A track for Naviar Records' Haiku Challenge. & days in which to write and record a track in response to the Haiku posted. To me the Haiku has quite an uplifting feel so I wanted to capture that in the music.

Open Road Stepping Stones (naviarhaiku466) - Adrian Lane

The Sim Selections challenge for March 2023 was "Write the hidden bonus track for your favorite album. Dig deep and really think about what 'favorite' means to you."

I didn't really dig very deep. I'm not one to have one definite favourite album, so I chose one album I'm very fond of, which I though I would be able to make something similar to. As should be quite obvious if you listen to the track, this was "Music Has The Right To Children" by Boards of Canada.

All the drum sounds, except for the loop going in the background, were generated using Audialab's Emergent Drums, and I ran it through Klevgrand's DAW Cassette. The pad sound is the Cherry Audio DCO-106. For the melody I used the FM-4 synth in Bitwig going through Audiothing Wires. The bass is a patch on the Behringer 2600. What makes this sound like a complete BoC ripoff are the voices. I got some recordings from the Tony Schwartz collection at Citizen DJ (https://citizen-dj.labs.loc.gov/loc-tony-schwartz/use/). I chopped out some parts where the voices were too loud (laughing, etc). Then I layered three recordings on top of each other to avoid understandable words to pop out. The layered tracks were grouped, and I added a gate with rythmic modulation, and a lowpass filter. I also chopped out some voice sounds and put into random places in the piano roll. Finally I recorded the entire thing to my old Fostex 4-track tape recorder, then back into Bitwig, where I did the final mastering.

Northwest Passage

Happy to be back to contributing for the Disquiet Junto. This must be one of my favourite recurring Junto projects as it's so inspiring and fun. 

About my process: After a first attempt that didn't quite work, I found a good setting on my Pladask Elektrisk Fabrikat -- one that leaves lots of space for the next person to add stuff in -- and improvised what you're hearing here, off the top off my head. I love how the pedal introduces "holes" in the incoming guitar signal, reminds me a bit of William Basinski's "Disintegrating Loops". All of this recorded in Cubase, adding a pinch of reverb & delay.

I hope this inspires some of you to add their second part to it!

More on this 591st weekly Disquiet Junto project, The Loneliest Number (The Assignment: Record the first third of a trio), at: https://disquiet.com/0591/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0591-the-loneliest-number/

Frugality (disquiet0591)

This week's prompt was to choose six brief segments of sound that I recently recorded and then to arrange them, semi-randomly, in descending order of volume.

I am teaching at a summer music camp in New Hampshire, so of course I have been recording lots of sounds! I pulled 5  off of my recorder and used one sound back from my home in Connecticut.

I assigned them numerical values and then rolled an online 6-sided die to arrange what sounds would be louder, quietest, and in the middle. The results were, in descending order of loudness:
1) A recording of rain falling on the other side of a door
2) Some weird AM radio static playing from the speaker of a small bus
3) The alarm of a truck backing up
4) The sound of me walking in my apartment and opening the window to record some birds
5) 4th of July fireworks
6)Some crickets by a pond

I quickly adjusted the volume of each track to put them in order. 
Then, I added a small amount of volume automation via sidechaining so that track 2's volume dipped down when track 1's volume peaked, track 3's volume dipped when track 2's volume peaked, etc. 

Next, I added a little panning to make space for everything.

I tried a LITTLE bit of EQ, but found myself running into the interesting problem of things with less high frequencies "feeling" quieter. So, I was pretty minimalist with the EQ.

After that I added a small amount of FX for some ear candy, including making a delay for the AM radio static, panning the crickets from left to right, and adding some flanger and granular delay to certain points in the rain recording.

There's a lot of percussive sounds in here, which makes it sound pretty dense, but hopefully it will stand on its own as a listening experience!

Soundscrape (disquiet0601)

An electronic composition, sounds created in Pure Data. Shoogly = unsteady, unstable, uncertain, shaky, wobbly.

