawer”:
http://disquiet.com/0265/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/kitchen-music-disquiet-junto-project-0265/6244
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Field Recoding (note lack of “r” in “co()ding”) is a process I utilize to resituate field recordings into new surroundings. Most often utilizing my own field recordings with my modular synthesizer. Often, the first step in Recoding is re-recording the source Field Recording inside my studio space. I approach these inside recording sessions just as I would my standard outside field recording sessions, meaning that the environment and sounds within it are very deliberately chosen and engaged with. In the case of this piece, I played the original .wav file directly from a Dropbox folder on my iPhone 7+ which was sat within a Tibetan Singing Bowl. The singing bowl’s resonance, excited by the iPhone’s speakers, was captured by a contact microphone attached to the outside of the bowl. The low drone heard in the left channel at the start of the piece is the sound of a large tractor clearing debris in the park a block from my home. Its rumbling travelled through the ground, up the walls of my home, and vibrated the desk that the bowl and phone sat on. At approximately the 1:18 moment of the piece, I turn on my own vacuum which was recorded to the right side of the sound field utilizing a coil pick-up attached to the exterior of the vacuum, revealing the inner workings of the electromagnetic field running through it. The contact mic picked up a bit of the ambient sound of my vacuum as well. At approximately 3:33 of the piece, I turn off my vacuum and allow the original recording to play out. Finally, we return to the low drone provided by the tractor. The title of the piece is a play on Jeff Koon’s “New Hoover Convertibles (1981)” I’m always awed by the sheer dimensions of places like Southwell Minster (where the original vacuum recording was captured). The sense of literal space is overwhelming on a cosmic level. I like the no-nonsense idea of somebody vacuuming such a space. Moving the air (dare I say “Spirit”) in a very honest and humble way. My piece attempts to bridge the space between my sacred space and another. I situated the Recoding within the bowl, a sacred object which is precious to me. In Koons work, he’s elevated something which could be seen as “lowly” to a new, higher station. A redemption of sorts.
Original source recording courtesy of Cities and Memory:
"Vacuum cleaning going on inside the cavernous interior of Southwell Minster cathedral - some fascinating reverb and a bit of a different sacred space sound."
I've been snakebitten creatively since before American Thanksgiving. This is the first new work I've been able to complete since 12/07/16. Nearly a month gone in 2017 and nothing to show for it. Incredibly disheartening. I'd love to be able to time travel to a time when my creativity flows more freely.
This piece starts with a ticking clock which is immediately stopped indicating that the passage of time has changed. I approach a buffer of this sound created by the Synchrodyne and coax it back and forth in a very tape sort of fashion. I can only represent this to you linearly. I wish I could present it more as a hole one could fall through.
More on this 264th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Time Travel: Record a piece of music that plays with the perception of time”:
http://disquiet.com/0264/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/music-for-time-travelers-disquiet-junto-project-0264/6157/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Source audio features "Snow Falls" from "Three Voices for Joan La Barbara" by Morton Feldman.
Experimenting with a new selection of modules for my portable improvisation case: https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/370960
I rarely go straight noise. I experience multiple streams of sound data as noise. These streams can be comprised of un-noisey sorts of sounds. But it's the density that makes me feel it as noise. That, and any sort of feedback feels like noise to me. So this piece is a combination of those characteristics. I find working in a modular environment that things can get overly dense too easily in my hands. I have to really work to breathe some air into my patches, and that's how I start this piece ... light, and not too dense. Then, I gradually pull out all of the stops and let it wobble it's way through to the end.
More on this 257th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Remember Noisevember: Make some noise” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0257/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0257-remember-noisevember/5549
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Art and Picture Collection, The New York Public Library. "Mattathias's zeal." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47e4-37e5-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
A live field recording gathered during the "Michigan Festival of Sacred Music" of the “Friends of the Gamelan” ensemble from Chicago Illinois performing at the Central Branch of the Kalamazoo Public Library in Kalamazoo Michigan on Saturday October 29 2016.
For more information, and to support the ensemble, visit the following pages:
http://www.chicagogamelan.org
http://mfsm.us
http://www.kpl.gov/default.aspx
Captured at 12:19 AM on Saturday October 29 in Wolf's Prairie Park: 41.9415899,-86.3337762
Come along on an early morning walk through Wolf's Prairie Park during high winds. Thrill to the sounds of the leaves shaking intensely. Marvel at the musical prowess of the aluminum flagpole next to the Jesuit Mission marker. Stomp along with the rhythmic steps of your host. And finally, find repose on his front porch with beautiful chimes.
My addition to the @glenn-sogge composition: https://soundcloud.com/glenn-sogge/game-on-gamelan-boson-spin
Which is a rework of the @boson_spin creation: https://soundcloud.com/boson_spin/collab-base-track
Thank you both for the inspiration and fine offerings.
Wasn't in a Raymond Scott sort of mood though I love his work ... this contribution may well be a hold over from the last junto ... it's hard to leave phases behind.
When I'm at my most vulnerable, minimalism soothes me greatly. Perhaps this new baby will find a similar feeling in listening to this.
This is a simple 4 note motif sequenced for one of the TVP's voices. I played the other voice live in realtime, warts and all, and this adds a human touch that I know I crave, and it seems likely that most babies do too.
More on this 250th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Soothing Sounds for Junto: Make some peaceful music for an infant child” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0250/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/soothing-sounds-disquiet-junto-project-0250/4927
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
I love Minimalism in all forms. It's been an omnipresent force throughout my entire life. The American branch of musical Minimalism, with the trinity of Adams, Glass, and Reich probably does make up my own personal liturgy. As I dug deeper into the that vein and discovered the forerunners like Riley, Young, and next generation contributors like Bryars and Nyman, the world of Minimal music kept expanding. Ironic.
So, Reich is one of my favorites and I know his music intimately. I knew exactly what I wanted to do in this Junto; sort of a mashup between his percussive pieces like "Music for Pieces of Wood," and "Drumming," and something rooted in his phase works like Piano of Violin Phase. For my source material I selected a portion of this field recording that I gathered in Peru:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/conjunto-tipico-sensacion?in=337is/sets/field-recordings
I then set out to create a basic loop which took longer than I anticipated. Once I had the basic loop, I copied it multiple times and rendered it as a new file. I then took two instances of that file and adjusted the playback speed of the second iteration to be slightly slower than the first. I could definitely hear phasing, but it wasn't as precise as Reich's work and I was disappointed in the results. So I turned to slowing things down a lot. When I did that, the phase relationship was almost completely obscured. I can still hear a bit of the phasing in the syrupy pings and whirls of the radically pitched down material. I'm pretty unsatisfied with this as a piece of music related to Reich, but am reasonably soothed with it as simply a piece of music.
Doing this Junto revealed to me how much I don't know about my DAWs. I tried to do this in both Ableton and Reaper and struggled mightily to free the individual tracks from the project's root tempo. It seems like the software is explicitly designed to mesh everything into compatible rhythms. It was hard to free them from the tyranny of tempo.
More on this 249th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Wish the minimalist composer Steve Reich a happy birthday” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0249/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/happy-birthday-steve-reich-disquiet-junto-project-0249/
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Thanks again to @autumn-drones for suggesting our collaboration and for being such a generous host. This is the third and final track culled from our time together in Tim's studio. As with the other two, this was a live improvisation created on the fly by the two of us.
Over the weekend I had the pleasure of meeting @yellow-salamandr-7 in the real-time waking world. We attended an awesome synthesizer build workshop together in Chicago. At the end of the workshop we each had completed our builds of the HYVE Hybrid Octave Touch Synthesizer. You can read more about the unique touch driven polyphonic synth here:
https://www.facebook.com/HyveSynthesizer/
The timing of my acquisition of this instrument was fortuitous as when I think of waltzes, accordions aren't far behind. The arrangement of the HYVE reminds me a lot of a concertina and playing little parts of waltzes flowed pretty easily for me.
A struggle that I had in rendering this is my not having the perfect audio cable to provide a pristine path to my front end. The HYVE uses a 1/8 single stereo output (like a traditional headphone out) and I don't currently have the requisite cable to accommodate that output in stereo. Stereo is really important on the HYVE as each key is split in half and depending on if your finger is on the left, the right, or somewhere in between, its placement determines the placement of sound within the stereo field. This can produce lovely vibratos and tremolos with a bit of wiggling. Without the cable I was left with a poor quality usb speaker that takes headphone input, and then mic'ing that. This causes an interesting aggressiveness of the sound as a result of the lower quality signal path. Please don't blame the HYVE's sound engine for this ... my recording of it is to blame.
The visual score was fun to interpret in real time. I ran through it four times in total for this performance with each rendition veering into more free associations implied by the movement I see in the images. I utilized the open upside down U used in the score as my home base, and any time I ran across it, I pulsed my selected chord more deliberately. Like ringing a bell to draw attention to that spot, and in my head creating the "Pah Pahs" of a classic waltz's "Oom Pah Pah." All of the other images led me to influence the central column of the chord progressions. Moving either from the right to the left, the left to the right, or up and down the central column. In the last read through I let those motions be more fluid and connected to each other by eagerly swirling my fingertips around and through the columns. Great fun!
