Update: the complete piece of music is now finished:
https://soundcloud.com/corkcitygamelan/pay-back-your-stolen-colours-1

My second sampler for a more substantial composition based on notions and ideas which came to me while reading Nova Express off and on for some decades.

I am making the piece entirely from sounds built by re-arranging and manipulating small fragments ("grains") of voice recordings of some of the text of the book. This is called Granular Synthesis.

I am extending the technique of Granular Synthesis by using the smallest grains as complex wave shapes in wave tables. I call them "Grainwaves", and I can use them to make beats, drones and musical motifs. In isolation, these very short grains can only be perceived as clicks.

the text:
Copyright © 1964 by William S. Burroughws
Copyright renewed © 1992 by William S. Burroughws
used by permission

my first sampler for this project is here:
https://soundcloud.com/corkcitygamelan/give-us-a-little-more-time-nova-express-project-teaser-trailer

enjoy!

Don't Tell Them What We Are Doing (2nd Nova Express project "trailer")

Three improvised live recordings, layered on top of each other...

The Duke of Whimsy is my familiar spirit, similar to Fripp's King Crimson, I guess. He shows up unexpectedly, does his thing, goes away ... and he might be back tomorrow ... or next week ... or next year...

He wanted to find out what my Nova Express toolkit might do do to my Cork City Gamelan samples. So I gave him just one single sample: the sound of a superball bouncing in a wok - a piece of street litter which I educated to become a musical instrument. This is what he came up with.

Enjoy!

The Duke Of Whimsy Explores The Space Between Rhythm And Not Rhythm

Season's Greetings, everybody - enjoy this oldie - I am not doing this kind of work any more.

It is all "fake", a DAW mock-up, originally recorded for the Crux Dance Theatre in 1907 with a "Flute", swapped for "Saxophone" in 2011, probably for reasons of nostalgia: I actually used to play the Soprano Sax for real before I became a "person with a disability".

Happy New Year to All!

O'Carolan's Farewell To Music (traditional, arrangement for Soprano Saxophone, March 2007)

Little Forbes - voice
Günther Berkus - Barred Steel Gate
both pre-recorded and processed beyond recognition using my CCG Player, a Max/MSP patch.

This is a home studio production, but I can perform a live version of it.

It is an image of crepuscular rays towards the end of a bad storm - one of my favourite nature spectacles since I was a child. It came back to me in a dramatic manner on this date last year.

I woke up in hospital after a lengthy operation, and there were impenetrable thunder  clouds and dark nothingness everywhere. Not much of me seemed to be alive ... and then a shimmering shaft of soft silver-grey light broke through the clouds. I opened my eyes, and the light remained, moving slowly towards me, resolving into the shape of a woman, smiling. "Do you recognize me?" she asked, and I did ... and I knew everything would be fine again.

IT took this journey to The Edge for me to learn who my REAL friends are, and this music is for THEM. The woman was NOT the one I would have expected to come and see me at that time ... see  what I mean?

The End Of The Storm (Drone Of The Week 09-2015)

A broadcaster, introducing a sample recording of one of my Gamelbots (software robots which compose algorithmic music), spoke of the development of technology as compared to the development of music. Together with my own notion - that real flesh and blood musicians improvising along with the robot can sound as if it listens and responds to the musicians in an intelligent manner - this gave me idea ...

The inventor and general genius Ray Kurzweil has calculated that by 2029 neuroscience should have achieved its ultimate goal: the complete decoding and mapping of all the functions of the human brain. At the same time, machine intelligence will have surpassed human intelligence, making it possible to model how the brain works. He predicts that machine intelligence and human intelligence should become indistinguishable from each other and converge. Parts of machines and humans should become freely interchangeable. Unless we are prepared to partially (and eventually probably entirely) become machines, the machines we have created are going to render us obsolete.

This piece of music is mainly intended for live performance. The score is a Max MSP patch which includes the robot and a way for me to play along with it. Since I have no control over what the robot is doing, no two performances will ever be the same.

2029

Last night the experimental music duo with no name, which is Alison "Little" Forbes and I, augmented by the incomparable Denis O'Sullivan (https://soundcloud.com/denmus), played a short improvised music set at the Zolala Klub (https://www.facebook.com/ZolalaKlub/), Siopa Gan Ainm (https://www.facebook.com/siopaganainm/), Cornmarket Street, Cork, Ireland. Here is the whole set, raw and unedited (excuse the overdriven Waterphone near the beginning): Denis and Little on Waterphones, yours truly on a home made Sample Player and Sound Processor, loaded entirely with sounds which Little and I recorded in my kitchen sink. Enjoy!