More on this 602nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Choice Words (The Assignment: Make a piece of music that strives to express a specific word), at: https://disquiet.com/0602/

About the Disquiet Junto: Disquiet Junto F.A.Q. – Disquiet

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0602-choice-words/

Shoogly (disquiet0602)

The word I use is PAUSE. I  wrote a simple and beautiful melody inspired by a 1960's Argentinian lullaby/children song.Recorded it on piano forcing myself to pause between phrases and sometime sin unexpected places. The late great Ryuichi Sakamoto once said, when asked about his use of silence on composition, that he didn't use "silence" he did use pauses to create space for resonance. He said something like: silence is nothing, it is not music. Resonance , on the other hand is alive. Silence is not interesting, spaces and resonance are.
With that, he did influence me once again.
Pause is very useful for me to create interesting emptiness. I just used one instance of Valhalla Supermassive to fill the spaces created by my pauses.

DD: piano+ Valhalla Supermassive reverb, Paris , Friday 14th July 2023.
Photo: by myself, the sky above me right now.

Pause - Cancion de cuna (disquiet0602)

More on this 602nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Choice Words (The Assignment: Make a piece of music that strives to express a specific word), at: https://disquiet.com/0602/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0602-choice-words/

Saturated (disquiet0602)

Electronic composition created in Pure Data with additional reverb.

More on this 603rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Animated Suspension (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that suggests something floating in air), at: https://disquiet.com/0603/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0603-animated-suspension/

Levitation (disquiet0603)

main ingredient - two lfos (one slow one medium) for pitch cv quantised by marbles, into rings, into beads

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More on this 603rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Animated Suspension (The Assignment: Record a piece of music that suggests something floating in air), at: https://disquiet.com/0603/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0603-animated-suspension/

disquiet0603 - そら

Disquiet Junto Project 0607: Silence Wave 
The Assignment: From close to zero and back again, alter the relative amount of sound to silence in a piece of music.


I used two stems of Norns awake recordings (heavyly altered). Every stem got four instances with Audiomodern Gatelab (via routing in Reaper). Gatelab configuration was reduced to 10 gates (just to make it easy) with one of ten gates activated (on a different location on every instance). 

So by blending in and out these four tracks I was able to increase the sound/silence ratio from 0 to 40 (times 2 stems, one for bass, one for head, both in sync) and back to zero. Some FX and panning to provide some roomish feeling. The construction is designed slower than the dismantling.

This all may sound like an engineers approach, but if I had not liked the result, I would have gone another way. The altering of the sound/silence ratio is not very granular (0-10-20-30-40 percent) and I may have calculated somehow wrong (somehow I have the feeling) but I think the perception is ok.

Bandcamp version:
https://krakenkraft.bandcamp.com/track/the-voids-in-the-walls-disquiet0607

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More on this 607th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Silence Wave (The Assignment: From close to zero and back again, alter the relative amount of sound to silence in a piece of music), at: https://disquiet.com/0607/

Thanks this week to Jason Richardson and Klaus-Dieter Hilf.

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0607-silence-wave/

disquiet23

The Voids In The Walls [disquiet0607]

Harmonium
Fretless bass
Arpeggiators/Synths
String orchestra samples.

I often work with arpeggiators, and I like to combine their kinetic, steady pulse with ambient parts, rubatto and floating.I particularly like to add acoustic "real" instrument to and icy electronic arpeggiator synth. I do like all those contrasts : rhythmic vs floating, acoustic vs electro, tense vs relaxing cold vs warm etc

Here I had an old , unused acoustic Indian Harmonium improvisation, played rubatto, no tempo, no click.
I tried to add more floating tracks, a fretless bass melodic impro, some string samples, etc but still didn't quite go nowhere..A menacing, repetitive and obsessive ARP could save the track, I thought.

So I tried to add a tempo-sync arppeggiator, but it was difficult to find a right tempo for the ARP track, rhythm that makes sense with the ambient pace. To make it worst, the Harmonium did start to play a more rhythmic bit around the 01:53 mark, and the rhythm didn't quite fit. Tried many different tempos and mixes, this is what I got Friday 6th October 2023 in the morning, before I have to abandon this and go to work..


Performed by DD (Jul 2020 Harmonium, Oct 2023 Fretless, Synths, Strings)
Photo by Amit Kumar

For the challenge "Step 1: Think of something related to making music that you do a lot. Step 2: Think of an alternate way to do it that challenges your habits.
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0614-alternate-route/

Alternate Harmonium  (disquiet0614)

Check out my latest album at https://defaultmediatransmitter.bandcamp.com/album/transmit-simulations

Northwest Passage

Default Media Transmitter

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