More on this 247th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Interpret as a graphic score an illustration drawn upon waking by Lark Pien” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0247/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/a-cartoon-graphic-score-disquiet-junto-project-0247/4647
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
(Modified) Image associated with this project is the (unintended, but used with approval) graphic score by Lark Pien.
@goiks suggested:
"I'd love to hear plucked string or other mutable rings sounds. I'd like the trigger for those sounds to also trigger an envelope that goes to the effect instead of the onboard lfo (both abrupt and medium attack), about 75% towards the lofi and wet settings."
Turing providing sequence, transposed by Pressure Points. Clock from one side of Maths, routed into other side of Maths to utilize AD envelope into ILFJ instead of its own internal LFO. Settings on ILFJ were usually 75 % for wet/dry and comp/lofi, occasionally full dry to reveal raw sound from Elements. Played with the rise and fall times of the AD envelope feeding the ILFJ. That, in combination to adding more and more Space in the Element's model created a lot of interesting textures. Any clicking you hear is a result of too hot of an envelope from Maths, but even that produces interesting artifacts. What can I say? Even when I try to do strings, they come out weird. Well, prepared piano is sort of a string right?!
For a video featuring ILFJ doing its thing to a drum loop, look here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2YiNFa7rx4
Here's a link to my modulargrid layout. Let me know the specific patch you'd like to hear and I'll give it a go if I can figure out your patch notes. :-)
https://www.modulargrid.net/e/racks/view/192609
This weekend was Knobcon and I was running top speed throughout the three days with my eyes and ears wide open. Synths and sounds EVERYWHERE. :-) And even more importantly, friends, old and new, also there sharing in the excitement. I got to meet fellow contributor Glenn Sogge in person and we talked at length about everything. It was soo cool to cement a friendship formed through the Disquiet Junto with shared time experienced together in the waking world. I thought about this prompt while I was there and found myself talking a lot about the Disquiet Junto with others. Some knew about it and responded favorably. Others who were unfamiliar expressed curiosity.
The song that immediately leapt into my mind for this is the great Raymond Scott composition "Powerhouse;" www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaC0vNLdLvY as it clearly describes the feel of industrialized activity through its motorik compulsion. Activity often implies rhythm to me. So of course I had very little sense of rhythm in my piece. The only nod to rhythm might be felt in the scalar leaps moving throughout the improvised scale. I felt very much like Terry Riley and could easily play/hear this piece looped for hours in a day, gently prodding me forward while providing a bed to rest in from time to time.
The only sound source in this is my trusty Oberheim Matrix-6 which I got when I was 15. One of the voices gave out years ago, and I took it in to be repaired. The person trying to fix it didn't know what they were doing and the store they worked at eventually went out of business. When I collected the synth back from them, I found it producing no sound at all. Finally, at last year's Knobcon, I took it and my friends Logan Erickson ( @low-gain )and Eric Wistrand put a plan into place to rehabilitate it for me. Eric donated another Matrix-6 which could be scavenged for parts and Logan set out to repair my board. This year it returned to me and it purrs like a kitten now. I was so eager to get my hands on it again and I sat down to create a patch from scratch and played for a few hours. This is a few minutes from those hours. :-)
More on this 245th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Write a piece of music for getting things done, suitable for playing on repeat” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0245/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
llllllll.co/t/make-some-practical-music-disquiet-junto-project-0245/4445
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
I dedicate this recording to @glenn-sogge who has a huge heart for sounds and a great ear for composition.
Recorded 09/04/16 starting at 6:20 AM EST in Mud Lake Bog from this location: 41.829888, -86.434760
Yesterday I attended the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi's Kee-Boon-Mein-Kaa ("I have quit picking huckleberries") Pow Wow on their land in Dowagiac Michigan. I was deeply moved by their drumming, singing, and dancing. I find their notion of inter-tribal participation particularly inspiring, where multiple cultures share their traditions in harmony.
Often, in my field recordings I struggle with what I feel like are intrusions from the human domain, spoiling an otherwise pristine natural environment. In my mind's ear I can imagine what these places must have sounded like before human development encroached on the edges. Mud Lake Bog is a reclaimed dump which was rehabilitated in the 1980s as a preserve. It is close to human settlements, roads, and flight paths. At first I was annoyed by the sounds of vehicles impinging on the sounds of nature. But then I remembered I drove there in my car and contributed to this sort of sound in the environment. I then thought of the inter-tribal dance procedure where different groups of drummers and singers take turns playing for the dancers. Often, there is a specific song requested but occasionally they open it up to "singer's choice" where the group chooses whatever song from their repertoire best fits the moment. Maybe humans aren't great singers in their contribution to environmental sounds, but they do contribute. I am surprised in this recording how at times there almost seems to be calls and responses between the wildlife and human generated sounds. I can hope for a harmony of sorts.
Migwéch
Thank you to @autumn-drones for not only maintaining an absolutely splendid polysynth collection, but for inviting mere mortals such as myself into the inner sanctum of your studio for collaborations like this.
This track was created live, on the fly with myself and Tim Stoneberg a week ago today. He controlled his fleet of polysynths from the Cirklon while I played his Prophet-6 live on the fly. This track has bumps and warts, but it definitely feels how I experience the original Vanegelis score for Bladerunner. I associate the mighty Yamaha CS 80 with that original score, and by God, the Prophet-6 has a bit of that lineage in it. An instrument that is a pure joy to play.
More on this 243rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Share the best track from your audition tape for Blade Runner 2” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0243/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0243-synth-trial/4288
There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.
Thank you to @autumn-drones for being a gracious host, a fine collaborator, and an amazing caretaker of synthetic technologies that would make your head spin. Check out his releases:
https://autumndrones.bandcamp.com/
So this week's Junto asks us to share a trick or technique that we utilize with a particular piece of hard/software. My response might be perceived as a willful disregarding of the spirit of this task, but I'm completely serious in my desire to share one of the most important aspects of music creation for me; namely face-to-face collaborations for real-time improvisations. I get such a boost of creative energy by working with other individuals who are consciously creating and responding to our shared space. The improvisational nature makes for an invigorating propulsion, and having another person helping to keep the figurative balls up in the air whilst juggling our way through means one can take more and more risks in development. Are their bumps and blemishes? Of course. But there are also moments approaching the sublime.
Find someone to create with live. Have them come to your place. Go to their place. Take a few pieces of gear. Don't overthink it. Jump in and let it all hang out. Even if the results aren't up to your normal standards, I guarantee you'll learn something new about how you create. If you're fortunate enough to have access to a person like Timothy Stoneberg (aka autumn drones) all the better for you because you'll have even more opportunity to learn through explorations.
This piece is the first one that we knocked out and we started it within minutes of sorting out our audio/control routings. Timothy's Cirklon was his co-brain in this, and they fed MIDI to my Two-Voice Pro. This made my instrument behave in a way that I'd not encountered before. There were certain things that I couldn't do that I normally can ... like octave shift the voices up and down with the press of a button. This meant I would be locked into a relatively narrow pitch range which was an unexpected limitation. So I had to work to change things that I could control, like timbres. I also stepped out and did more raw oscillator tunings that I would normally do, sweeping the dials up and down to at least partially change the pitched zone.
As the song proceeded, I found myself fatiguing of some of the repetitions, and I was keen to try introduce rhythmic variations. I began opening and closing the envelope stages more aggressively, and using the knobs more like I used to approach DJing with a mixer's crossfader while cutting and scratching. This opened up a whole other area for exploration. Finally, being synced to a shared global clock, I discovered I could still adjust my sequence's length anywhere from 1-16 steps, and uneven numbers would create interesting results when played against Timothy's chords, drums, and lead lines.
I know this is ridiculously long contribution, but it really pushed us both to keep things developing, morphing, and changing as the nearly 40 minutes passed.
This was the first time that we worked together and it won't be the last. Production, especially electronic production, can be really an isolated experience. I think that's why so many of us reach out and participate in groups like this. To feel a sense of camaraderie, and to share inspiration with each other. If you enjoy it online, you GOTTA' try it in the flesh.
More on this 242nd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Make (and annotate) a track that provides an example of a trick/skill/tip you want to share about a piece of musical software or hardware” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0242/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
http://llllllll.co/t/share-yer-knowledge-disquiet-junto-project-0242/4218
The sound which begins this composition is a looped portion of a longer field recording that I captured near latitude: 28.8048 and longitude -80.8606 about this time last year. This area in Florida is a challenging place to record as there is a significant amount of both terrestrial and aquatic noise pollution from cars, boats, and um, rockets. This was captured within the grounds held by NASA and the ecosystem is a fascinating mashup of both fresh and saltwater marshes, pools, and streams. This particular hydrophone recording comes from a small inland lagoon of brackish water. When I dropped the microphones in, I was happy to see a bunch of the fish and crustaceans appear to find them interesting, brush up to them with their fins or tapping them with their claws. All of the pops and clicks heard are from them messing with the hydrophones. I was also surprised to hear that our voices from above the water could be clearly perceived and captured by the hydrophones. On reflection, I imagine that their world must be excessively loud and noisey thanks in large part to human interactions.
