Really beautiful January. Normally I love the first half of January but the second half starts wearing thin. This helps 🙂

Schöne Kompostion. Feines Arrangement. Ansonsten fehlen mir die Worte. Chapeau !!

That's the warmest January I remember...You know how to rub sticks & strings together to make sonic sparks unite!  You out did yourself, again, Frank! ;)  For the love of crystal crisp keys...PURE WINTER MAGIC!

well this warmed me on a cold February day...wonderful

Sphaera's Portal

Singers: Front yard Tonkawa birds

The birds still sing when I feel at a loss for words.

“After documenting the loss of nearly 3 billion birds in North America alone, it was dismaying to see the same patterns of population declines and extinction occurring globally,” says conservation scientist Ken Rosenberg of the Cornell Lab, now retired. “Because birds are highly visible and sensitive indicators of environmental health, we know their loss signals a much wider loss of biodiversity and threats to human health and well-being.”

Global bird populations steadily decline. (2022, May). Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved May 2022, from https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/05/global-bird-populations-steadily-decline

While The Birds Can Still Sing

Piano score: https://bit.ly/ecmusic_solitude

Solitude

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9PzfPAc74g

Zelda

A little psycho funk trip with accordion and more...

Funk This!

🖤Buy

Lyrics & artwork: Cosmic Keanu. Backing vocals. David. k. A. Spencer

Coming back to cosmic reality. (Vocals. Cosmic Keanu.

Whispers In Your Dreams

I only sing !!
Mahan Mahan all instruments !!

Mahan Mahan And eddyoffline 22

(Free WAV Download available here under '••• More'; and eventually, as part of a future solo album)

Greetings all you fun and funky SC musicians. I don’t typically upload remastered versions of a song as a new track. I usually just replace the old with the new, and change the title to reflect the remaster. But this one is special, for a few reasons (and if you’re not much into personalized mixing details, you may want to skip this liner note).

First (and most importantly)… I thought I’d lost the ability to edit the original tracks for this song. The last time I opened it up in Logic (updating it for the 2018 album remaster), the siren voices were all messed up (automation in Alchemy can have odd results sometimes). I just assumed the original native file was broken forever, because I no longer had access to that version of Logic. I had to do the album remaster from my only existing mix… and it was definitely lacking.

4 years later, I’m so glad I took a chance on reopening the native file when I concluded this ‘Siren’ trilogy. All the sounds/automations were exactly as I had left them. Prior to this attempt, I just assumed the worst, and never tried again. Thankfully, I was wrong. :D

Second… the remaster turned out much better than I hoped; and the differences were so satisfying, I thought it might be fun to have both versions up (for a side by side comparison, for any interested musicians out there. Here's the older version: https://soundcloud.com/grevusanjl/siren-rising).

So why does this one sound so much better than the original version? (And please take all of this with a grain of salt. I’m no pro. But I have discovered what works for me.)

Honestly, a tremendous amount of credit goes to having a much better understanding of Compression. For many folks, Compression is almost a dirty word. Just the title of the plug-in alone confused me at first. Why would I possibly want to compress my sounds, when I liked them as is? 

But it turns out (for me at least) that the different Compression options really shine when chosen specifically, and used minimally. As an example (and I’m not sure if your DAW offers similar options, but), Studio VCA works brilliantly with strings, female vocals and many of my favorite synths. But Studio FET works great on drums. Etc. And while some might cringe at the idea, I absolutely love what Soft Distortion does to most tracks as well. Used in mild amounts, Soft Distortion adds a phenomenal amount of spacial quality to the sound. I don’t use this one all of the time, but I bet I use it at least 75% of the time now (and Compression in general on about 95% of the tracks).  So there you go… I’m definitely a big fan of Compression… when used responsibly. :)

In addition, I’ve also learned a lot about EQing since I first did this song in 2017; so much so, that I was actually baffled by some of my earlier choices. So a large amount of the repair/update time for the 2022 remaster was spent on getting the EQing for each track set up more effectively.

And finally, I had the opportunity to give the full mix a healthy rebuild. After 5 years, you’re undoubtedly going to have a very fresh perspective on a piece. And I realized a lot of the sounds simply weren’t in their optimal positions in the stereo field. I also reconsidered where sounds faded in and out, and how intensely they did so… and I updated all of that as well. 

