Created for the One Synth Challenge 146. All sounds and instruments were made using the synth Sinmad in Ableton Live,(32 instances).

Stock Plugins: EQ8 x 16, Utility x 6, Echo x 3, Compresor x 4, Convolution Reverb x 1 and Limiter x 1.

Third Party Plugins: Youlean Loudness Meter Free

AuBenstation 114

Maltoné - AuBenstation 114 - OSC 146 Sinmad

new places

Celestial Trax returns with new work of tonal-textural explorations.
On 'Lifecodes' the producer born Joni Judén weaves together a dense quilt of sound, shimmering and surging as it unfolds in free-time. Judén invites the listener down a luminous, harmonically adventurous path, where sound takes creaturely dimensions. The songs blossom and wilt, at times floating in states of ambivalence, at others washing over the listener like waves, bathing them in heavy light.

'Lifecodes' was created in the small village of Pynnölä, Joutsa in central Finland, where Celestial Trax has been living and working since 2020.

✩○ º༺☆༻ º○✩

Music by Celestial Trax, recorded and mixed at TUO TUO
Album art and visual concept by Robert Ra linktr.ee/RobertRa



Buy album

Beyond

Sedna

Solo violin
Solo cello
Field recordings (treated)
delays and reverbs

Music inspired by this sentence by  Ursula K. Le Guin: 

“For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.” 

Created by DD in Greece on Friday 21st August 2020

for this junto challenge:
Disquiet Junto Project 0451: Ursula’s Silences
The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea .

Photo by DD, Kamari, Greece, Aug 2020.

@disquiet

Surrounding Silences (disquiet0451 )

The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea: “For a word to be spoken, there must be silence. Before, and after.”

Also on album "Hearken Beach".
https://krakenkraft.bandcamp.com/album/hearken-beach

Originally I just wanted to make five minutes of interchanching deep pad and noisy something, with a lot of non-silent space between them. I added some ambient field recordings in these spaces, because the name of the track was intended to be 'The Impossibility of Being Silent'.

But then my mi clouds produced some sounds of it's own and I liked it. At the end I had to reintroduce silence to all parts. All in all I hope this to be considered as a tentative approach to silence, with an increase towards the end.

--

More on this 451st weekly Disquiet Junto project, Ursula’s Silences (The Assignment: Make music inspired by a line from A Wizard of Earthsea), at:
https://disquiet.com/0451/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0451-ursulas-silences/

Album: Hearken Beach

A Tentative Approach To Silence [disquiet0451]

I decided, after looking at several of Martin's paintings, that I wanted to focus on that precision repetition, the light/dark alternation, and the subtle gradations of field.

The track is an improvisation inside Live, with one instance of the Buchla Music Easel (providing the upper-register track) and one of ARP 2600 V3 (providing the lower one), with Live's BrainDance and Squishy Beat Repeat effects to put in additional emergent rhythmic effects. I potted down both synths, gradually faded them in, and then slowly tweaked the filter frequency and resonance on the ARP, gradually adding in ore modulation from the ring modulator, then slowly removing it. The Buchla's variations came from tweaking the effects following it, but basically leaving the patch alone to imitate the regular ruled lines.

The Tree, 1964 [disquiet0456]

“The thing with analog circuits is they follow very simple, natural laws,” says synthesizer designer and builder Jessica Rylan, “just like breaking a tree branch, or like water, or even like birds flying in a V — they push and are pushed into that pattern because it’s the path of least resistance … like you turn on the power, it’s just following whatever the vibration would do. And the sound it produces is the exact same as the electricity producing it.”

There are many such nuggets to be found in Tara Rodgers’ excellent book Pink Noises, which compiles interviews with twenty-four women working in electronic music and sound art. Rodgers’ conversation with Rylan, coupled with pandemic isolation, inspired Suss Müsik to explore the craft of DIY synthesis and digital instrument hacking.

