music - tm

"Fusion Disassembly" [mp3 removed]

Tunes were added to "Audrey (Royal Beats 2)." Much time spent EQing and compressing and rearranging to get this--it's about 10 tracks total, including three drum tracks, three basses, and two e-pianos.
Had in mind a kind of deliberately robotic, or MIDI-oid, fusion jazz, a collection of parts that come together as counterpoint elements as the song progresses. (But still feels "perky" and moves along, and with a fuller sound than old school "homepage MIDI.") So the tunes are kind of placeholders, that I start liking more towards the end of the song. (And it's only two minutes.) No idea if any of this communicates in the finished piece, or why anyone would especially want to do this.

"Audrey (Royal Beats 2)" [mp3 removed]

Another iteration of this Vermona drum machine beat series I've been working on. The device has three drums that can be kicks or toms depending on the tuning and the attack/decay envelope. Here I tuned them to different pitches and used them to play reductive melodies. Why not just use a synth? These toms sound really good to me, and filtering them makes them even more sensuous.

The bass is a long, distorted note recorded earlier on one of the toms, then given different pitches after the fact, using a software "tune" plug in. And am continuing to explore compression plugins to punch up some of the sounds.

This could be longer than two minutes--am thinking of ways to add to it. Also thinking about making the tom "solo" in the middle a bit less random. [Update: Changed a few notes in the "solo" and reposted the song.]

"Fuchsia Refraction" [mp3 removed]

Was admiring a minimal techno piece by Alessandro Crimi posted on Disquiet. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of doing anything like Crimi's--sexy, ponderous, deep, long. Every time I try, something silly happens like the slightly out of tune self-oscillating filter in this one. Then all the points seem to be made and the piece ends at 1:39.

"Audrey the King" [mp3 removed -- a revised version is on Bandcamp]

Fished this electric piano chord sample out of the bowels of a Reaktor sample map about five years ago--it's intended to be "mangled," as the beatmongers love to say, but I unmangled it.

It was added to the minimal beats two posts back, necessitating adding tons of other stuff to solve the resulting compositional Rubik's cube (it's not that complicated a song but the writing was slow, e.g. the bass/piano counterpoint at the end).

Earlier "the sample" was used in a tune I've been continuously massaging; see "Audrey Zapp (Light Industrial Remix)." It's a very "happy" sample.

"Caesura Salad" [mp3 removed -- a newer version is available on Bandcamp]

Another on the "modular" rhythm synth. See previous post--same methodology. Some weird commercial electro beat samples were added to one of the "stanzas." The line breaks of the various stanzas are actually not caesuras but the pun had to be used.