My interpretation of the assignment this week, to start with a drone and slowly reveal its constituent parts, made me immediately begin to think in terms of pointillism in painting where many small dots create a larger form when viewed from a distant point. I thought about distinct periodic elements in sound being disguised by altering both duration (decay, sustain, and release) and slewing pitch to remove any distinguishable pitch differential. Rhythmic patterns morph into more nebulous washes through repeated listening to me. So I started with things as smeared as possible as the drone, and quickly allowed the two component voices to identify themselves through both their inherent rhythmic pattern and their timbral centers. Eventually two distinct patterns emerge in the left and right stereo fields. But, they extend too far, and again become diffuse as their timbral centers sustain longer and longer. Turning into a drone yet again. The coda is the unaltered field recording unlooped.
More on this 240th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which a drone slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic and/or melodic” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0240/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on llllllll.co and on a Junto Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion).
Please note: lots of bass in here that will sound better on headphones or a decent monitoring system.
I learned most of what I know about synthesis through my relationship with the Clavia Nord Modular line of synthesizers. Some of my greatest "a-ha!" moments came while experimenting with the original Nord Modular. I had a significant amount of time to devote to learning and using it while living in Yu Chih (Fish Pond) Taiwan near Sun Moon Lake in the rural/agrarian middle highlands of the country. When I moved there in 1998, I knew it would be a temporary situation, but I was keen to keep creating music while there. I brought my Nord Modular, Roland TR-909, and an MPC 2000 with me. When I landed I discovered the flight case which I'd had custom made to hold this selection of gear was covered in a layer of frost from being in a non-pressurized space at altitude for nearly 30 hours. It soon melted away in the heat of Taiwan.
This assignment to memorialize a fallen piece of software touches a very sensitive spot in me as Clavia abandoned their platform for modular synthesis and moved into a more lucrative market segment devoted to keyboards in the most traditional piano/organ sense. I still think that they make great products and I so wish that they'd jump back into the modular synthesis game again. They were so far ahead of their time, and their two modular synth releases are STILL the best way to create affordable modular polyphony that I know of. I can still run their G2 software on my current macs. But the editor for the first hardware model(incorrectly referred to by many as the "G1") takes a lot more effort and hand-holding to get up and running these days. Virtualization and Windows XP are required, as is a MIDI to USB adapter. Not impossible, but I really have to be in the mood to jump through all the hoops. I wanted to dig in and create something entirely new, but time would not allow. So instead I present this vintage recording from 1998 (wow, nearly 20 years ago...) where all sounds are from either the 909, or the Nord Modular. It was recorded to a MiniDisc recorder which I purchased that year at a night market in Taichung. I was not particularly experienced or gifted at mixing to its strengths and in fact I had no mixer properly gain levels. Also, the MD format had a weird compression built in, so the levels are even odder than usual for me here. I've tried to even it out a bit using some modern tools in my arsenal ... I'm not certain I was that effective.
More on this 239th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a short composition in memoriam for a piece of recently deceased software” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0239/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on a Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for inclusion) and at this URL:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
An improvised score for this:
https://youtu.be/R3C80JzNrsw?list=PLmnMbJnfiGVF_R5tiDUJJR22nJSg1e9NV
Experimenting with two voices stating simple melodies and inversions using La Monte Young's just intonation.
An unusual (for me) contribution to this week's junto as I worked entirely in the box for this. I snipped the first 30 seconds of the three tracks as directed and then processed each one with itself in Argeïphontes Lyre 夏 5. I took the three new tracks and layered a performance into Ableton where I adjusted stereo positioning, eq, and compression. Sprinkled a bit of spring reverb over the top and served chilled.
More on this 233rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Make one track from three different netlabels, courtesy of a Creative Commons license” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0233/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on a Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for inclusion) and at this URL:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Image associated with this project is by Jet Lee and it is used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/o9vg
A melodic and timbral exploration of multi-channel pitch quantizing. Easy to drift in this for hours at a time.
Some stompy Monday morning music culled from last night's exploration of my freshly built Turing Machine MK II paired with the mighty E350.
Here is an experiment utilizing a one minute field recording of the Silver Beach Carousel in Saint Joseph Michigan:
http://www.silverbeachcarousel.com/
I made the field recording after listening to the ebb and flow of the space near the shore of Lake Michigan for several minutes. An earlier recording featured just the carousel music with no announcements and I found that a bit same-y over the length of the recording. This one, with the announcer reminding the patrons to stay seated until the ride came to a stop had a bit more variety so I chose to work with it.
The instructions for this Disquiet Junto found me frantically trying to scribble some meaningful notations about what I was hearing whilst recording. I broke this part down by writing the numbers 5 to 60 in increments of five. This broke my minute into five second intervals and I noted things happening in the recording like "annoucement," "organ music," "vocal whoops," and "seated."
Then, when I returned home, I set out to complete the compositional element of this Junto. I fired up the Oberheim and fed a variety of CVs from it into the Elements. I settled on a bell-ish/drum-ish sort of sound and tried to imitate the sounds and patterns that I recalled while looking at my field notes for timing information.
I then combined the two sources in Ableton, trimmed to precisely one minute, and uploaded the results to soundcloud where I then first listened to the results after working partially blind/deaf through this. Neat!
More on this 231st weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece to align with, from memory, 60 seconds of everyday sound” — at:
http://disquiet.com/0231/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Recordings captured on May 29, 2016 between 4:06 and 4:31 PM. More information about the park here:
http://www.midarkskypark.org/
My score created for this video and animation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CfzQky9HFU https://vimeo.com/167423925
The video/animation is a collaborative work between myself and Anne Zwiener. The germ of this idea sprouted during our time together at the Sachaqa Centro De Arte in San Roque Peru:
http://www.sachaqacentrodearte2.com/
I captured the raindrops falling from the trees outside a bodega across the road from the Iquitos airport and thought they were beautiful. During my time in Iquitos, I thought a lot about water and how we rely on it to live. I also thought about all the creatures that literally live in water. Water makes up their world in the same way that water makes up our very bodies. As I sat drinking tea one night, the overhead lights caught the ripples in my cup and reflected light back at me as moving shapes. They soon coalesced into fish, crustaceans, octopi, and turtles. All swimming around inside my cup. I later shared this vision with Anne when I arrived in San Roque. She suggested that we collaborate to bring it to life. Her animation beautifully captures the sensation that I experienced while musing over my cup of life.
You can see more of Anne's amazing work here:
www.annezwiener.com
This week's prompt finds me experimenting with using very different tools that I normally do. It would seem that Mr. Murch had tape recorders with variable speed controls for both record and playback functions. My normal field recorder does not have this functionality (well, at least I couldn't figure it out if it does). I know this sort of manipulation can be done after the fact, but I wanted to experience what it is like using the precise method for creating a reverberant space which he describes in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_py6jVyOqUY
All sounds in this track are taken from his video and there was no post production other than a slight bit of EQ to keep my ears from totally bleeding. I recorded the playback of the video on my iMac using SmartRecord on my iPhone. This app has the ability to both slow and speed up both recording and playback, but it's max speed is 2X. So After I recorded the initial recording at 2X, I then bounced that over to my iPad recording with the same software also running at 2X. This got me into the realm of the 4x recording he mentions. All of these recordings were done over the air in my studio space which doesn't have much going on in the way of acoustic treatment. After these initial two recordings, I began bouncing faster and faster, and then slower and slower. I was greatly irritated by the exceptionally aliased recordings complete with stair stepping and piercing artifacts. But, these were being played and recorded, repeatedly, with tinny consumer-level speakers on portable devices not known for their fidelity. I did eight takes on each device for a total of sixteen; half speeding up, and then half slowing down (.5X is the slowest it could go). After that I ended up with the screechy drone that runs in the middle channel of this. I captured it using my MKH20 pointed towards the iPad's speakers. I didn't care for it by itself and decided I'd bring two of the early iterations into play in the left and right channels panned hard each way. I really liked hearing my breath, which was frustrated as I did this, in the recordings. That and my clumsy efforts to press play and record on multiple devices concurrently led to some thumps and bumps that I also like in the final mix. I was surprised to find that once I'd sped things up that many times, and bounced the recordings that many times, there was no rescuing the human vocal data of the original recording. No matter how much I slowed things down on the drone, it droned on.
More on this 229th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Fourth Worldizing: Use a favorite trick of legendary sound designer Walter Murch”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0229/
Thanks to Steve Ashby (ashbysounds.com) and Jakob Thiesen (jakobthiesen.flavors.me) for beta testing it.
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
I used a multi-mic setup while living in Peru last year. The recordings that I captured in and around San Roque and the Rio Cumbazza on April 11 2015 fit this Junto prompt perfectly for me. The three recordings heard (in order of appearance in the mix) are:
-A night recording from my stereo DPA 4060 pair on the bamboo balcony of my mountain hut about a mile from the river
-A Telinga parabolic dish and MKH 20 recording of locals playing in the waterfall which came off the mountain I stayed on and dropped a bit more than 100 feet into the Rio Cumbaza
-A stereo pair of JrF hydrophones under the water, just around the bend from the waterfall, and headed downstream back towards town
The parabolic dish and hydrophone recordings were taken concurrently about 20 feet apart on the river bank. The 4060 recording of the night sounds and dogs was taken back at my place about 8 hours after a full day of recording by the river. The dogs were mad at something in the jungle and they were keeping me awake so I decided to record them.
