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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Kleinode, Some Less Exciting Space Adventures, disquiet23, Eternal Trancemissions, Machinic Hallucinations, Lament Lake, Walking Zone 5, disquiet III, and 33 more.
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I always wanted to do the ice project, but year for year I missed it because of … reasons. Last year I even build a diy hydrophone (see here https://www.instagram.com/p/CXoJtm5tR_w/ ) for this project (and missed it again). Now I tried to melt the ice with the frozen contact mic inside, and record it 'from inside'.
I made some videos: In the “red part” of the video I hoped to create (and record) a crack in the ice, in the “ice inside a glass” part you may even see the bubbles of noises you will hear in my track (not in the video, it's meta only): https://www.instagram.com/p/CnFbiOiNIV3/
The results were … unspectacular. By whatsoever reason the ice didn't click or make interesting noises and because I had to amplify the signal from the contact mic of the hydrophone, there was a lot of noise and hum in the Zoom H5 recording.
I used a 1 minute sample from the recordings, reduced the noises and the hum and tried to isolate the sound of the slowly melting ice, which was a sound between cooking water, eating popcorn, burning wood. It didn't work well, because the noise frequencies were mostly on the same range. But you can hear them in the background noise floor, which I doubled time-displaced for having stereo. I added some Supermassive FX, because it worked.
I could have lived with that alone, but decided to add some bass. Fortunately there was the f…ing 50Hz AC humming in the recording, which I had filtered for the melting ice noise tracks – and which I amplified for the bass track. Maybe not the most interesting bass lick, but I liked it for its endurance.
I used another, unfiltered version of the sample to add rhythmic elements with the help of Audiomoderns Stepfilter and Gatelab plugins, which are always nice for something like that, and here I used two instances with different speeds (1/4, 1/8T) for creating some unexpectedness.
I think I clearly failed recording "ice in a glass". Next try next new years eve … but I really like the resulting track, because all is made with a single noisy humming 1 minute recording sample. If someone wants to add some solo or remix it – be my guest ;-)
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I started with the idea of following the white rabbit and the Disney scene in my mind, where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and things became strange. I took used stems from older tracks, selecting only weird ones, cutting and rebuilding them by hand and with some Puremagnetik and other FX, to what I felt was an acoustic funnel which hopefully sucks you in.
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Out of curiosity, I had just bought a sequencer called ZOA, so I decided to go with the "Game of Life" approach of this sequencer (chances are I'm not alone in this). In case you're not familiar with the concept: Conway's Game of Life is a cellular model of evolution in which the life of each cell depends on the life of neighboring cells. In ZOA, each cell is a note and four sequencers play these notes according to additional rules. ZOA adds features like MIDI, and I liked that a lot.
What I didn't like was the randomness of the melodies, but hey, isn't life random in the first place? (Big debate… let's say: Sometimes it feels random...) I had pushed the development by changing the probability of the notes by hand. If the game of life had come to a halt with some dead pattern, I would have used that, but I didn't want to force it.
I played with many instruments and patterns, but in the end I reduced it to two tracks of eighth notes. For the beginning and the end I chose a cheap fade-in, fade-out, because life came quietly and very slowly out of nowhere, and I think that according to current scientific knowledge, one day it will end like that and just fade out.
Self verdict: The track is soulless and meaningless, like the evolution of life, which need not mean that listeners could not hear either soul or meaning in it if they felt like it.
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Kraken Techno has to be plain 120bpm and 16th sequenced suction cups, but these have to drift apart in the course of the piece - like the tentacles do.
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At first I used a (way longer) track I am working on and added the erasers. First eraser is the virtual modular Mirack as a FX: The rubbers are two filters, the randomness comes from a pair of probability driven sequencer CVs with divided semi-randomnized clocks. The second eraser is simply Audiomodern Gatelab, which has a mode in which at the end of the loop a new gate pattern is created. The third eraser is Cherry Audio Voltage Modular as FX with a panner, that is gating with a sequencers input; the sequencer is just an on/off pattern (erasing lefts and rights), but the clock is probability driven (and the probability amount is CVed by another probability module).
Maybe because the original track (a) was generative/euclidian with a lot of changes in itself, the result didn't convince me. So I looked for stems with less movement.
I added stems from "Eternal Trancemissions #01 [disquiet0576]" to the existing track framework with the defined FXs. Because the bass stem fell into the track with the Mirack modular filter there was this part murky, part screaming result I instantly liked as a fundament for the remaining stems of what became (b).