And there you have it, the story/history behind one of my all time personal favorites. I’m so glad I had an opportunity to revisit this one (while leaving all the original instruments true to form), and I hope you enjoy all the latest sound enhancements as well. I’m excited to hear what you think of my ’Siren Rising (2022 Remaster)’. :D

WTF! The Musical

Siren Rising - 2022 REMASTER

wrote down a letter
shrouded it in code
gonna mail it off in the first class post
to some unknown address
from long ago

and if ever you do see me down the road
please do not shout out
I will not slow
if I should hear some distant voice
from long ago

you coulda lit my fuse
but it's too early to say
cancel my subscription
down with the masquerade
if you're so honest 
I'm the longest day

you may lay claim 
to banish all my blues away
but it's just conjecture deception and facade
when it was you who put most of them there
anyway 

I'm mailing all of my blues away
I'm mailing all of my blues away

somewhere out in the distant multiverse
my entropy is flowing in reverse
and all my branches are forming
to build a church

where I can go and get some peace
retrieve my letter off of
the holy priest
and slowly build my life back
piece by piece

I'm mailing all of my blues away
I'm mailing all of my blues away

but you know just lately
I have come to doubt
what in the hell it is that 
I'm taking about
maybe you'd be better off without

and in about a billion years or so
I'll figure something out
you don't already know
and mail it to some address
from long ago

recorded at home on my 8 track

thanks a million for stopping by folks, really appreciate it, keep on being cool✌️

From Long Ago

N-Lovely Gold Digger

The word nostalgia is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of νόστος (nóstos), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric word, and ἄλγος (álgos), meaning "sorrow" or "despair"

480BC

NOSTALGIA - ΝΟΣΤΑΛΓΙΑ (432Hz)

Entrance of the Big Ones

(Free WAV Download available here under '••• More'; and eventually, as part of a future solo album)

Good afternoon my SC friends. This year, I thought it might be fun to share some of the brain rebooting information I’ve discovered over the years that helped me navigate life a little easier. So if you like the idea of following along with these liner notes, you’ll want to watch this video first (about 1 minute... Selective Attention Test video: https://youtu.be/vJG698U2Mvo), before you continue reading down. It’s quite challenging to get the count right, but the results are utterly fascinating. :)

*waits patiently*

Welcome back. So, if you haven’t already seen it before, you just watched a video that brilliantly demonstrates our limited capacity as observers. I admit, I was so busy counting the passing ball… I totally missed the gorilla. Most of my family missed it as well. And according to the creators of the video, at least 50% of the audience will. That’s mind blowing.

So what does that say about our perceptions? It seems to suggest we’re not as aware as we think we are. And that is a lovely thought, because it means we don’t have to be so hard on ourselves when we misperceive things. We are literally incapable of taking it all in, and therefore we don’t always have the full picture (or even the same picture as our fellow traveller).

And that just demonstrates the limits of our mental awareness. Now consider our senses for a moment… how our hearing range is limited to a range of 20Hz to 20kHz. Think about how our vision doesn’t go below the ultraviolet or above the infrared. And I know I can’t smell things to the excellent degree my family’s pets can. 

The one that really blows my mind is that we aren’t ever physically touching anything. There is always an atomic amount of space between all objects. So when I sit down in a chair, what’s really happening is the molecular particles that collectively agreed to make up my butt are interacting with the molecular particles that collectively agreed to make up that chair; and the signals are all just electrical stimuli to my brain. I believe I can feel the smoothness of the polished woodgrain… but it isn’t a full or accurate story.

So now we have an idea of the limitations of our five senses. Add to that how we are limited to those five senses in the first place (unless some of you have physically developed sonar like a bat or have the ability to create an external multi-member neural network like fungi do underground), and you start to have a better idea just how much of the picture we are missing. 

