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It's more an interpretation than a direct implementation. I started with a choir track I used from somewhere else. I mirrored it adding a reverse version of it, because the lakes image mirrored. Originally I wanted to stop here, because I liked the result and it had something from a lake mood. But the waveform was missing, so added the sequence and it's volume tend to follow the trees shapes. I added some pad of different colors at some points which could be interpreted as the yellow areas. One choir track is decently rippled by a phaser …. etc. Bottom line: you may not hear the wave form, but it's there!
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The track is build around a sequence in some permutations and some probability gimmicks, which I was currently working on for myself. It’s 9/8 in a plain vanilla Cminor scale and it’s 80 bars (plus some outro bars) at constant 90bpm.
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I somehow felt the vegetation to be very alien, high frequency, fragile and stereo, the visitor of the flora low frequency, stabile and mono. From there on I fumbled together things in Reaper. It got a bit lenghty, but I like it very much and needs it's time.
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I instantly wanted to do something with probabilities. So here are a lot of probabilities at work, thanks to Ableton: The pad (23 notes of A minor scale, with a 23% probability of being played an octave higher) and the gong have a 23% probability of not to be played inside 1 bar with 1 note in a loop of 23 bars. The cymbal has a 23% probability of being played and, if played, a 23% probability of being a rainstick. The voices saying 'The Probability Is 23 Percent' are made with ttsmp3.com and I downloaded 23 different versions which had a switch probability of 23% (so not all of them may have been played; the 'stutter effect' is by accident, I did not found the cause and liked it anyway). And so on, with 23 bpm. I wanted to do 23 Minutes but to honor the "squared" prompt (and to spare you some repetition) it's only 529 seconds (8:49min). Be assured that, although I was a huge fan of The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Wilson/Shea and it may sound otherwise here, I didn't take all that too seriously…
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It sounded like a construction with two textures to me and thats how I started it. The basis was build by 2 recognizable field recordings (crowd voices, pool noises) and 2 noise drones from my AEmodular (which it strangely made while idle / no clock).
The field recordings where FXed to become hardly recognizable, the noises were placed more like environmental sounds and with a slight stereo pan. I didn't like the result, it just felt too shallow. So I added the AEmodular FMOS SEQ8uence, which has in itself two (mainly) different states with some generative, some manually made transitions. This explanation seems overly intellectual now but I think the track would entertain inside an elevator transit between two floors.
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6. |
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The first 24 bars of Satie's Gymnopedie #1, cut into bars, repuzzled and then rearranged, mostly by ear.
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7. |
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The short story: Good Things Take Time, and so did this.
The long story: This was planned to be "My Memory Seems To Be Clouded" and it mainly consist of Bastl SoftPop2 recordings (sometimes via MI Clouds) plus some Drum VST, but I somehow did something wrong with the recording. In Reaper it was 4 Minutes and normal, after exporting it was 4 Minutes and way too fast. Just scaling down the tempo to the half didn't work, as the stretching algorithms destroyed the sound in a way I didn't like. I was sure that the problem was just some setting anywhere, but I was no able to locate it. I started things new, reinstalled things, re-arranged the crazy Mac aggregate device and so on, and after some time even old tracks had a wrong tempo and I checked my coffee for psychedelic mushrooms. At the end it was something with "96khz versus 48khz" after I had used another recorder for line recording this week. Learnings: Reaper has a general setting for the sample rate of recordings and a project based setting for only this project. Wave editors like ocenaudio can change the sampling rate without changing the lenght, editors like Audacity can change the sampling rate so that by reducing it to the half the track is double the lenght – and no stretching is needed, all samples are saved. By some unknown quantum karma this turned out to be the conversion I needed, although it is now 8 minutes. Fun fact: So at some stage Reaper definitely showed a wrong lenght, and I remember that I already thought "this somehow sounds longer than 4 minutes … is it ambient or just boring?". Anyway, it took some time to get this result as wanted, because Good Things Take Time (which may more be more of a proverb that a metaphor, but I did'n want to emphasize the Valley Of Dispair subtext …).
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8. |
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…
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Being lazy, I wanted the breathing itself to do the music. So I used plugins on my breathing, that use the source audio more or less as something to resonate on. At the end it's mainly AAS Object Delay and Micheal Norris Spectral Filterbank / Blurring / Bin Shift / Grain Streamer / Harmonizer plus filters, panning, reverb.
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I decided against steganographic tools or an alphabet-into-scale scheme and went for a simple morse code. So at the end of the day this is mainly security by obscurity.
