music - tm

"Escape from Spring"

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"Escape from Spring" [4.1 MB .mp3]

A two minute post-chiptunes opera inspired by Poulenc.
Live MIDI performance by Travis Hallenbeck cut up, reassembled and rhythmically augmented by Tom Moody.
(A longer version was posted previously as "H.M.M.M. 2")

Libretto:

In a pastoral landscape in rural Virginia birds and crickets frolic among some old rusted trucks.
Enid, a hamadryad, listens from inside a majestic oak.
Some goths on mopeds enter the clearing to drink absinthe while sitting on the trucks.
Enid cries out from inside her tree, wishing to join them.
The absinthe opens the goths' frontal lobes so they can hear her and summon her from the tree.
Enid, personified as a teenage girl, jumps on the back of a moped and rides into the city with the goths.
Cruising through the night streets her song becomes an atonal wail of mingled pleasure and pain.
She yearns for her tree but prefers the speed, artificiality, and rootlessness of city life. The song ends with her riding the subway with her boyfriend, who drives a front end loader and still occasionally goes out to the Virginia woods for medieval role playing.

"RMV Study No. 3"

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"RMV Study No. 3" [mp3 removed]

mildly spooky Latin robo-percussion.
all done with the Linplug RMV soft-sampler except the pitched bass tones, which are analog.
The djembe with the long pingpong delay (in the second half) gets me kind of excited.
Will probably add some e-piano parts to this, this is all-percussion.

"Metro Blorp 2"

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"Metro Blorp 2" [mp3 removed -- a revised version of this track is on Bandcamp]

Some electro drum loops run through a software delay and multi-tracked; the synth on top of them is the Reaktor 3X. Was inspired on the squiggly synth filtering by the work of Lory D, some of whose tracks I've recently found, after listening to one ("Bitter End 1," misnamed as Synapse's "Stealing Science" on Tony Thorpe's Electric Kingdom compilation) about a thousand times. He alters more settings in real time, but I've got several tunes going at once by the end.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (with Electro)

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A tune of mine ("Yog 2012") is used in a YouTube-documented sculpture work by Aron Namenwirth, titled I Can Hear You. An abandoned speaker is filled with soil, which is used to grow an oak tree seedling. The music emanates from the "tweeter" while the tree occupies the slot for the former "woofer."
Namenwirth is using cast-off furniture and other artifacts as soil cases for growing trees--in this case with a literal audio component. Back in the '70s there was much discussion and media buzz about talking to plants and playing music for them. That's somewhere in the cultural background of this electro-eco-botanical artwork. I like the lumpenfuturistic element--it works as an abject counterpoint to all the buff new media pieces that try to incorporate growing things, while still being straightforward in its urban environmentalism (Namenwirth plans to eventually plant the trees and let the casings rot in the ground).