So in a nutshell, we simply don’t have the full picture; and that can be a very liberating realization. That idea gave me the wisdom I needed to release my stranglehold on being a perfectionist… just a little bit. If I’m constantly missing things I don’t even know I’m missing, perfection isn’t even an option. I can also take these ideas out into the world with me, and realize we really don’t perceive things as similarly as we think we do. We are constantly being influenced by everything from our senses and mental awareness to cognitive dissonance and the bias of preference. We are each having different experiences, and that underlying realization is a great place to start, if change be the thing we desire. :)

So if you found this write-up interesting, you might enjoy ‘The Invisible Gorilla, And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us’ by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. It’s a thought provoking read. 

I’ll share other inspirational books and TV shows in future song notes. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed my latest sonic adventure, ‘Develop Mental’ (especially all the little details I added in the 21kHz+ range, as well as the ‘scratch and sniff for dogs’ elements). :)

Develop Mental

Bells and Hymns

You know how you can sometimes see shapes in the clouds? Similarly, sometimes I hear music in silence or in white noise or subtle sounds. I've always felt angelic presences around me and I like to think the music is from them :) This song is an attempt to portray that music that keeps me intrigued by the mystery of this existence.

Image artwork by me :P

Catching Random Sounds

January

Heavy Punk Rock 'n' Roll band turns into Synthwave nowadays! Brand NEW album "Ultraviolet Cosmos" available NOW!
https://shockthealgorithm.bandcamp.com/album/ultraviolet-cosmos

A small note on my own behalf: I have noticed that my playback figures have dropped dramatically. The statistics show that the number of playbacks has dropped from 2000 per week to just under 200.
On the one hand, this is frustrating, as everyone sees this as an indicator and confirmation of their work. On the other hand, figures are not particularly important, but one wonders what is wrong. In my opinion, SC has changed a lot, uploading tracks has become more complicated and constant security queries are annoying.
In addition, great artists are disappearing from the platform, partly by their own choice, partly because they have been banned, the algorithm has “recognized” them as spam and mercilessly deleted their account. I'm still a paying member, but my attitude towards this has changed...

Please let me know your experiences and impressions.

😮‍💨😔


When I don't have the time to actively listen to my favorite artists on soundcloud, I just leave the stream running...while washing up in the kitchen, for example 😆

By the way: this user-92853963 was my old link address and leads to the empty.... I AM NOT A ROBOT!

********************************************************************

A long, long time ago, there was an organ in the Christmas-decorated living room in his parents' house, where Frank grew up. Originally bought by his father for his two older siblings, they showed no interest in playing the organ. Frank, however, did. White and black keys and giving off strange sounds. 

So at the age of 9 he began to let his fingers circle on this instrument, searching for the right keys like on a typewriter. And another 9 years would pass before he could buy his first own instrument. Already at the age of 13 he made notes about the then current synthesizers, bought one magazine after the other and visited music fairs in Frankfurt, Germany.

His first keyboard was the Yamaha DSR-2000, which he bought in a music store near his hometown Biebertal. In installments! Finally he could develop himself further - away from the limited tonality of the small organ. The built-in 8-track sequencer helped him to reach unimagined heights. 
Little by little his equipment expanded and his ambition to create music like that of Jean-Michel Jarres came closer. Influenced by this and countless other musicians of the time, his interest grew, but he taught himself everything. Not even having attended a music school or being able to read music at all, he wrote one song after another and recorded them on the only medium available to him at the time: audio cassettes.
Many of these recordings are unfortunately lost forever, because cassettes are and were not the best recording medium. He has to try to play many of his songs from memory. 

In 2007, he fulfilled a long-awaited wish: to buy a KORG. He had always wanted to own one, but with the latest synthesizers at the time of their release having a purchase price of over 6000 D-marks (the currency of the time in the 1980s and 1990s), that dream of owning one was far away. So in 2007 he bought a used KORG 01W/FD at ebay. And as before with the purchase of the Yamaha keyboard, a completely new world opened up to him.

In addition, there were expanders and sound modules from Kawai, Roland and Yamaha (K1m, SC-55, QY10). Six years later his enthusiasm for making music ebbed and rediscovered his hobby (which it always was and still is). In 2018 in April he decided to present his music to a wider audience and uploaded his first song on the platform soundcloud. Since that time, thanks also to the ever-evolving software, he continues to evolve, experiment and relive his times through music.

January

Frank Mehl

Recent comments

Alfred de Raza

Phil McWalter

Smooth Waters Sonic Journeys

J.Rivas

Related tracks