4500: Recent Episodes
auxels
4500: a creative exercise to create 45 seconds of music per day for 100 days.
auxels: ambient/drone/glitch/electro-acoustic music
As the sun sets on 100 days, I am looking forward to spending some time revamping my performance system, and experimenting a bit more with some new sampling ideas that I’ve come up with over the course of the project.
Thanks for listening.
Once more with gusto. An attempt at combining the chaos noise with a beat and bass. A non-food item.
A somewhat dizzying state at the end of long haul. As of last week, I was supposed to be done on Sunday, but here I have taken the whole weekend as a break, and now I am finding myself confronted with a somewhat substantial writer’s block for short, one-day pieces. Full of ideas for larger scale projects, but drawing blanks for how to finish this thing.
So today, we spin in a dizzying loop. Perhaps the next two will come out more conclusive.
And on other days, there isn’t do much a melody between the noise as there is a solitary hum, and the occasional intergalactic disturbance.
As our program comes to a close, you may find yourself browsing for other stations, and perhaps discovering some uncanny emotion in the static between bands.
Slightly off-schedule again, and as a result, a morning jam. Experimenting with no-input cables as a means of producing old-vinyl-like sounds, and exercising in sparseness.
A remix of sorts; yesterday’s disquiet track distilled through granulation and repetition. Synthesized by looping the melody through a few different patches, and then processed/performed with Block Party.
Another junto, happily. The prompt: loop a melody, and remove one or more notes each pass through the loop. I came up with a somewhat longer melody, so I decided to cap the loops to 4 passes, to keep the length within reasonable range of the 45 second limit. I added a bit of reversed reverb on top at the end to glue the whole thing together.
Number 92. A continuation of the refinement of block party tones. As with last time, the idea started far from the destination. A memento of the adventure, rather than a documentary of the journey.
10 more days. It’s remarkable how much lighter the source material for this one was than the final output. Blues gone dead. Perhaps a lighter rendition of the guitar parts tomorrow.
thinking of a texture, and a color.. a (possibly now tired) blending of the traditional (fingerpicking) and the modern (granulated loops)
the past week or so, I’ve been focusing on practicing with the block party rig, and trying to get more adept at the kinds of pieces I can put together by dubbing multiple mixing performances as takes. it slowly feels like things are coming together with it, though the timing and latency still leaves rather a lot to be desired
A track for the Junto. I’ve been meaning to do at least one of these since starting the 4500. I had some deeper ideas for how to manipulate some of the granular stuff into beats, but I both ran out of time, and found the layered modified tones to be their own right.
The source sound is a plucked octave at c# through my usual guitar rig. Various layered effects in Logic
Removing some complexity this time. A static drone with “traditional” guitar accompaniment, though still rather noisy
Fell off the wagon again yesterday. Life tasks are taking time and space, and the music making is more stressful than relaxing these past weeks. The home stretch is here, but it’s the hardest. 17 more days after this.
An experiment inspired by the previous day, turning some knobs in Block Party that I'd never turned before.
Composed/remixed of field recorded bits of CTM installations, Skalar and Uncanny Valleys of a Possible Future.
A quieter, calmer side of things; in reflection of seasonal deception, wherein January momentarily pretends that it’s March.
Today was one of those days where I really just didn’t feel like doing it. I’m still waiting on stable internet at home, so I was backlogged in posting tracks from the previous two days (they were finished on schedule, but not posted). After all that, and a late evening at work, I had to force myself to get up and actually make something. I’m glad I did, but even with the light at the end of the tunnel, some days are still tricky.
An optimistic foil to yesterday’s. This one actually felt like it could use some cohesive rhythm, but I still haven’t quite figured out the tech of incorporating rigid rhythmic elements into the rig. It’s a pretty blatant violation of the timing rule, but it felt like the right length for the work.
I’m stabilizing a bit after moving at the beginning of the month. Having the Block Party rig set up more permanently leads me to granulating more, and playing more with guitar. This one came out a good bit longer than 45 seconds, but it has a somewhat concise trajectory for a noise drone piece.
A wandering bass cycle fades in over pantomimed foghorns. The ships navigate through the fog. The birds squawk and peck. As the day ends, so another one beings.
Beats waiting in loops hidden in improvised recordings. A return to the Block Party setup leaves me with some features to be desired in the playability of loops department. But, where tools present a wall, a good strategy is often to turn into a different direction.
A digital cape, or a misspoken escape. An attempt to simultaneously maintain routine, and to break out of it.