There are two text messages inside the music and most effort went into making it difficult to even recognize the morse codes, so they are splitted up, hidden behind scales, sounds, noises and apparent significance and there is never a moment where all needed sound information is given at a time. On the other hand there are hints to find the looping points of the multiple morse codes.
I don't know if I would be able to extract the message now, but I'm pretty sure it's extractable. The hidden secret is: "This contains an encrypted message." and "Here are the secret missile codes.". The missile PIN code for the nuclear end of the world itself is hidden in another attribute of the track, which unfortunately may be the easyiest to … measure.
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This was fun. I thought about intrusions. Mostly it's the loud street in front of my window and kids running in the flat above mine and people shouting at Siri, Alexa and OKgoogle in the backyard.
I checked my field recordings and there it was: the f… church bells. A bad ambient track, repeated relentlessly every sunday, never changing, a transcendent single-track playlist …
I threw the field recoding of the bells into deCoda, and it calculated Aminor and 84bpm. I started a track from scratch with these parameters and improvised some beats and pads. The idea was to have a peaceful ambient track … that could be disturbed by acoustic intrusion of the church bells.
The track seemed finished when I read the algorithm again and listened to the Cage-Feldman-Talk. I liked the pure oddity of the first minutes, so I added some parts of the beginning, accepting that this will draw focus to the conversation, so I didn't care that you don't understand much.
Next sunday at seven, they will play my track …
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Track image credit: Ancient church in Lunigiana (Tuscany, Italy) by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash https://unsplash.com/photos/rJo9jh9iORU
Talk samples credit: John Cage + Morton Feldman's Coffee-Sippin' ASMR Chat in a Room Full of Cigarette Smoke on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chEvxoypyUo
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13. |
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I split up the John Cage chord into a fistful of Ableton Live tracks, all with (not too) different Kontakt instruments and placed them in space by pan and reverb. Every note had a chance of being played of 50% per 90bpm bar. Some noise was added because I felt it being too clean, accepting that this and too much movement would maybe not correspond with the spirit of Cage's piece. An export was done and the mix happened in Reaper, where a Valhalla Delay with 4 bars lenght on the master track repeated whatever is played to smear the notes into each other. The result was this version. I took a 3 minute part out of this and made it into a loop by adding the beginning to the end to comply with the rules. The loop version can be downloaded on soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/winterer/chord-cage-loop-disquiet0554
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I tried different DAWs and Synths to get a nice sound and ended with Live, Stepic and Aalto (Beat Edition). The track consists of 5 tracks, all tracks are automated with 5/10/15 step sequences. Aalto does not offer triangle, but I used sine, square and saw. Some tracks change their wave form by modulation and/or automation. I allowed all 5 sequencers only to select from 5 notes (plus octaves), from which one note had to be random. The drums are very deep squarewaves with very short decays, which made noise (looking at the exported waveform this may have been a betrayal to the assignment). No effects have been used but some EQ on the drums, modulated and automated panning in general and some mastering at the end. The lenght is 555 seconds (5m55s felt wrong). I think I failed on 'minimalism', on the other hand it's 9+ minutes with only five sequences which do not bore me, so I think it passes as minimal ambient. As always, it was a fun challenge!
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I didn't want to understand the picture as a kind of timeline to be read from left to right. From the beginning I felt the urge for simultaneity, as it is inherent in images. I saw four or five elements, of which the lower/left one is incomprehensible, condensing on a background and perhaps disappearing again like stains from a coffee cup.
With that in mind, I started playing around in Live, mostly with samplers like DecentSampler, Soundpaint, and Spitfire Labs, and a lot of destructive FX. I wanted to achieve the mysteriousness that I felt myself when I looked at the image. The only discernible motif kind of emerged as I played around, it was actually too clear to me, but then I didn't want to go without it.
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I did a lot of tracks, all of them endet in being "too full" for my idea of falling asleep. This one, based again on my breathing, felt monotonous enough to to the job.
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The idea of Digital Magical Realism was to combine realistic field recordings that don’t match realistically, plus synths that mimic real instruments, but not realistically enough.
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I used a track on which I was already working on and added automatic tools to randomly add or substract up to two octaves to all tracks. The probability was chosen so that the octave jumps should go unnoticed.
