BETTER OFF TED

This track treats a photo by Yojiro Imasaka as its score. More on Imasaka at: http://yojiroimasaka.com. 

View original image: http://disquiet.com/images/2012/2012.05/2012.05-yojiroimasaka.jpg

The music you hear emanates from the windows. It includes the sound of someone banging on the pipes and metalwork. I tried to interpret the windows’s variation in size from left to right as a direct influence in this track’s complexity and velocity. 

Audio recorded between May 10-14. 

Features extensive use of The Harvestman’s feedback console (Evin 209 + Stilton Adapter) with pedal chain. Rhythms created with Double Andore influencing Piston Honda and Polivoks VCF. Others…

All in all, 7 individual modular takes were recorded. The original final edit to this track was over 6 minutes in length. In order meet the 4 minute track duration requirement and represent the many floors of windows in the image, I divided the track in half and faded the 2 regions into one another. 

Edits and changes to time created in Logic Pro. 

I used my usual array of stock Logic plugins and one instance of D16 Toraverb.

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

Track 1: Acoustic guitar through Tyme Sefari. 
Track 2: Hertz Donut drone. 
Track 3: Piston Honda manipulation.

The 16th assignment in the Junto series. 

2 tracks digitally manipulated in Logic Pro. 
Each exported and individually run through the modular. 
Imported both new files into the Logic environment and layered against the originals.

Sandpaper sample by HerbertBoland at: http://www.freesound.org/people/HerbertBoland/sounds/28541/ 
Dice sample by Robinhood76 at: http://www.freesound.org/people/Robinhood76/sounds/60857/ 
More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

A sonic interperataion of an excerpt from Matt Madden’s single-page comic:

Harvestman Modular, 5by5’s “The Critical Path” excerpt.

Background: Matt Madden’s single-page comic is the template for a book he created titled 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. In the book, Madden told that same story 99 different ways, each in a different comic-book style. For example, he told it as a superhero comic, he told it as a manga, he told it as experienced from upstairs, and he told it as if it were overheard at a bar. Madden did this in homage to the French writer Raymond Queneau’s own Exercises in Style, which is a key text of the literary movement known as Oulipo. Oulipo approaches the act of writing with intentional constraints, and the movement’s approach to creativity was a strong influence on the development of the Disquiet Junto. Oubapo is the name of the comics version of Oulipo. What we’re up to is the musical version: Oumupo

More on Matt Madden and his book 99 Ways to Tell a Story at:
http://mattmadden.com/
http://exercisesinstyle.com/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

No birds were harmed in the making of this audio file.

The source material for this track was provided from these two samples:
http://www.freesound.org/people/UncleSigmund/sounds/30266/ 
http://www.freesound.org/people/reinsamba/sounds/32480/

Changed length of birdsong » songthrush_17_03_07.wav  to 1 hour, 7 minutes. Pitched up 2 octaves. Sent to 40 tape delay bus. 

Changed length of A_c#minor_bminor_E_chord_progression_on_guitar_with_echo.wav to just over 5 minutes, keeping pitch intact. Re-EQed and sent through 40 tape delay bus. 

The “40 Tape Delay Bus” exploits only the tape modeling and does not provide any wet/dry mix of the audio sent through it. This basically just adds some warble, warmth and slight timing/tuning distortions. 

Once I got the two tracks nestled in a mix, sounding roughly the way I wanted, I uploaded this “beta” version to Soundcloud to play trough my iPhone and into my Harvestman modular. The audio went into one Double Andore channel and direct into the Polivoks VCF. The signal split there, as I sent the LPF out to Tyme Sefari; the bandpass out back to Double Andore channel 2, which then led to Qotile Ultimatum (which is being used as mixer) before hitting the Stilton Adapter (which is my main output). Both of the Tyme Sefari’s 2 outs were used: Mix Out led to the Piston Honda (in Table Addressing mode) straight to that same Qotile Ultimatum; DLY Out took a trip through a Kuzminorgel sub-octave divider before hitting the Qotile Ultimatum. Double Andore’s Mix out was also sent directly to the last of 4 inputs on the Qotile Ultimatum. These 4 channels were summed and some very light delay and reverb was applied to the master as it ran through the Stilton Adapter and back to Logic Pro. The Hertz Donut (LFO), Double Andore (envelopes) Stillson Hammer and Zorlon Cannon were used to manipulate the signal path as I manually controlled various settings.

