music - tm

"Marching Morons (2013 Mix)" [mp3 renamed and moved to Bandcamp]

Revisited a tune from 2005, now retired from its duties as a bot-magnet (owing to the unique extension "mp3"). I liked the sensual sound of the SID chip's 8-bit-with-analog-filter-processing so I just had a repeating figure going up and down an octave while a drum machine chugs along underneath. It essentially still does that but I added some dropouts (which sounds like a contradiction), some delay, some Afro-Cuban percussion, and couple of sing-songy synth motifs at the end. "The Marching Morons" is a 1951 science fiction short story by C.M. Kornbluth.

"Fidgety Twister" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]

Am continuing to play with the Octatrack's slicing tools as a way of rearranging notes. You can do this in Cubase but it's a pain, cutting and pasting and dragging files around with a mouse. The Octatrack is designed so you can get in and move notes around and change pitches and sample rates with buttons and knobs and it's faster. Probably about the same as an Ableton control surface but I've avoided Ableton as not "classical" enough.

What's time-consuming is the writing. Each bar is tweaked so it's not just a numbing sequencer grind. An added note here, a pause there, a slight delay, a backwards riff...

The raw material came from "Rack Dance 3 (Atonal Variations)" -- I guess I tried to make it more tonal. Also bulked up with added bass lines and familiar jaunty breakbeats.

"Texas Sawtooth Massacre" [mp3 removed -- tune is now on Bandcamp]

Sounds from the computer_controlled_rack (the name I gave my modular on the Modular Grid gear fetish website), MIDI-triggered, sampled, and arranged in the Octatrack. The main excitement here is a gritty wavetable sample originating in the WMD Gamma Wave Source module, sampled by the Doepfer A-112 in wavetable mode (with CV-sweeping of the table at my barbaric skill level), played as a MIDI controlled synth (with hi, lo and notch filters), sampled in the Octatrack, "sliced" and rearranged to make 10 or so patterns. There is also a bass line and the reappearance of the most famous beat in the history of electronic music. This is kind of rough going at the outset but gets better as it progresses IMHO.

"Ambient Chord" [mp3 removed]

Sounds generated by the computer_controlled_rack, but with no MIDI or cv guidance: it's just LFOs and envelopes triggering and shaping sounds.
The chord is three oscillators tuned to A above middle C, __ and __ (a few semitones on either side of A, I truly don't care what emotional values some idiot has assigned this chord).
A cascading envelope array triggers the notes and filtering residue lingering after the notes have sounded. The notes are played in real time, but were also 8-bit sampled, slowed down, and looped to make the repeating tonal figure that runs throughout. Some filtered scratch sounds also loop in the background. The speeding up of the chord at the halfway point is accomplished by increasing the LFO frequency gating the envelope-cascade (turning a knob, in other words).

"8-Bit Dancehall Dustup" [mp3 removed -- a revised version is on Bandcamp]

Inspired by the "breakage" of a kid on YouTube I sliced the most famous beat in the history of electronic music, hopefully beyond recognition.