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As Iˋm traveling at the moment all I had was an iPad. I thought about skipping the prompt but then I wanted to do it for the challenge of making it mobile. I used MiRack, a virtual modular system, to make a patch that goes out of tune regularly. To add some atmo, I added the MiRack recording to a granular sampler (Samplr) plus some noises plus me humming live out of tune with the seashore in the background. Hope you like it. Sorry for lo–fi, it's made with cheap earbuds and outside a studio in the hotels garden. Track name references to „Ring my bell“ from the end of the golden era of Disco, which popped up in my mind when I thought about a track name with bells …
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What can be surfed? A wavetable synth. How can it be surfed? By the sound of sea waves. This was the starting point for this patch with the virtual modular system miRack.
The wavetable module "Seven Seas" gets modulated by CVs generated from the field recording inputs (that you can hear parallel). The pitch is generated by the seawaves cv, mixed with a LFO for more variety (and the LFOs speed, too, is slightly modulated by the waves cv).
As a result the playing of the wavetable synth follows mostly the sea waves – it's surfing it. (Interspersed additional recordings of an internet surfer and a theremin (only for some 'good vibrations'…).)
I did so many version and was never satisfied with the modulation of the wavetables itself, but this day is over. Whether all the effort was worth it? I have no idea, but I think I learned a lot. Anyway, there's a more traditional first version that I discarded, here https://soundcloud.com/winterer/surfing-seven-seas
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I wanted to have a track that contains traditional music, the feedback should just be rococo flourishes. I started with two field recordings and made them rhythmic. I added three instruments. Both field recordings and one of the instruments got a Valhalla Delay with a manually painted feedback curve. I wanted the feedback to be a little bit, but not too annoying.
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I started with a track I'm working on since months and which does not work for me. I threw away all but what was originally some kind of Rhodes basis. I rearranged it until I liked it more than the original fully instrumented version. It's now Dmin with only two 4-bar-progressions to Gm and back. It's 90bpm, 6/4. I see plenty of space for Drums, Leads, Vocals, Noises - have fun, if you like ;-)
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I used a field recording of static rain in Munich from 2021 or so, on four tracks identically. All of them got filtered thru Cardinal VST, a very nice VCV Rack alternative, working as an effect, so that I could apply nested LFOs and parameter curves to the stereo filters (1x lowpass, 1x highpass, 2x bandpass) and it's resonances. The whole mix was filtered by apesoft apefilter for dramaturgy reasons.
There was a 1 hour version but I cut it down to 10 minutes because even I could not stand it that long, but with 10 minutes it's nice. Without the junto rule set I think I would have applied more elements.
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Salty
04:50
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Sour
03:40
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Sweet
03:52
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Bitter
02:32
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Emerging Flavours
29:29
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The self-contained ambient drone tracks are on this album, too.
All covers by Midjourney ("a cover for an ambient album named sour / salty / sweet / bitter"…), final cover is a blend of them. I was not able to prevent Midjourney from using halucinated writings.
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I wanted to make a ten minutes track, because thats 600 seconds for disquiet0600. Some of the samples went into granular meat grinders of different kinds (but mostly Granulator II in Live), others were used more or less directly, but with something from Puremagnetik as an FX. I went by stomach for a track that would please my taste, using only Marcus samples
I used all of Marcus samples and nothing else. Begin and end use unchanged samples. I think it became a pretty cool ambient track with a nice hypnotic effect.
All sample sound material: Marcus Fischer – thank you!
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It was a cloudy day. I had a migraine clouded mind. I took a cloud picture and gated it using a threshold function. The idea seemed to be to lose something. I kind of stirred all that together, somehow, more by stomach. Then I made cloudy sounds, used Kilohearts Gate and changed it’s threshold parameter over five recorded tracks manually to keep them stuttering. I wanted the acoustic image to be recognizable, but partially destroyed by it’s lost.
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AmbPadic [disquiet0614]
04:23
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Disqbeat [disquiet0619]
03:19
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Krakenkraft Munich, Germany
Ambient electronica, ambient adjacent, noise drones, chillout & kosmische space music from Munich, Germany.
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Sonic Hymnary [CYD 0071]
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A Krakenkraft release at the great CYCLICAL DREAMS label!
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Æther Waves Vol. 5
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nice compilation with music from the AEmodular system
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Saturn Mysteries
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Berlin School album from my other identity
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