More details on the Disquiet Junto at: http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info

It’s with great pleasure that I am able to announce my inclusion in the formidable Futuresequence series, SEQUENCE. Taken from my upcoming full length on Quonset Digital, Recordings for Ensoniq Fizmo’s P64 has been featured on SEQUENCE3. The immense track listing includes work from some of my favorite ambient/drone artists and clocks in at over 4 hours in duration. A definite must-have for 2012.

Spinning Cylinders, created entirely from antique cylinder recordings imported into Logic Pro. The source material was recorded between 1899-1919. 

The earliest of the three selections, “Angel’s Serenade” by the Columbia Orchestra was recorded in 1899 by “The Columbia Phonograph Company of New York and Paris” and appears to have heavy surface noise around the beginning of the song. I used the song’s spoken introduction, along with the surface noise to create a number of different elements for this week’s submission, first at the beginning of the song, right before the drop and again at the end.

The piano, xylophone and saxophone samples are taken from 1919’s “Shimmee Town” by The All Star Trio, a bit of the early foxtrot sound you’d have heard at the Ziegfield Follies around that time. Foxtrot was the most popular uptempo dance music style from the late teens well into the 1940’s, so I pay tribute to that here by incorporating the samples into a more modern dance beat. 

Indestructable Concert Band’s 1908 recording of “Rainbow Medley” is where most of my percussion and bass sounds come from in this track. The baseline and midrange LFO nonsense started as a sample taken from the clean vocals in the middle of the arrangement. A few trips through Logic’s AutoFilter and a hundred year old thick syrupy bass. There is a very prominent clack sound throughout this recording, which I used in my track to create a number of the hits in the drum kit. 

Besides the stock Logic audio units, I also used  each one plugin from Massey, Soundhack and PSP. 

All audio selected from these antique cylinder recordings:

“Angel’s Serenade” by the Columbia Orchestra (1899): http://www.archive.org/details/colnyp-15132

“Shimmee Town” by The All Star Trio (1899): http://www.archive.org/details/edba-3871

“Rainbow Medley” by Indestructable Concert Band (1908): http://www.archive.org/details/ind-986

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto”

As 2011 wound down, I was fortunate enough to participate in an exciting new project commissioned by Disquiet’s own Marc Weidenbaum. I’ll let Marc describe it here:

“Photos shared with the popular software Instagram are usually square in format, not unlike the cover to a record album. The format leads inevitably to a question: if a given image were the cover to a record album, what would the album’s music sound like?

 Instagr/am/bient is a response to that question. The project involves 25 musicians with ambient inclinations. Each of the musicians contributed an Instagram photo, and in turn each of the musicians recorded an original track in response to one of the photos contributed by another of the project’s participants. The tracks are sonic postcards. They are pieces of music whose relative brevity—all are between one and three minutes in length—is designed to correlate with the economical, ephemeral nature of an Instagram photo.  

The result of the 25 musicians’ collective efforts is an investigation into the intersection of technology, aesthetics, and artistic process. What parallels exist, for example, between the visual filters that Instagram provides users to transform their photos and the sound-processing tools employed by electronic musicians?  

In many cases here, the musicians employ sonic field recordings as source material for their music. In the case of both their photos and their compositions (photography in one case, phonography in the other), documents are altered to emphasize their atmospheric qualities: to eke a modest art out of the everyday.”

-Marc Wedenbaum, Disquiet.com.

I contributed a short piece titled “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away” which featured various field-recordings and my Harvestman modular synthesizer.

In “You’re Trying to Focus, but it’s Too Far Away”, I depict the blurred portion of the image through a “musical” theme that never quite resolves. Like the image, this piece is also framed by field (street, in this case) recordings. Raindrops, footsteps, creaky doors and wind are easy to pick out, yet the brunt of the track highlights the inferred. A mental picture that is never quite clear.  

The full album is available to download (free) at archive.org, both individually and as a Zip file. Be sure to grab the 58-page PDF with full-page reproductions of the images and additional information on all the participating musicians.