The dough starts rough, and after a few rolls, falls over itself, as it slowly starts to congeal. This piece is a flakey pie crust, in the school of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca. Set in 3 time, its 14 tracks were blind-recorded with the through-line of “record the same thing each time”. Obviously some variations emerged from the performances, and some from improvisation, and willful neglect. The crust gains its life from imperfections.
An exercise in sparse, spacious composition, inspired by listening to the latest episode of the Norelco Mori podcast. Let the space breathe life into dead machines.
Another track that sounds like it could be the soundtrack of an underground Mario level.
Two-thirds through. Today a piece in the fun-a-day style of some friends in San Francisco that sounds like it could have come from a 90s three-piece with a dead member. ZZ Top Rage.
Lindsay got this Christmas nutcracker that we’ve named Fredrick. He’s still hanging out throughout the winter, so I thought I’d put together a theme song for him.
I was aiming for something minimal and repetitive today, and I think I hit the mark. This sounds a bit like I’d imagine a film score for the scene when the character is stuck at a red light at 3 in the morning that takes 15 minutes to change.
Influenced equally by the quiet strumming in a slint song, and the heavy slowness of sleep. Made this on the correct day, but didn’t have internet to post it.
Today I gave myself an hour time limit (which I still overshot by 30 mins). The result is a two-part guitar song that I probably otherwise would have added an effects/atmosphere track to as well, but couldn’t swing it with the time constraint. It turned out to be a nice vehicle to experiment with the repetitive motifs in the higher register, and with chord voicing in the lower.
Today I felt compelled to revisit a chord progression that I’ve been playing with for a couple of years now. This recording is an experiment in accompaniment, though I’m not sure yet how successful I consider it. It’s an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach of sorts, with the main progression slowly introduced as a fade in over the first couple iterations. This definitely isn’t the final phase of this chord progression, but I do think it’s the first time I’ve released it anywhere.
I finally have access to a guitar again, so I got down with a darker slow jam, accompanied by granulated highs, and some strums glitched out sigh Shaper.
An experiment in blind recording, inspired by listening to @ioflow talk about his process on the lines sound and process podcast.
I was shooting for something a bit more sparse today. Started with a very slow Rozeta Particle Generator blasting midi into iSEM, accompanied by some granular noise, a bit of bass, and a bit of strings low in the mix. There wasn’t a particular meaning or inspiration. Sometimes noise is just noise.
but we haven’t got a sponsor... This is a deliberately ballady pop number, inspired by a request from my friend Sean to take a shot at producing a pop track. This is what came out after an hour or so of nosing around GarageBand on my iPad.
Most of these tracks have been made towards the end of the day. Today, I flipped that approach a bit. After waking up early from jetlag, I decided to jump straight into a song, before even really getting up, and before even having coffee. The result is mellow and has a space to it that I’ve been trying to find with some of the noisier pieces. It took about an hour to track, and then another half hour to tweak the mix.
I fell off the bandwagon for a couple of days, partially due to travel (and some serious flight delays), and partly due to heavy partying on New Year’s Eve. The original thought behind this one was to come back in a sort of minimal, kraut-rocky vein, but I think I missed the mark on the latter half of that. I’ll be able to devote a bit more attention and care once the jetlag wears off.
A further distillation of some of the guitar recordings I made yesterday, barrel aged through Borderlands.
We visited a distillery today and had a tasting, with a lesson about old still pots. For this piece, I took a few guitar loops, and kept the distillation process in mind while preparing the loops in iDensity.
Had a chance to borrow my girlfriend’s dad’s guitar for a bit while visiting for the holidays. Put together this little Folk-inspired, off-time tune to kick off the second half of the project.
50 days in. A melodic line from Ribbons, juxtaposed with granulated drums and high register bells in Borderlands
Cold winter slow jams, with the sound of rain knocking on the window, and deep, rumbling chords.
First round of Christmas dinner jams, featuring vocal samples from family members, put together in fluxpad.
I listened to a lot of Kraftwerk today, and threw this together after a few too many burbons.
For the first time in a while, I actually came up with a sound idea before sitting down to play. The inspiration came from watching a documentary of the Cassini mission while on a flight over the Atlantic.
Track photo sliced from the panorama at https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7803/?category=images
An experiment in process: first finish the drum take, then record the melody take over it. I would have liked to add a bass line, but ran out of time with packing and traveling for the holidays.
I started on a 7/8 rhythm today, but ran out of time to turn it into a full song, so I granularized the recording a bit into this noise composition.