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I listened to some of Eric Saties tracks for musique d’ameublement, like Tapisserie en fer forgé and knew, it has to be very repetitive. I was lazy and took a track I was already working on and cut away everything non-repetitive, plus I changed the instrumentation to something more orchestral and Satie-esq and the key to Am (in which Carrelage Phonique seems to be). I wanted it to have beauty and regular irregularities. I added some field recordings to give a feeling of listening to this musique d'aménagement de jardin outdoors. Like all good wallpaper, the pattern repeats loopable.
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Laurie Andersons "Big Science" was one of the first "avantgarde" LPs I owned in a time, when teens like me used to listen to Kim Wilde or so. I remember listening endlessly to especially "From The Air", "O Superman" and "Example #22".
Since then the beginning of the "voice sample" from "Example #22" is what I speak into microphones to test them. And as I had a podcast recording this week, I started the track with a sample from this recording.
I noodled it thru some granulators and added some other stuff. I absolutely wanted to add some "O superman"-vocoder-oh-ohs with a XILS V+ I bought last week (don't miss the 75% sales, especially the XILS 4 https://www.xils-lab.com/products/xils-4-p-148.html, and no, I'm not connected to Monsieur Oudin) and it nearly drove me insane to get Reaper and the V+ to run as a vocoder. But it worked.
The resulting track may be considered as what I have in mind when I think of these tracks from Laurie Anderson, which I am thankful for. Please notice that is 40 years since "Big Science" – wtf am I old …
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I opted for "Fuchs Du hast die Gans gestohlen" (Fox you stole the goose), a German nursery rhyme from around 1824 based on an older folksong. It was written by Ernst Anschütz, whom you may know for "O Tannenbaum".
Because I'm currently in love with the Playhugger Microns Presets for Pigments , which use wavetables based on the MicroQ I once had (and sold when I was out of money), I currently do everything with these pads. So I went for a slow ambient pads arrangement of this song, using only the original melody material plus some probabilities.
At the end it did not sound like a lullaby at all, but I liked it very much for what it is. At one point I added some sweet bells and stuff, but I always went back to this somehow brutal and unkrakenkrafty version.
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I liked Tendigits https://soundcloud.com/tendigits/disquiet0572-rythm-kit and because it seemed to be made completely "by machine" I wanted to add only things without machines/automation.
So I improvised around five additional tracks of sounds (and tried to leave room for some variation on the original drum track by Tendigits while doing it). In this week I also had field recorded the sound of icicles that I had knocked off the corrugated roof above the bicycle stand in the inner courtyard of my flat (my wife recorded, I knocked of the icicles – they can be seen on the track cover) and somehow felt they would fit as a mysterious element (hence the title) and because there was something like ice rain I heard in the original track (maybe its just me…). Finally I felt something was missing and added a live sung/spoken session of some kind of acoustic nagging to the track, which I edited with a lot of fx and manually painted parameter curves.
It now feels like a hit.
There is a video on instagram www.instagram.com/p/Cmem4hepeBb/
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23. |
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As soundcloud already is my musical diary, the filter was "published on soundcloud, but not for disquiet junto and not a Bandcamp album". By synchronicity the result was 23 tracks. Triggered by this number, I set the speed in Reaper to 22bpm and decided to give them all some bars. Each snippet is now 10.909 seconds long, which I could not relate to 22 or 23, but it's the day the Truman show went wrong (and the movie started 24 years ago). The audio excerpt of each track was mostly choosen visually in the end of the first third. I preferred light fades (25% of the lenght) over hard cuts. Some volume corrections. No FX.
Thanks to Marc and all junto members for their tracks, feedback, ideas, inspiration.
Track samples from:
“Lustgarten”
“ytraavaan”
“some weathering”
“Nicht heute”
“Algae Goddess”
“cyanea capillata”
“AEmod_KAESTLE”
“The Dirac Sea”
“HO_EL”
"Business Party Chatter
“doubts about going for a walk”
“Red Palms”
“MFOS-WSG-Juni22”
“The Cline”
“The Eightfold Way”
“No Kooning”
“Rippling Along”
“Heavy Gluon Nebulizer”
“Monomatopoeia”
“Prejatorif”
“Strange H”
“Nondrian”
“Continuum Decay”
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A 2h+ collection of selected ambient & experimental electronica contributions to the Disquiet Junto.
"Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto group, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate."
I consider the 23 tracks on "disquiet III" my 'best' contributions to the disquiet junto in 2022. Now that the year has ended the album is finished. You may want to download it now for free (even if you have already downloaded an earlier version with fewer tracks).
Some rights reserved. Please refer to individual track pages for license info.
