"Arrival" by Octal Industries. 

Removing key elements through effects manipulation to create a droning, almost atonal ambient piece. Repeating high frequencies help retain some semblance of structure.

0Kt-4R.vL

"Cry" by MBLAQ

An upbeat and tuenful Korean pop song shifted and warped reduced to a flowing ambient texture. This was created by way of a particularly long effects chain, probably one of the longest I've had the pleasure of working on. Removal of all musical elements bar the voice was the goal of this particular manipulation, the rest has been turned into punctuative high frequency elements.


wbQ_[WY]

Still Alive by Jonathan Coulton
The original track's juxtaposition between analogue instruments and the vocal track is quite apparent, my vision was to reverse that. By turning the analogue instruments into the smattering high frequencies and transforming GLaDOS' computerised, auto-tuned vocals into a warm, reverberating and almost human texture, I think I've done what I set out to do.

I also took the advice of a friend of mine and will set out to make my recordings longer and more involved. Hopefully my work will be able to send him off to sleep.


5tl.AvPn_QTL

The Republic by Plato

I tried a few things over the weekend, but nothing really came to fruition. This morning I searched for and downloaded an audiobook of 'The Republic' by Plato. I was disappointed by the poor recording and encoding quality of the MP3s provided so I deleted it from my 'downloads' folder. Just before I went to empty the recycle bin I wondered what it would sound like after a bit of modification.

This is what that sounds like; a thick pad with swirling high frequencies and reverbearting whispers.


Pt-0_rPBk

Soundscapes by Cohaagen

I really wanted something different to what I've been producing before, so I thought I'd work on one of my own tracks. This gave me far more control over the individual elements within the piece and allowed me to rework everything with greater precision. I wanted a piece with a strong sense of rhythm and heavy reliance on delay and, although this piece is set to 70bpm, I really wanted the tempo to be meaningless and to rely more on time itself without the restriction of beats per minute (if that even makes sense).

My previous pieces have all been flowing ambient pads with little or no structure or hard rhythm, so I really wanted to see what I could do with only a few elements and no bpm restrictions. I like how this has turned out and I think I want to explore this method of working in the future with other tracks.

Working on one of my own tracks may be cheating a little, but my friend Josh once told me that there's no such thing as cheating when it comes to music, so I'm taking his stance on this one.

SND-5Kps

Amsterdam - Luminary

I find trance pretty annoying even at the best of times. I really haven't listened to any trance in a long time, partly because I've been listening to better music, but mostly because I got bored of the repetitiveness of the genre.

intro > break down > build up > sustained 'euphoria' > break down > build up > sustained 'euphoria' > key change > outro

So I decided to change this a bit. I wanted to take a particularly standard (read: boring) piece of trance and turn it on its head. No doubt the producers of this track originally intended this to be an upbeat piece, full of energy and whatnot. I wanted neither of these things.

This project's becoming quite cathartic. Perhaps I'll start modifying tracks I hate.

I'm looking at you, S-Club 7.


//AMS_[m:n]

PWSteal.Ldpinch.D by Aphex Twin

An analogue electronic track with lovely warm synth elements reduced to a droning yet musical pad. I wanted this particular manipulation to be warm and thick and bear some semblance to the original as I really love the synth lines at the end and in the middle of the master.

This is an extended edit of a track I wrote early on in the project. A few people asked for a longer version of the track and I'm all for giving the people what they want.

pHx_tn16 (08 extd. edit)

Ochre - Radio

This is the first track where I've really set out with no preconceptions as to what I was looking for in terms of an end product. I started with a fixed set of sounds taken from the original and I tweaked and fiddles with effects for about five minutes until the sound started to take shape. At that point ideas started flooding in and I managed to form an idea and work toward a goal. 

It felt good, that moment when everything went from a cocophony of noise to something that made sense.

I really feel as though I'm getting the hang of this, now. The work's becoming more involved, I'm learning new things about the software and hardware and I've noticed that my workflow has changed completely. 

This is a time of change.

[HR/E]*RD.0

Japanese photography, city streets at night and memories of flying over Hannover at five in the morning.


Photograph source - <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/end-of-photographer/4765612523" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.flickr.com/photos/end-of-photographer/4765612523</a>/




Sotokanda 1 Chome

Image credit - <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hott/2867211563" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.flickr.com/photos/hott/2867211563</a>

I'd like to point out that this track is by no means finished, rather it's a sketch, an outline of something I have lined up for the future for when I get back into recording specific soundscapes on a regular basis.

What Happens Now?

After I'd been working on this track for a few hours I realised that I'd created something which sounds a bit like the music found in Wolfgang Voigt's GAS project. This was entirely unintentional, I might add. 

This is more a sketch than anything else, something I intend to build on in future.

Forest

Walking through a park at night can do interesting things to a tired and sleep-deprived brain.

I'm enjoying this recent spat of looping, purple, throbbing techno. There's something brilliant about listening to the same sound playing over and over again for hours on end that just does things to my brain, I just don't really know what those things are.

The loop keeps playing over and over and, after a while, you forget where it starts and where it ends; the sound just becomes one great envelope of seamlessness and all the structure it had just collapses in on itself and it transforms into something else entirely.

I'm going to start removing beats and percussive sounds and, in the spirit of music I've written before, move away from the conventions of time signatures and beats per minute. Writing more of my music in counter-intuitive DAWs akin to max/MSP will certainly help with that - Ableton's vertical lines can sometimes be a little distracting. I'll try turning my monitor off.

This'll be the last piece of music I upload before I have money to spend on upgrading my SoundCloud account. I seem to have used up all the time available to me. 

Writing lengthy pieces of music has its downsides, I suppose.

Alexandra Park

Ausländer

Spring

The second in a series of Spring themed tracks.

Field recordings, found sounds, processed samples and ambient textures are combined to create a thick, lush soundscape reminiscent of spring, the season of birth, growth, reanimation and ilfe.

Spring 2

The third and final track in the Spring series.

Spring 3 (Into Summer)

It takes me around an hour and 15 minutes to get home from work. After a particularly tiring shift I fell into my seat on the bus and zoned out while watching the city go by through the condensation.

When I finally got home I spent the evening writing this.


Condensation

Flight

My Mum and Dad visited my brother and I earlier in the year, so we went to Ayr for the day because my parents love it there so much. The weather was miserable and my camera isn't very good at video, but that didn't change the fact that it was one of the best days of the year.

I recorded a load of sounds while I was there, a good few on the beach, some conversational ambiance, a chip shop, and the sound of my parent's car as we sped along the motorway.

This is the result of those sounds thrown together, edited, manipulated, and processed into something fairly musical.

I haven't worked with just straight ambiance for a while, so I decided to leave the percussion and the kick drums out of this piece and just go back to what I love doing; drones.

An homage to Rod Modell, and an exercise in creating faster, deeper techno than I'm used to. Setting the BPM higher than 125 without writing a piece of music in half-time was unusual, but I enjoyed creating this piece.

Loud Village

"It sounds like a heartbeat."

For a winter so cold, I've never felt so much warmth.

Tiergarten

Creating things out of things which already exist.

Óþekkt has been writing music for about ten years. He's written many different styles of music in that time but feels more at home with drones, pads and effects processing.

If you'd like to use the music featured on this site for any purpose, or if you would like to commission Óþekkt to write music for a specific project, please contact him directly through SoundCloud. 

Óþekkt

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