I took 3:33 from each of the three recordings and arranged them in Reaper. For each recording, I re-mic'd the recording using Oceanway Studio from UA. This let me place naturally occurring acoustics gathered in the field, into a controlled studio space environment. I then faded in and out the three recordings at specific points related to sound events in each, building to a bit of a climax with the boys playing in the cold water of the falls, and the dogs on high alert. Honestly, I like the untouched field recordings a bit better than this resultant collage, but this was an interesting and fun experiment.
More on this 228th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Make a piece of music with one sound source recorded three different ways”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0228/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
I haven't discovered a "favorite" chord yet and was stumped for the first few days as to what to use. Then I remembered that the Thoth deck I work with has Qabalistic note associations for the trumps. So I chose cards until I found three from the major arcana and ended up with Adjustment (F#), The Empress (F#), and Art (G#). With two of the same note in my chord, I decided some euro-pop styled octaving was in order so I fired up my Oberheim 2 Voice and banged out the simple 3 step sequence (with a triple ratchet). I then recorded that sequence 3 times into Ableton with no sync or MIDI. I manipulated the 2 Voice's filters during each of the three passes. Finally I recorded a tri-tone of F# clusters by tuning all 6 strings of my guitar to F#. Then I plucked the top three strings in the root F# and occasionally reached for the octave higher. The octaving in this part feels a bit like cheating to me, as I was really only given one F#. But playing the guitar the whole time with just that note was a bit disappointing when I didn't sound like Kevin Shields. The octave doesn't really bring out My Bloody Valentine, but I had more fun playing it.
More on this 227th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Record a piece of music in which what changes is the treatment of the notes that comprise a single chord”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0227/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Here's a riff on the Make Noise Maths "Bouncing Ball" patch. It starts and ends dry, with only the bouncing ball patch in the mix. As the patch progresses I introduce delay (MOAR BOUNCE!), reverb, and filtered harmonics to emphasize the space between the bounces.
This strikes me as somewhat futuristic sounding in a sentimentally retrograde sort of way. Perhaps what the world of possibilities may have sounded to Bucky back in the 50s and 60s. I can't think of him without thinking about his domes and my own set of magnetic Bucky Balls. The balls are what inspired the basic concept of my contribution, and his domes are what provided me with additional sonic architecture to explore ... tracing out paths of possibility. Having seen a few retrospectives of his work, and hearing a few interviews with him, I get the sense he was incredibly playful. And it's in this one area I wish I could have produced something a bit more smile inducing. I feel this piece would likely be too sterile and cold to really capture his attention. It seems to me that he'd be more interested in something more obviously human and organic.
More on this 226th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose music for a fictional greatest-hits collection of the electronic music of R. Buckminster Fuller”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0226/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Project inspired by a dream that C. Reider of Vuzh Music had:
http://vuzhmusic.com/
I placed my matched stereo pair of DPA 4060 microphones on the top shelf within our refrigerator. One positioned towards the back which picked up more of the machinery rumble, and one positioned towards the front by the door. I then closed the door completely to hear what the fridge sounds like from the inside. Pretty chill with a breathy sort of pulse. I transferred the sound file from my field recorder to my computer and performed a bit of eq-ing to bring out the bass rumble a bit more. The opening 15 seconds is the fridge solo. I then imagined the fridge sound as a bass and rhythmic bed for the track and improvised the synth melody using my Push 2 controller for Ableton Live. It was the first time I used it in this way and I didn't use any quantization.
Incidentally, our fridge is a Whirlpool model, and my wife Lisa starts a new job with them tomorrow. Here's to her blissful transition.
More on this 224th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Make music with the sound of a refrigerator as its foundation.”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0224/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Note: Pan hard right to hear just the unaltered audio of the source material. Pan hard left to hear the distortion of the ERD/ERD at work. Pan center to have a wild ride!
Source audio features samples (primarily "Snow Falls" from "Three Voices for Joan La Barbara" by Morton Feldman) culled from this thread:
https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=151868&highlight=
This is a demo of three modules created by Martin Howse:
http://www.1010.co.uk/org/ERD.html
Folks in this thread:
https://www.muffwiggler.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=146386&start=125
have requested demos, particularly of the ERD/ERD used with vocals. So that's the premise of this track. I fed the output from the Radio Music into the ERD/ERD and ran that output to the left channel of this mix. The right channel is the unaffected audio taken directly from the Radio Music. I used ERD/Gamma and the ERD/SIR to open and close the ERD/ERD which lead to distortion when more fully open. I also used the two to modify each other, and to trigger the Radio Music's reset, station, and start CV inputs. Eventually, a low rumble of distortion is heard and that's where I've plugged into the two alternate earth returns on the ERD/ERD and manipulated the ends of the leads with my fingers to produce the various distortions. Placing my hands nearer to the earth vessel changes the intensity and character of the distortion.
I can't help but think of Eddie Murphy as the Prince in "Coming to America" when I consider one of the more pleasant scenarios when being awakened. But, as I am not royalty (in the traditional sense) I instead imagine I could be quite happen being awakened to this peaceful chordal melody. I fired up the Oberheim Two-Voice and tuned each oscillator to one pitch in this unison chord. I then improvised a rising and falling pattern in real time. By utilizing the envelopes on the Obie to both modify the VCAs and the filters, there is a breathy sort of quality in the development of the rhythm over time. I associate this with the nebulous quality I often experience when transitioning from the dreamtime to the waking world.
More on this 221st weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose something — quiet, peaceful, refreshing — you’d want to wake up to”) at:
http://disquiet.com/0221/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I did not utilise the photo associated with this project by Alf Eaton:
https://flic.kr/p/8NUM/
Played live, by hand and on the fly, slop and all. No sequencers were harmed (or used) in the creation of this.
Lonelyheart on Valentines Day seeks intimate partner for further musical exploration. Got something to add to this? Let's hear it!
A preset song from Tom Oberheim's kitchen table. Parameter tweaking performance by myself.
Detail from: Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library. "Mr. Font et Mme. Dubinon dans la danse Corralleros de Sevilla" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. [1834?]. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/08d331e0-7de4-0130-59e4-58d385a7b928
I've radically shifted my toolset and have pretty much lost the plot. So much to learn and trying to find my footing.
Working that clock. No filters used. Waveshaping only.
Image details:
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "10-ton electrically operated ore re-handling bridge, span 238', tower cantilever 90', shear leg cantilever 50'. Also showing two 10-ton electrically operated Hulett automatic ore unloaders." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1860 - 1920. http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-b5f5-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99
Happy Fifth Ice Experiment Disquiet! This is the second of two takes I did for this Junto. After gaffer taping the contact microphones to my niece's commemorative wedding goblet, i dropped five pieces of ice, one at a time (each in honor of one year of the Junto), into the glass. This resulted in a pretty bland take. So, I left the first five cubes in the glass, and swirled it in my hands for the second take, where I added another five ice cubes one at a time. By the end there were ten cubes of ice in the glass. Here's to at least another five years of the Junto!
More on this 210th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2016/01/07/disquiet0210-icecoda/ More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/ Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/ Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/ *NOTE: I did not use the photo associated with this project by Michael Scott used via Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/5vyz3G
A welcoming track for our new compatriot, the Noisering. Plugged him six ways to Sunday with brainwaves out of the B1b. This took care of the melodic, rhythmic, and timbral aspects leaving it all to newly discovered noise-based chance. I think he'll fit in just fine around here!
I am so grateful to Marc Weidenbaum, the Disquiet Junto, and all of the participants from this year. This project has enriched my life greatly and kept me moving in creativity on a month to month basis. Thank you to each of you for the inspiration you bring to this project week to week.
Here is the timeline for this recording which is a collage of my output in 2015 with five seconds from each calendar month utilized in chronological order:
JAN 0-5 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/back-yard-bird-feeders-010615 FEB 5-10 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/fetch MAR 10-14 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/galien-river-crows?in=337is/sets/field-recordings APR 15-20 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/lilly-action-poem-drink-1 MAY 20-25 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/conjunto-tipico-sensacion JUN 25-30 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/marram-grass JUL 30-35 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2 AUG 35-40 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/national-tennis-centre-melbourne-australia-1989-disquiet0189-tonelayer SEP 40-45 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/mwen-pi-fo-pase OCT 45-50 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/things-of-this-world-disquiet0199-spacecrickets NOV 50-55 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/they-luv-dats-jugged-fish DEC 55-60 seconds: https://soundcloud.com/337is/modulars-are-monophonic-slow-motion-time-travel
Each of the individual tracks listed have full production notes if you’re interested in the individual five second clips. A few additional observations:
-This collage accurately splits my activities of six months of field recordings to start out the year
-I am out of compliance with the Junto's instructions in one spot. My Crows recording is only four seconds long to start with so I have a one second gap in my year. I like this moment of silence as it represents the time spent actively listening for something to record
-Followed by a move to more compositional material with “Bassline Seeking Companion 2” which many great people from the Junto remixed and recomposed with
-Both “National Tennis Centre,” and “Things of this World” represent variations on my concept of “Field Recoding” which utilizes some element of a field recording transformed via synthesis
More on this 209th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“The Assignment: Create a sonic diary of the past year with a dozen five-second segments”) at:
disquiet.com/2015/12/31/disquiet0209-journal2015/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I used my own photo and did not utilize the photo associated with this project by Barry Silver used via Creative Commons license:
flic.kr/p/8A6XQV
Melody sloppily played using only the filter cutoff knob of a 24 dB resonant filter on a 10% pulse wave C/G drone.