I felt like i was at the end of a creative rope, and then this came out, in a bit of a different direction than most of the other stuff. The drums are attempting to be in 3, but with a polyrhythmic phasing snare pattern, and the Block Party granular acts as a flourish, rather than a focal point. It’s good to turn the tables on your creative processes sometimes.
Messing around with the Bram Bos apps, Xynthesizr, and some contrabass sounds. There’s a point here where this feels a bit rote, and like the routine is devoid of real creative thought, where like, what did I actually do to make and conceptualize this? It feels a bit like Tetris - sometimes you don’t choose what pieces fall down next, but you just move them around as they fall.
Though I spent a chunk of the morning experimenting with sequencing and sample slicing, I wound up here, with a riff that came up a couple of days ago when working on a previous song. I suppose this marks an interesting point of parallel thought: more than one idea comes out in the process of making the days song, and so it may carry over to another day, whether it’s this riff, or the still-unfinished experiment from this morning.
After two days of guitar and vocals, I thought I'd run a synth through the Block Party rig. The source synth patch is the same as from Sunday of the Dead.
I'm noticing that I'm inclined to violate the 45 second constraint more and more with these ambient pieces, as it doesn't feel like enough time for the piece to fully develop. Perhaps tempo is a relevant part to this as well...
Note: original title redacted, because emoji broke the RSS feed.
Some pieces of the puzzle are edges, four are corners, but most are somewhere in the middle.
Made with guitar, vocals, and Block Party by Rodrigo Constanzo.
Day 30. One full month of songs.. It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to do a full guitar multitrack, but I managed to squeeze it in today. It was also a bit of an emotionally trying day, so it felt appropriate to add some vocals in here.
polyrhythmic fuzz arpeggiation.
this is a sort of noodling that i found to be hypnotic over a longer period of time. when constrained to 45 seconds, it only barely has time to develop. a point of intrigue is the fine line between harmonic chordal mush and the melodic movement within.
Note: original title redacted, because emoji appears to have broken the RSS feed.
Sometimes, the composition lies in the corners... I came up with a few other parts that I intended to mix in with this, but I decided to toss them out at the last moment, as it felt like too much to try to develop over 45 seconds. And even limiting it to these sounds, it still came out almost a minute over time. It's an interesting feeling to be at a point in the project where full parts get discarded. It feels like an editing luxury that I couldn't afford in the first days, and possibly won't be able to afford due to time in some of the upcoming ones.
An experiment in recreating boomerang delay by hand, with some granular textures, and low-mix deutend fluttering wandering melodies
Onions crinkling, and a causal inflection point between the effected and the source. Entering the second quarter of the project, I’m finding that even the simplest of tracks still take at least an hour or two of recording, editing, production, and publishing work. Ideally I would be writing more here, but the time is scarce, and the song is the important part.
The roller coaster of daily compositions.. yesterday’s was a 1am haste job after recording a bunch of random guitars and spending way too much time on tech setup that wound up not working. Today’s is a midnight slow haste, after experimenting with new iOS apps and effects.
Keep the melody straight-forward. Allow the effects to add complexity.
If yesterday's straight-up techno track was a departure from the drone music, then this might be somewhere in orbit. It's a coping mechanism of sorts, for an unfortunate scenario I experienced on the S-Bahn a few nights ago.
I found the base rhythmic of this piece in some explorations of the lovely Zmors modular app for iPad, rewiring a preset to drive my own samples. I decided to overlay some guitar/singing grains from Block Party to flesh out there rest of the sonic space.
Day 3 of Ableton Loop. Inspired by binaural beats, feedback resonances, broken pianos, and decaying 60s communist architecture
A single-sample composition, of sorts. Made using a strange, detuned piano sample, run through various processors
Yesterday's release came together a bit haphazardly, and today's is a bit similar, so I'm breaking my own rules: More than 45 seconds. This is partially because I ran out of time, and partially because I enjoyed this whole impromptu jam, and couldn't figure out where to cut it.
The sound generator is called Fugue State. It's an installation piece at Ableton Loop.
Day two.
The trailing end of yesterday's composition left me wanting a slow, swung, hip-hop-ish drum beat, so I took a shot at it.
45 seconds was shorter than I'd realized for this piece, so the exercise of removing and refining is in full-force.
I also learned a new trick with the Borderlands iOS app -- namely, that you can continuously stream audio into multiple clips at the same time, and position them like normal sound clips, with the grain-clouds swarming over the input.. It plays like an effect this way, rather than a synth.
A vocal-focused track to kick things off, with a little bit of explanation.
Here we go with an adventure