Apologies to my followers on Soundcloud: my account had been vandalised by a hacker, and I was keeping a low profile for a while.

A Kitchen Sink Event Live Feb 8th 2017

Music and Video in three very different movements - all movements made from the same set of found percussionsounds in Cork City, Ireland. I processed the sounds beyond recognition to compose the first and the final movements. The intro and the	 coda are field recordings which I made in the City. I created the animation using a Modular Graphics Synthesizer (Artmatic Designer).
I started this project a little over three years ago and had to abandon it when I became ill. I finished it and made the video during a single weekend.
You can view the video her: https://youtu.be/VyLZ5mz0AIA

Three Different Ways Of Looking At The Same Thing (see description for the video)

This is a Tribute to Louis and Bebe Barron. Bebe passed away on April 20th, 2008. Her anniversary is my Birthday... but I was abroad, away from my studio, and laid up before then, hence the delay.

I tried to build a software version of Todd Barton's (https://soundcloud.com/user7621213) popular Krell Patches for the Buchla synthesiser - lovers of Science Fiction will spot the connection. I was  searching for original timbres which don't sound too bad when I compare them to Todd's mastery of his Buchla. I ended up with quite an original new instrument in my toolkit. It can probably be called an AM Synth: simple cascades of multiplied sine waves - no filters or other modifiers involved. Todd will hopefully tell me whether this qualifies as a Krell patch.

The Nerd info: This is the first couple of minutes of a self-generating (automatically composed)  8 minutes long piece, one take, no edits, no added effects.  A "Chaos Metronome" drives The Thing: Two controllable pulse generators, one modulating the other in an intricate manner, and each of them additonally controlled by its own very low frequency oscillator with an arbitrary complex wave shape, create the "beat". This goes into a sample and hold which can sample any signal (filtered noise for this piece) to create the control signals for the audio. Most of the routing for each control signal is determined by an algorithm built around two random generators. Nine sine waves interacting with each other make all the sounds you hear... anyway, enjoy!

Foreboding Planet (tribute to Bebe and Louis Barron)

For Bass, Alto Flute, Waterphone, and Tamtam - a bit different from what I usually do - a lot more "common practice". I composed this for "Pupa", a show by Emma Fisher. I constructed it from pre-recorded phrases and samples - I would find it impossible to repeat Waterphone phrases with such precision.
For "political" reasons, there are two different versions of this music - another one with whale song added, called Whale Dance. I needed it as a birthday present for somebody before the premiere of the show, that's why  ...
A slide presentation with stills from the show and this music as a sound track is here:
https://youtu.be/T11ft9T8Iqk
The Whale Dance version is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYyFeRYvxSk

The Cat, The Fox and Pinocchio (from "Pupa" - see descrption ...)

A sparse double-tracked Waterpohone improvisation.
This was supposed to be ready by July 4th, but rendering the video graphics took forever.
The video is here:
https://youtu.be/J4fBRQ3PCdg
About one in 10 million people on this planet owns Waterphones, and July 4th means something special for us.

enjoy

A Journey To Hy Brasil (belated July 4th track - see description for more detail)

How to do it:
1) Make a really slow animation in a procedural modelling program - I used Mandelbulb 3D, which combines fractals with ordinary 3D space transformations
2) Set up a  drone of the same length in a music synthesis application - I used Max/MSP
3) Use the changing parameters of the animation to control some of the parameters of the drone, so that it evolves over time in perfect synchronisation with the animation.
It really IS that simple... but ... would anybody notice?
Hardly, I guess ... enjoy, anyway!
here is thevideo
https://youtu.be/75BuAGZtd7w

Dance Music For Really Slow Creatures (see description for video)

I made the sounds originally by hitting and scraping a huge stainless steel barred gate, then processing them beyond recognition using Max/MSP.

VIdeo at https://youtu.be/-iiqff2KC0g

I Know What I Saw

Collaborative piece of work with Natalia Kamia (field recordings)

Music created entirely from recordings of a door creaking and banging:  https://soundcloud.com/user-992438679/sets/doerren

Video on Youtube
https://youtu.be/JcQHb-MQ-ZM
(3D Fractal animation)

enjoy

On The Far Side Of The Door (collab with Kamikuma, Video on Youtube)

A musical tribute to Bebe and Louis Barron.

Please note that this is a technology test or proof of concept - the real thing will follow later this year.

I made the music on a home made software synth, built using Nax/MSP. It uses a "Krell Patch" for sequencing - an original idea by the American composer Todd Barton - https://soundcloud.com/user7621213.
I used Mandelbulb3D to create the animation.

Video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/hVjVLootfBg

I shall probably delete this track and the video whenever I finish the final piece of work.

enjoy
G.

Cork City Gamelan

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