music - tm

"Frienemies (2018)" [5.1 MB .mp3]

Am about 28 songs behind in posting to my Bandcamp page. This one is a redo of an effort from December 2007. At that time I didn't care much about song structure, or, alternatively, was mesmerized by certain textures and just let them repeat for three minutes. Now some of those efforts test my patience -- enough, enough, break it up already. This remake has a few more motifs piling up in a shorter run time. The triplet chords at the beginning were originally notes from a MIDI version of an, ahem, Enya song that Guthrie Lonergan posted.

8 midi channels in Ableton are converted to 8 pitch/gate voltage signals using Expert Sleepers midi-to-SPDIF-to-cv modules; the pitches and gates are patched to 8 gate and 1v-per-octave inputs in two Mutable Instruments Edges modules. Many thanks to Andrew Ostler of Expert Sleepers for providing an Ableton template that made this work.

Screenshot of release page for my 27th Bandcamp release, Enough Units.

Short songs with a few ambient-style pieces interspersed. Continuing the quest for concise combinations of electronic sounds, noise, canned beats intended for electronica producer-wannabes, and "loopable" phrases from old vinyl records. "Tunes" are used in this process of integration and commentary; musical development within a song, in the conservatory sense, occurs but as a means to an end: a theme, a chorus, a bridge, an abrupt segue to a new tune are useful in focusing attention on the timbral and mnemonic connections, in a way (I find) that mere drones, collages, washes of sound, and other ambient music vocabulary elements, are not. The song-smithing is as "discursive" as it needs to be. (As a friend noted, there is also intentional humor.)

Streaming version on Bandcamp: 02:24 min

From my current release Similarity Engine

.wav files from the St Celfer sample archive added some noise-oomph to this track. Also featured are time-mutated ambient sounds I made with the Qu-Bit Nebulae synth, and some sequences made with other Eurorack modules (I can't remember which now).

The screenshot of the Tracktion Waveform DAW tells you little or nothing -- that is to say, as much as the wave file images that Soundcloud uses. A crude "indexical" record of the music, not a score per se.