As a result, Suss Müsik’s toolbox is now teeming with circuit boards, jumper cables, soldering equipment, resistors / capacitors / inductors of all sizes, a kaleidoscope of LED lights, touch-sensitive / knob potentiometers, plastic casing of varying sizes, and a lifetime supply of 9-volt batteries. It’s great fun.

A key learning was that acoustic instruments create sound by moving air — a string is plucked, a drum is hit, a mouthpiece receives wind — while electronic instruments make sound by moving voltage. Nature is a rich ecosystem of patterns, and the ability to manipulate patterns of electrical current is the core of synthesized music. 

This short piece is an excerpt from a series of compositions played mostly with custom-built and hacked instruments. In this particular instance, you’ll hear an piezo-amplified kalimba, a homemade sawtooth oscillator, and a photo-sensitive harmonic generator played with a flashlight and touch-ring interface.

The cover image is by visual artist B.G. Madden.

More on this 467th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Toolbox Show & Tell (The Assignment: Share a tip for making music that you learned during the pandemic), at:

https://disquiet.com/0467/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0467-toolbox-show-tell/

There’s also a Disquiet Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

SixOverEight [Disquiet0467]

Disquiet Junto Project 0467: Toolbox Show & Tell. The Assignment: Share a tip for making music that you learned during the pandemic.

80% of my music started on a cheap android DAW app called "Caustic". The sound is not perfect, but I like the workflow. Anyway, since 1 year or so I try to switch to Ableton Live. Because of the lockdown I had a lot of time to flatten the learning curve with this DAW.

My tip is about "Follow Action", to bee seen in the Clip Editor. Follow Action allows a clip to trigger other clips by probability, in the screen example of the track cover there is "play again" with prob 1, "play any other" with prob 2. The clip is one of of many clips which only contains some note on a scale or a chord.

Normally I somehow reject pure generative music, although I place a lot of value on chance in my own. It always seemed dishonorable to me to let a software (that I didn't write myself) generate music and claim this music to be "mine".

However, with "Follow Action" I have the possibility to achieve an (in my opinion) honorable mix of probabilities and composition.

In this case, there are different tracks with different signatures and different Gongs in A minor. I even added "empty" clips to get some "silence" into it. The probabilty for the different tracks differs, one could for example use one track to establish sequencial clip triggers, to include motives that are bigger than inside a bar.

(And please consider "honorable" a way to big word here…)

More on this 467th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Toolbox Show & Tell (The Assignment: Share a tip for making music that you learned during the pandemic), at:

https://disquiet.com/0467/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0467-toolbox-show-tell/

Generative Gongs [disquiet0467]

Τα ρέστα...

I lived in Houston for 9 months in 1997.  Lived and worked on Westheimer Rd.  I worked near River Oaks at a tech startup.  My wife worked somewhat nearby on Greenway Plaza at what is now Invesco.

The food in Houston was excellent.  One time, Dusty Hill from ZZ Top was behind us in line at a BBQ joint and ordered "a quart of jambalaya".  Yes, he was dressed like he was on stage.  I thought it was the perfect Texas moment.  Although a close second was going out with Ann's co-workers to somebody's horse farm in the country and one her co-workers rode a horse backwards very fast.  Nice people.

There should be more cars on whatever road this is.  I remember the traffic was crazy.  And the air often smelled of gas, the result of being close to oil refineries.

This track is a combination of several pieces of mine:  Aleodeology's "Time Travel Destination in the Past", "Simulated Gravity", "Aleodeological Travel", and "Empty Interstate Due to Microaggressions", along with my side band Vibrating Wires' "The Long Drive Out", "The Path to REM Sleep", and "Southwestern Desert" - and some field recordings of rain that I recorded.

*

More on this 476th weekly Disquiet Junto project — IAH Forecast (The Assignment: Here’s your next single’s cover. Now record it.) — at:

https://disquiet.com/0476/

The image that is the source of this project is by Robert Boyd (www.thegreatgodpanisdead.com) and has been used with his permission.

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0476-iah-forecast/

Maltoné - AuBenstation 114 - OSC 146 Sinmad

Robert Chavez