As soon as I read Marc's email, I knew that my Doepfer sequential switch would be the star of the show this week. I fed three variations of a sound created in Elements into it as follows:
1-Raw Elements 2-Granularized Elements via Clouds 3-Basstravaganza courtesy of Warps having its way with Elements
Using Pressure Points' Touch Gate Out I controlled when the switch moved from one of the three spots. The trick, as I was working without my main rack, was I had no proper mixer to allow a subtle conclusion with all three variations playing at once. I routed things through the PM Mult and used it as a cheater mixer, and left the right side cable of the master outs unplugged until the culmination.
Note: each time the switch moves, and in particular moving on or off the bass sound, there is a strong click. I like it and think it brings and interesting imperfection into play.
More on this 206th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Compose a track with a trio of through-lines that repeatedly alternate relative prominence”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/12/10/disquiet0206-threeswitches/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Source photo (“Three Light Switches”) by Zoran Kovacevic used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/2YdqLK
The beautiful guitar meditation that inspired this track was created by @toaster-1 should be listened to here:
https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/beacon-for-marissa
The raw honesty of the original compelled me to respond in a primal fashion. Upon repeated listenings, a percussive response crept up out of my bones. I used a contact mic gaffer-taped to the inside of my handmade frame drum, and played along with the original in real time. The drum was processed by my modular, which I couldn't tweak much as I was drumming live with both hands. Vishnu has many hands to do many things at once.
More on this 204th weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Add a foundational rhythm to an ambient foreground”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/26/disquiet0204-underbeat/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I did not use the image associated with this project which is a light reworking of the image that accompanied the track, Toaster’s “Beacon, For Marissa,” that is the source audio for this week’s project:
https://soundcloud.com/toaster-1/beacon-for-marissa
I just updated my studio headphones and can finally hear things a bit better now. I was shocked to hear how compromised my nearly 20 year old pair had become. A revelation in sound! Hence, a bit of exploration in pure joy from last evening.
@random-coil has created a well heavy track here:
https://soundcloud.com/random-coil/it-1
This week has left me with a very heavy heart. I'm ashamed of how my country is responding in fear to a humanitarian crisis. This appears to be driven by people who identify as Christian but seemingly pick and choose when to follow the faith's basic teachings. The lack of compassion to those with real need staggers me.
I learned of Ma'loula this week, a town near Damascus in Syria where Aramaic is still spoken. It is said that Aramaic is one of the languages that Jesus may have spoken. I tried to find a creative commons licensed recording of a Syrian reciting the Lord's Prayer but could not locate one. Instead, I found Iraqi children singing it and this recording served as my primary source for this week's composition:
https://vimeo.com/134710145
Using my modular I wave-folded two copies of the singing and further processed it with delay and reverb. The recording was then combined with the original track from @random-coil. I adjusted the levels a bit to mesh them in Reaper.
More on this 203rd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Add something to a rhythm track titled ‘It'”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/19/disquiet0203-beatbasis/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Image associated with this project originally accompanied the source audio (“It” by Name Constant) on SoundCloud:
https://soundcloud.com/random-coil/it-1
I first became aware of coder/artist Bassel Khartabil Sadafi through my participation with the Disquiet Junto while creating this celebration and continuation of his art:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/disquiet0108-freebassel
There is a new book which continues the good fight on Bassel's behalf:
http://costoffreedom.cc/book/
In this chapter:
http://costoffreedom.cc/book/epilogue/the-cost-of-future-tense
the words of hellekin rang out in a liturgical fashion for me. As I read it, I could hear a responsive reading, a call and response which brought the tradition of a Greek chorus to my mind. I can easily imagine a similar chorus vocalizing in Palmyra. As I set out to create my own chorus, I found that in each of my successive readings, things took a turn towards plainsong. I was really intrigued by my cognitive failings and misspeaks, which alone, would stand out, but mixed into an eight part polyphonic chant sort of evened things out a bit. I like the idea of my own personal collective consciousness (and by that I mean the myriad personas I identify as "me") channeled aspects of a wider, shared collective unconsciousness which hollow-boned its way into the chant.
I deliberately broke two of the specific Junto's suggested rules. First, I used my own voice and did not synthesize anything. It was interesting to me to hear the layers build up into something both human, and synthetic to my ear; nearly drone-like at times. Second, I leave this a capella as motets are generally not accompanied by instrumentation.
This Junto stretched well into new territory. I rarely use my voice in my compositions, and if I do it's generally just a snippet of field recording. Also, I seldom multitrack, and in this I performed eight separate takes ... it got a bit confusing with all of the voices in my head let outside! I'm really pleased with the process that I used for this as it only utilized the features on my Yamaha AW4416 mixer/hard disk recorder. I panned the voices in space, and added a pinch of onboard processing. I did no further editing and a computer was only used in the encoding to .wav file.
More on this 202nd weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Create an audiobook chapter from the new essay collection The Cost of Freedom) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/12/disquiet0202-costoffreedom/
The source of the text in this project is from the book The Cost of Freedom, which raises awareness about the ongoing detainment of Creative Commons coder/artist Bassel Khartabil Sadafi. More on it here:
http://costoffreedom.cc
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
freebassel
newpalmyra
What to do when @Plato-3 writes a three minute Pop song? Well you remix it to over ten times its original length of course. Thanks for being you PLATO & the Western Tradition! If you'd like to participate in their awesome exploration of Indra's Net, please read on.
Includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, PLATO No. 3508 Mongoose Proverbs
PLATO & The Western Tradition invites others in the Electronic Music Community to participate in the creation of an on-line compilation called “Weaving Indra’s Net”. Here are the “rules”: 1. Download from @plato-3 any of the improvisations by PLATO & The Western Tradition that capture your attention. 2. Use some or all of what you download as a part of your own music making. 3. Post your piece to SoundCloud, and post the SoundCloud link on Plato’s FaceBook page: www.facebook.com/PLATOandTheWesternTradition 4. Please comply with our Creative Commons attribution requirement (see creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) by including in your description of your piece this language: “Includes material from PLATO & The Western Tradition, No. 2811, ‘Limitless Geometries’”. (You should substitute the number and title of the piece that you are using.) 5. PLATO will organize and maintain the compilation as a playlist titled ‘Weaving Indra’s Net’ on the PLATO SoundCloud site.
I worked in a very unusual way for myself for this week's Disquiet Junto. 100% "in the box" with no modular. I limited myself to working within one program only and chose the mighty "Argeïphontes Lyre 夏 5." After downloading Montano's self titled release( https://montano.bandcamp.com/album/montano ), I set about processing each track, in order, with the subfunctions of Argeïphontes Lyre. Some of them did not alter the track as much as I would have liked, so I reprocessed the processed track into a second iteration. Once I had sufficiently disturbed, or distilled each track's essence, I combined them into one final track in Reaper. I eyeballed the track lengths and trimmed the longer ones into a happier median with the shorter tracks. I adjusted the individual tracks volume levels to avoid clipping, and sprinkled a light reverb over the top to help with cohesion.
More on this 201st weekly Disquiet Junto project (“Encapsulate an album for efficient yet meaningful consumption”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/11/05/disquiet0201-realfuture/
This project was developed for the November 2015 Real Future Fair in San Francisco at the encouragement of and with the participation of Alexis Madrigal and Cara Rose DeFabio:
http://realfuturefair.com/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
All sonic material sourced (thanks Creative Commons!)from Montano: https://montano.bandcamp.com/album/montano
I drew from the Crowley Thoth deck to get my random number ... figured I'd draw until I hit a number between one and seven. Pulled seven on the first draw. Swords; pertaining to the mind and realms of thought. Futility; exactly what I was bumping up against in trying to come up with something for the Junto this week. Oh well, let's download the story snippet and run it through the modular to see if anything happens.
The story, though short, is PACKED with ideas that a true foley artist could go to town on. That doesn't ever seem to be me though ... I can hear all the spots where I'd love to insert purposefully made sounds ... water, sparks in the dark, gnawing on pork, etc. I got it in two spot by my count. I like the fluttery echoes as Louis recalls the times passed, and I like the court musicians joining in at the end (courtesy of the astounding tELHARMONIC) though they decidedly do not play a minuet. Oh well. Another time perhaps.
Thank you to Marc and Richard for the source material and inspiration.
More on this 200th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a score to a Richard Kadrey short story — using his own voice as source audio”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/10/29/disquiet0200-kadreyscore/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
More from Kadrey at
http://richardkadrey.com http://facebook.com/richard.kadrey http://twitter.com/Richard_Kadrey
I was so excited to learn of this week's Junto theme. The best patch I ever created on my original Clavia Nord Modular I named "Crickets," and it's the only sound source in this track. Before I moved from my childhood home in Howell Michigan, one evening I sat down in the dining room (which at the time served as my studio space)with the windows wide open and set about recreating the nighttime chorus synthetically. I felt then, and still do, that I nailed it. Hearing this takes me back to the yard of my youth in an instant. I let the patch run during the length of this work and simply split the stereo image into the two sides of the Verbos Dual Pole filter ... Hipass on the left, Lowpass on the right. The two filter slopes created various rhythms which excite the two reverbs creating a sense of encapsulated near and far space simultaneously. I think of the hums and thrums heard throughout as the sorts of deep sounds a spaceship might make which would creep in through the flesh, even whilst wearing headphones.
More on this 199th Disquiet Junto project (“Make a field recording of a field recording in a spaceship”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/10/22/disquiet0199-spacecrickets/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I created my own image and did not utilize the image associated with this project; a screenshot from the film Interstellar.
There is a quiet place. Light source for: https://soundcloud.com/337is/tuning-mothers-shadow
A backyard session with my mobile rig. Time spent searching the heavens for signs and wonders.
My first nighttime voltage controlled shortwave radio experiment with a 25 foot antenna. Featuring an occasional duet with the tELHARMONIC.
I'd been thinking a lot about clocks this week, as I'm sure a lot of us had been after what went down in Texas. When learning the Junto would be focused on clocks, I was determined to work in my 4ms suite of clock utilities. When I learned we were to record a clock for the basis of the track, I decided to use the basic pulse of 60 BPM which feels a bit like a second hand clicking along to me. I fed it, and a duple time variation of it into a Braids and Mankato filter, which I further pinged with clock division and multiplications. This provides the continual ticking through the piece and is only slightly process using a spring reverb. I like the idea of clocks having a spring, being manipulated by something else with a spring. Yes my humor is that silly. For the rest of the structure, I took multiples and divisions of the basic clock and manipulated multiple parameters in my sound sources; sweeping the wavetables in the Morphing Terrarium, manipulating the spread of the Cloud Generator, and massaging the effect of the Deflector Shield. These were all destabilized a bit by feeding free running LFOs into the SISM to create looser, less predictable variations of the timbres in the two oscillators. One clock division ran René while another division gated the Quad Temporal Shifter which nudged the two harmonic lines of the oscillators closer and further apart. The results remind me of Philip Glass' Music in Twelve Parts, though much more condensed. Running this all into the Dubmix, with the Erbe-Verb attached on Aux A led to some beautiful swirling moments of reverb tails and distortion which made me recall why I love My Bloody Valentine so much.
So there it is. An unholy alliance of two disparate influences which have helped shape my ears, heart, and brain. Somehow it all makes sense to me.
Addendum: I usually adhere closely to the suggested time constraints for these Juntos ... this one required more time for me to work through my ideas and I think it's more solid in the long form than in any attempt to truncate it to fit.
More on this 194th Disquiet Junto project (“Record the sound of a clock and make something playful and sweet out of it”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/09/17/disquiet0194-clockplay/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Experimentation with an Intellijel Dubmix to learn more about its pre/post auxiliary mixing structure and stereo panning features. Wow. A whole new kettle of fish to explore.
An experiment with the Frames Parasite code:
http://mqtthiqs.github.io/parasites/frames.html
Watch the short film here complete with this score: https://youtu.be/FR5qyOePi7k
I used the still image with an iOS application called Tunetrace which creates melodies based on the image one feeds it. It analyzes the image, and then follows the contours of it creating simple sounds. The image associated with this track is a partial screen shot of the app in process. Once the image has been analyzed, one can then play it forward, pause it, speed it up, and reverse it; all of which I did, in order, over the course of our allotted ten seconds. I then recorded it into Audacity and turned it into a mono track, compressed and eq'd it, and added some of those tasty Valhalla effects. This entire procedure was not my normal way of working at all and it stretched me a lot to come up with it. I love the Junto for it.
PS. Super-ironic to me that this image came out of the https://www.muffwiggler.com community ... a place dedicated to modular synthesis ... and I didn't touch my modular for this Junto! ;-)
Link to Tunetrace iOS app: http://www.qappsonline.com/apps/tunetrace/
More on this 192nd Disquiet Junto project (“Record a 10-second loop to accompany an insane cat GIF”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/09/03/disquiet0192-psycatdelicloop/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Source of the animated image associated with this project uncertain, but used at the suggestion of Brian Biggs.
Here is a thoughtfully expansive re-composition courtesy of #asoupofnettles who utilized portions of this composition:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/00207-disquiet0191-heldchord
The result is a masterful creation utilizing; repitching & restacking, oblivion reverb rippling through the filter wall, parrots shrieking, chimes ringing, and a dog barking somewhere.
Be certain to listen to more gems here:
https://soundcloud.com/asoupofnettles
This started out as two unique improvisations played one at a time with my own two hands in real time. I used a virtual dual-manual instrument on my iPad to create the pitch and gate information which fed a MIDI stream into my modular. The filter and envelope settings were manipulated live. Oh to actually have four hands!
I never intended for them to be related other than in key, but an a whim, I combined the two individual performances into one track. I really like the space that they co-create.
Image details: Wellcome Library, London Valves in forearm From: Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus By: William Harvey Published: G. FitzerFrankfurt 1628 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
I patched on four separate occasions and tore each one down. This one is the fifth, and I'm still not thrilled with it. However, polyphony on a modular is challenging, so I'm giving myself a small break. I settled on a major third for my chord, and then set about to creating it on the three oscillators I have in my modular synth which can create chords; Braids, Shapeshifter, and Patch Chord. I was forced to tune them by ear as I no longer have my Dave Jones O'Tool oscilloscope. This actually took the most time for me. I understand the appeal of monophony in monastic orders now. The next trick was figuring out how to morph from one oscillator to the next. For this I turned to Doc Oc and believe it or not, this is as slow as I could get it. Still sounds too quick in transitions for my ears. By slowly turning down the Q on it, I could slow things a bit more and make the chord hits less aggressive. I liked the sound of this, but in exploring, I eventually realized that with too little Q, the whole thing would stop moving altogether. Finicky.
More on this 191st Disquiet Junto project (“One chord to rule them all — on several instruments”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/08/27/disquiet0191-heldchord/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I did not make use of the Image associated with this project by Max Nathan, and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/3aL7nK
A composition and performance created in honor of my friend Vincent Eoppolo who always takes me on the most amazing sonic journeys with his Society's Realization of Itself project:
https://soundcloud.com/societys-realization
Thank you for your friendship and inspiration Vincent!
This composition is based on the beautiful works by the following two composers:
Steve Ashby aka @ashbysounds "august 15, 2015 (disquiet0189-tonelayer)" https://soundcloud.com/ashbysounds/august-15-2015-disquiet0189-tonelayer
Olaf Wisselink aka @olafwie "Cascade (disquiet0189-tonelayer)" https://soundcloud.com/olafwie/cascade-disquiet0189-tonelayer
For this project, I selected the first second of Steve Ashby's composition and created a repeating loop with it. I selected 3 seconds from Olaf Wisselink's composition and created a second repeating loop. I played one loop on my desktop computer and one on my laptop. I fed the two loops into 4 VCAs with two panned hard left, and two panned hard right. I then used phase relationships created by Dr. Octature II with the 1 pole degrees driving Steve's loop at 45° on the left and 225° on the right, and the 2 pole degrees driving Olaf's loop at 90° on the left and 270° on the right. The left and right sides were run into a Modcan Dual Delay which was synced to the Doc Oc II's 4 pole degrees, 180° and 360° respectively for the left and right sides. For my contribution to this composition, I started with the frequency of the Doc Oc II as low as possible, and slowly moved through its range over the course of three minutes; from LFO into audiorate modulation. This caused interesting artifacts to arise. I felt like there were several sweet spots I could have let things run on longer, but was eager to experiment and work through in just a bit more than the suggested length.
More on this 190th Disquiet Junto project (“Set two out-of-sync loops atop each other, and then add sonic glue”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/08/20/disquiet0190-missedconnections/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
NOTE: I did not utilize this image: Image associated with this project by Theilr, and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/saiGo
Expanding the consciousness of this track, @name-constant has stood and delivered beautifully. A few notes on the process:
"here is my addition to a new issue of the Bassline seeking companion. added keys, mangled church bells and wet fingers on a thick glass plate, distorted. (and fun :) )"
For anyone that would like to participate:
Original lonely bassline: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm
@MidiPunk version: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm-entry-midipunk-has-background-in-vaudeville-version
random-coil version:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-name-constants-spark-it-up-rub-it-on-the-glass-version
random-coil has established a repository for all the stems (beautiful additional contribution, thank you!) included in his version here:
soundcloud.com/bscstems/sets/bassline-seeking-companion-2 Now we all await your voice and contribution!
@letterfounder @pythagora @Rezitator @ellowalamandr4
This junto exhausted me. So much to try and fit into one minute! And so much planning and patching for that minute! I'll do a full write up of my process shortly, but this was recorded live on the fly with one take.
Original field recording of my Tibetan Singing bowl, used for the source of this track:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/scraping-harmonics-contact-microphone-test?in=337is/sets/field-recordings
Full notes:
I was almost immediately certain I wanted to repurpose the above recording of my Tibetan Singing bowl when I read the concept of this week's Junto. The sustained tone created from scraping the edge of the bowl in a circular motion creates the harmonic overtones which can be infinitely sustained given the right stick technique. I found the sound both haunting and soothing, and a contact microphone recording of the bowl begins this performance. I played back the recording on my computer and fed the headphone out into my Music Thing Modular Mikrophonie at full gain (to induce a bit of distortion) and then jacked the volume up even further by dual gain-staging the signal via both sides of my Positronic Transient Gate. The PTG proved to be the heart and soul of this performance as I routed the audio chain through my Phonogene. The Phonogene was then cv-d six ways to sunday from the remaining outs of the PTG, which I essentially used as an elaborate envelope follower. I extended some of the envelopes further utilizing my Function, and spread a clock/gate from it throughout the effects chain. Everything was tempo synced through this gate, and the tenuous wisps of harmonics were modulated by it as well. The hardest thing was to establish the first layer, leave room for more delicate layers, and exit without getting overly dense and heavy ... all in under a minute. I love the near fade to silence, that is overcome with echoes of echoes, which re-arises just prior to the finish.
More on this 189th Disquiet Junto project (“Create a dense stack of attack-free tonal material from one audio source”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/08/13/disquiet0189-tonelayer/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
(NOTE: I did not use this image) Image associated with this project by Nicholas D., and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/ca1iLd
Here is the drum track added by the mighty @MidiPunk: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm-entry-midipunk-has-background-in-vaudeville-version
And here is the original bassline: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm/comment-243615650
The two combined make up: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm-entry-midipunk-has-background-in-vaudeville-version
random-coil has established a repository for all the stems (beautiful additional contribution, thank you!) included in his version here:
soundcloud.com/bscstems/sets/bassline-seeking-companion-2
Now we await your voice and contribution!
@letterfounder @random-coil @pythagora @Rezitator @ellowalamandr4
The mighty #MidiPunk has spoken, and thus drums we're played. And they were good, and enriched the lonely bassline. Who will add more sonic DNA to this family tree?
Here are the #MidiPunk drums without the bassline: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm-entry-midipunk-has-background-in-vaudeville-just-the-drums-version
Here is the original bassline without the drums: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-mwm/comment-243615650
random-coil has established a repository for all the stems (beautiful additional contribution, thank you!) included in his version here:
soundcloud.com/bscstems/sets/bassline-seeking-companion-2
@letterfounder @random-coil @pythagora @Rezitator @ellowalamandr4
BREAKING NEWS! S/H/A/R/R/P/S has completed a video for this song! Hit the video link above or click here: https://vimeo.com/136455104
@midipunk @random-coil @letterfounder
Each of the above, a Master at Work. Collectively? Unassailable!
Thank you to each participant for layering the goodness of your production on top of the humble beginning track: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2
Be sure to check the original posting here: https://soundcloud.com/letterfounder/rootandbloom-sharrps-v-337is-v-midi-punk-v-name-constant
For this work, I failed to follow directions and I failed to meet the deadline. However, I had fun. :-) I first took both tracks provided to us (I was to have selected one of them) and combined them into one track with the first track in the left channel, and the second track in the right channel. I then threw every software plugin I’ve ever bought and paid for onto the two sides … I don’t work “in the box” very often, so this is my tiny concept of “complicating” something … over-processing it to the point that it becomes essentially noise. Once I had that process complete, I mixed it down to a mono track. I then decided to treat recording it as a field recording exercise. I played it back on my laptop computer with its tinny speakers, and utilized a contact microphone to even further decimate the audio. I processed this microphone in realtime utilizing my modular synthesizer. I created a simple audio path of the left channel patched through a high pass filter, and multed through a low pass filter (effectively creating a notch filter), and then multing the microphone again to an envelope follower which opened and closed both sides of the filters. While all of this was taking place, I concurrently played back the original recording of “Complexification0010SH” on my desktop computer and tried to focus my listening on it exclusively … all the while hooked up to my Soundmachines BI1brainterface which monitored my brainwaves and converted them into CV messages to distribute throughout my modular. I selected specific waves to manipulate the filters further, and also used them to disrupt the signal flow through my reverb and delay. I manipulated nothing in real-time with my hands other than moving the contact microphone twice; once at about 3:15 to move from recording my heavily processed track playing on the laptop to the speakers on my desktop playing “Complexification0010SH,” and again moving the microphone when that song finished to place it against my chest to record my heartbeat which can be heard closing this track. I did not use headphones or monitor recording during this performance and instead relied 100% on the source material and my brainwaves to move things forward.
More on this 188th Disquiet Junto project (“Take a provided track and make it more complex”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/08/06/disquiet0188-complexcomplex/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
(NOTE: I did not utilize this image) Image associated with this project from the notes that accompany the album Complexification (Entr’acte), by Guy Birkin and Sun Hammer, and on which project is based.
More on Complexification:
http://entracte.co.uk/projects/guy-birkin–sun-hammer-e187/
Headphones strongly encouraged for this one. Captured near latitude: 28.8048 and longitude -80.8606
This is a challenging area to capture pristine sounds in due to nearly constant water, air, and road traffic sounds. Here is a brief few minutes of wind, insects, and occasional water droplets caused by frisky minnows jumping out of the water.
I'm bummed that I won't be in town for this year's MIMF (Michiana Improvisational Music Festival) so I decided to create some sounds that might be useful to them in my absence. Have fun!
I recently aquired a Verbos Dual Four Pole Filter (which traces its design to the Buchla 291) and was eager to explore the new tonalities it will open in my case. All sounds from the DPO and filtered by the heavily modulated Four Pole.
An exploration of attractors at work in the chaos system of my Snazzy FX Dreamboat which generates all source sounds in this piece.
Repeating bars with the sequencers I have in my modular eluded me for this junto, so I instead opted to play this by hand using my Pressure Points. I decided to use a rapid 4/4 to define my bars and played a simple 13 bar (1 + 8 + 4 = 13) ascending and descending scale through the first 13 harmonics. I had my E340 set to drone the root harmonic throughout and slowly opened the E440 filter on the way up, and closed it on the way down. I inverted the logic signal with a channel of Maths to close the Dr. Octature Filter wrapped around the E350 on the way up, and to open back up on the way down the scale. The gate created by each press on a Pressure Points pad was fed into the E102 Shift Register to delay the moving pitch's CV by a small amount. This led to the slight pulse in the piece. I ran the clock from the E102 into the Dual Delay which further spread the note hits out a bit more in space. The entire composition seems longer than 13 bars, but the harmonic movement stops at bar 13 and simply fades out naturally.
More on this 184th Disquiet Junto project (“Explore the relationship between segments that consist of 1 bar, 8 bars, and 4 bars”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/07/09/disquiet0184-setsofbars/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
(NOTE: I did not use this image and instead created my own) Image associated with this post by Vladimer Shioshvili and used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/dEE5RJ
@pythagora has joined the party and added a delightful synth/guitar lead to: https://soundcloud.com/random-coil/337ismidipunknc-bassline-seeking-companion-synths-topping
After name constant had added something to: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix
Which had the perfect drums that @MidiPunk had added to this: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2
Another version! This time courtesy of @random-coil (name constant) who added some sweet synthing to the mix of:
337is – Bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix
Which stemmed from this: 337is – Bassline-seeking-companion-2
Another layer added to this original track: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2
This time, guitar pyrotechnics courtesy of @Rezitator who managed to still find space in the track for grooves, textures and wicked licks!
A brilliant thickening of the soup courtesy of @ellowalamandr4 aka YS4 ... you should check out the rest of his work!
Now who is going to transform this yet again?!
Check out the original barebones bassline: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2
Listen to the @MidiPunk drumstravaganza smash-down mix: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix
I selected the piece by @vgmrmojo contributed to the "Disquiet Junto 0170 Glitch In The Night" project as, at the time, it had the fewest listens of the project. A shame because it's a beautiful continuation of the previous work on the "Disquiet Junto 0160 One Minute Past Midnight" project. I also relate to several themes in these works. First, snow and cold are my natural surroundings for much of the year here in Michigan. Second, the material stems from field recording which I avidly participate in. Third, do you even modular?! ;-) vgmrmojo does, and so do I! Fourth, the use of Audacity puts us in the same family!
So, I was inspired to use a process I refer to as "Field Recoding" where I alter field recordings in some way with a deliberate compositional form. I left my modular out of this process and instead repurposed one of my field recordings which utilized coil recordings to pick up normally unheard electromagnetic sounds generated by my Yamaha AW4416 hard disk recorder.
My steps in this composition:
1-open both recordings in Audacity 2-separate the two stereo tracks into four mono tracks panned hard left and hard right 3-create a complete fade out of my field recording starting at the very beginning of the track and progressively lowering in amplitude over the course of the minute. I did this to allow the natural breath in vgmrmojo's track to have its own space 4-generated a tremolo effect on each of the halves of my recording that are 180 degrees out of phase from each other creating an illusion of movement in the stereo field 5-combined all tracks into a new stereo track 6-generated a slow random pan to shift sounds in the final stereo mix
You can hear vgmrmojo's original tracks here: https://soundcloud.com/vgmrmojo/disquiet-junto-0170-glitch-in-the-night?in=disquiet/sets/disquiet0170-midnightglitch
https://soundcloud.com/vgmrmojo/disquiet-junto-0160-one-minute-past-midnight
You can hear my original field recording here: https://soundcloud.com/337is/aw4416-electronic-field
More on this 183rd Disquiet Junto project (“Insert something that plays across the stereo spectrum in an after-dark field recording”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/07/02/disquiet0183-stereomidnight/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
More on the One Minute Past Midnight series at:
http://oneminutepastmidnight.com/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
[NOTE: I did not use this art and instead created my own] Photo associated with this project by Blake Danger Bentley used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/5A9Hrv
Here's a rockin' version of this original track: https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2
The live drumming and percussion programming courtesy of the imitable @MidiPunk
Now, who is going to flow or vocalise over this?!
Anyone up to using this for some Cumbia, Polka, or something? Have at it!
MidiPunk has had a go with this bassline! Listen to it here:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/bassline-seeking-companion-2-midipunk-smashdown-mix
Tangerine Dreaming
11/14/2020: Checkout Wilfried Hanrath's elegant reworking of this performance:
https://soundcloud.com/flyingtonefish/wilfried-hanrath-feat-udo-zoels-nachts-wenn-alles-schlaft337is-three-three-seven-is-rework
My modular attempt for something sounding a bit like shakuhachi flute. Nowhere near as beautiful and elegant as Mr. Firman's fine playing of the actual instrument, but at times, I feel the mournful tones get close in feeling. You can listen to his beautiful playing here:
https://soundcloud.com/mafirman/sets/shakuhachi-1
The coil pickups were placed on the two screens of the AW4416 whilst mastering this recording:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/disquieting-preparing-to-dream
This week's Disquiet Junto asked us to consider what our favorite instrument might sound like while dreaming. To create this piece I patched a dense and complicated structure on my modular synthesizer with a goal of having as many modules as possible blinking, flashing, and participating. I recorded the sound of the patch here if you're interested in checking it out:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/disquieting-preparing-to-dream
Then, while recording that patch, I broke out a stereo pair of coil pickups which allow me to record electronic sounds emanating from devices and the environment. I moved the coils around the various modules in use for the patch and recorded the sound of them functioning to create the other composition. These sounds cannot normally be perceived or heard, and I imagine them as the subconscious of my modular synth. And the subconscious is home to dream. I added a bit of reverb to the recording to imply the depth of headspace in dreaming states.
More on this 181st Disquiet Junto project (“Imagine your favorite instrument is dreaming while it sleeps — what does it sound like?”) at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/06/18/disquiet0181-instrumentaldream/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
(NOTE: I did not use this image and instead created my own) Image associated with this project by Tim Patterson used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/7bhwdM
A preparatory piece for this week's Disquiet Junto. You can hear the sound of this patch dreaming here:
https://soundcloud.com/337is/dreaming-disquiet0181-instrumentaldream
My wife has a Ukrainian heritage, so nesting dolls were a part of her childhood, and you can see one of her sets in this picture. She helped me with the compositional concept and suggested that each doll should represent a larger or smaller resonant space in relationship to the other dolls. I chose to limit my sound sources to pingable, resonant filters and fed each a clock pulse at their respective audio inputs. I also added a rhythmic element to the concept by having each doll represented by its own unique clock multiplication between one and six. Each doll is introduced one at a time in order from the smallest, least ringing, to the largest and longest ringing. Once they've each said hello, they join together and sing as a family. I slowly add a bit of spring reverb to emphasize the open space they enter once they are completely un-nested. The voicings and clock divisions are as follow:
Doll 6 (smallest) - Wasp Filter, clock multiplier at x6, shortest ring Doll 5 - QMMG Filter in dual Low Pass, clock multiplier at x5, slightly longer ring than 6 Doll 4 - Dr. Octature II Filter, clock multiplier at x4, slightly longer ring than 5 Doll 3 - Pittsburgh Modular Low Pass Filter, clock multiplier at x3, slightly longer ring than 4 Doll 2 - STG Sea Devils Filter, clock multiplier at x2, slightly longer ring than 3 Doll 1 (largest) - Synthesis Technology E440 OTA Filter, clock multiplier at x1, longest ring
*Note: Her doll set has five dolls, this project suggested using six. So in the picture, the Sea Devils filter does not have a corresponding doll resting on it. All other filters have their respective doll in front of it.
More on this 180th Disquiet Junto project — “Use the Russian nesting dolls as a model for a musical composition” — at:
http://disquiet.com/2015/06/11/disquiet0180-matryoshkamusic/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://disquiet.com/junto/
Join the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place at:
http://disquiet.com/forums/
Image associated with this project by James Jordan used thanks to a Creative Commons license:
https://flic.kr/p/4oJYZG
A recording of wind moving the tall, brittle grasses which occupy the dividing line between the sandy shore and the beginning of dune elevation in Warren Dunes State Park. It was a blustery day with constant wind rustling the stalks. I was able to wedge the two contact microphones at the base of two clumps and they held them, almost like a clothes pin, while the wind whipped the tops. I was surprised how sharp and pointy the drier stems were as they jabbed me while I got the microphones in place.
Love Light Fancy (An Occasional Berceuse For Louis Vierne) by 337is (three three seven is)
It was a cloudy windy day when I visited the beach at the base of the grassland dunes in Warren Dunes State Park. In this second recording both contact microphones were attached to the twisted metal wire which held up the wooden pieces of this fence. The picture shows the setup for the first recording where the right contact microphone was attached to one of the metal posts. I love the low vibrations in this recording and was really surprised to hear them develop from this simple fence.
My first attempt with something like ratcheting by utilising multiple synced clock sources and a voltage controlled switch to distribute them.
We didn't tape down the mics sufficiently on this one so the sound is a bit off and noisier than I'd like. This comes from an elaborate rusty metal structure that the DNR uses to pull huge catches of sample fish from the fish ladder near the hydroelectric dam. I stood in the middle of it and beat both sides with my outstretched hands. The real ringing sounds come from when my rings strike the poles.
After the wind and rain stopped, we took to hitting and strumming the guy-wires to activate them. Einstürzende Neubauten we're not!
First time trying out contact microphones in the field. Picked a weird day for it as it was sunny, then rainy, and windy ... seemingly changing every few minutes or so. The wind had been really whipping it up a few minutes before setting up to record when it promptly died down and the rain started. I'll be revisiting these wires supporting the electrical grid down by the dam again in hopes of capturing them when they're really vibrating.
Here's a mono recording which is unusual for me as I normally record in stereo. Also, this is the second take. I do not like it as much as the first take which seemed to have more organic variety. Regrettably I forgot to record the first take. This version still has some elements in common with the first take that I like. There are some nice evolving timbres and patterns. The only sound generator used in this piece is the DPO which is pretty remarkable to me ... so many possibilities in one module. Every out on the BI1braininterface was full and pumping the waves from my brain to various event shapers in the patch.
Score to this video: https://youtu.be/-gX1n9wEzmM
Inspired watching Anne working with an intricate painting on 3/24/14. Score composed by Leslie Rollins reprocessing material by Adelita Navas Videyra.
“Oh, no. There were many Indra before you and will be as many after you. In fact, right now there are countless Indra in many parallel worlds. It can be said that you are only a particle of sand on the beach of Indra. When blinking, a man dies. When Brahma blinks, an Indra dies. When Vishnu blinks, a Brahma dies. And when Shiva blinks, a Vishnu dies.”
To see Anne's work please visit: http://www.annezwiener.com/Anne_Zwiener.html
In honor of having 433 followers on my SoundCloud Page I pay homage to John Cage with my rendition of 4'33" for modular synthesizer.
The score to a video work that is viewable here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_WekBIRC1ow&feature=youtu.be
This score was inspired by my witnessing of an intimate moment shared with my friend Maura as she cleaned her clothes in the sink of the studio at Sachaqa Centro De ARTE in San Roque Peru. Captured and manipulated on 03/23/15.
My first attempt to manifest sound using multiples of the number 13. This work springs as a direct result of my improvisations with Plato & The Western Tradition and conversations with Boyd about his growing integration of Kabbalah, Sacred Geometry, Sound, Manifestation, and multiples of 13.
ALM's Pamela's Workout in partnership Modcan's Quad LFO with did the lion's share of the lifting in this with Pammy's eight outputs each dialed into a multiple of 13. The main clock was set at 26 BPM (our "Here" Between Above and Below) and each of the 7 remaining outputs either added or subtracted 13 pulses to that starting number. These eight pulse streams were then moved around the modular with the first four streams sent to the four gates of the Quad LFO. The same four streams were additionally multed and distributed to the CV in of the Quad LFO. I then selected a variety of rates on the LFO to create multiplications or divisions of thirteen with a range of one to thirteen. With these signals in play, I routed them primarily to the E350 Morphing Terrarium which served as the only oscillator in this piece. All morphing inputs available were fed multiples of thirteen. The output of the E350 was first fed into the Pittsburgh Modular high pass filter (with all of its CV inputs influenced by multed LFO clocks) and then on to the Ecophon which was also clock synced to a division of thirteen. The feedback loop of the Ecophon was fed into a STG Sea Devils low pass filter whose resonance and cutoff were modulated by multed clocks from the LFO which had been slewed by an SSF Positronic Transient Gate. The Sea Devils filter was then fed into the Thonk Spring Reverb (in a proper homage to the Putney) and out. This created much of the upper frequencies in this work. The same signal path from the E350 was also sent to a Toppobrillo Sport-Modulator for a bit of sample and hold. The XY output of the E350 went to the top channel, while the Z output went to the bottom channel. The two CV inputs of the sport modulator took clock from multed LFO signals and the comparator output of the unit was used to feed the E440 low pass filter. The CV inputs of the the E440 were thrummed by multed LFO clock slewed through the other side of the PTG. This chain outputted the fairly steady bassline in the track.