Exploring some new timbres trying out various shaped masks placed on the scanner screen and new modulated scan paths after my first attempt at building a dedicated optical waveform scanner loosely based on Daphne Oram's optical waveform scanner in her Oramics Machine from the early 1960s.

The last segment is a demonstration of the sort of effect that results in modulating the Y-axis beam with an audio frequency instead of an LFO.

It must be pointed out that no filtering has been applied - you are listening to the raw waveform generated by the optical scanner.

A rough description of how my analog recreation of Daphne's Optical Waveform Scanner works can be found in the playlist description.

Recording Copyright D.A.Wilson, Hideaway Studio, 2022.

Oramics Optical Waveform Scanner Prototype: Exploring New Timbres...

Lain - My Body Is Full Of Metal

AverilRdcut

Flow

Music by https://soundcloud.com/martin-rutley, https://soundcloud.com/arco5, https://soundcloud.com/veelargo, https://soundcloud.com/und-sidedly, https://soundcloud.com/firnwald, https://soundcloud.com/collagist, https://soundcloud.com/d-fried, https://soundcloud.com/mar-ric, https://soundcloud.com/nikitexa, https://soundcloud.com/user-137870698, https://soundcloud.com/samplequence, https://soundcloud.com/flipforgarth, https://soundcloud.com/atom_ant-1, https://soundcloud.com/ksoptionica, https://soundcloud.com/mutellat, https://soundcloud.com/sedatic, https://soundcloud.com/kilmarth, https://soundcloud.com/nearfield-1, https://soundcloud.com/sobrio

Sixteenth Listen

[PCLVA 016] Various Artists - Sixteenth Listen (2023) teaser

Playlist and other information available at: https://www.freeformfreakout.com/fffoxy-podcast-235-2023-rewind-edition/

FFFoxy Podcast #235: 2023 Rewind Edition

A potentially surprising release on Editions Mego. Another planned prior to the untimely passing of Peter Rehberg in 2021. 

Melvin Gibbs is the renowned bass player and producer from Brooklyn who’s vast resume includes playing with Sonny Sharrock, John Zorn, The Rollins Band, Dead Prez, Caetano Veloso and Femi Kuti amongst others. A solid resume, no doubt, but what is Gibbs doing on Editions Mego? 

Behind the scenes, those who know Gibbs knew that amongst all this he was also tinkering away at another form of music, one which skirts around the border between music and sound design. The Wave is the first release that reveals this side of Gibbs’ creative output to those outside his inner circle.

The driving force for this output is Gibbs’ multi-decade friendship with acclaimed  American video artist and cinematographer Arthur Jafa. Over the course of time Gibbs and Jafa have had many conversations about music and the connection between film and music. Jafa’s desire to make film that worked the way Black (as in Black/African-American/ Afro-diasporic peoples) music worked inspired Gibbs to study the filmmakers Serge Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and incorporate their philosophies and tactics when recording his own music. The two discussed sound design which directly informed Gibbs’ choice of music making tools and led to him acquiring Symbolic Systems Kyma software and hardware, incorporating this as a composition tool and sound design and component in his work. These conversations bore concrete fruit through Gibbs’ work for TNEG, the film studio Jafa ran with filmmakers Malik Sayeed and Elissa Blount Moorhead. Gibbs created the soundtrack for their very first project, the short film “Deshotten 1.0” (2009 - directed by Jafa and Sayeed) as well as their Martin Luther King-inspired meditation on Black life “Dreams Are Colder Than Death” (2013, directed by Jafa)  

The bass-forward music, or ‘sonics’ as Gibbs calls it, emerged from an alternative mode of contemplation, a mode that he sees as closer to the mindset of a rootworker, an African-American herbal doctor who cures psychic ailments using means derived from African spiritual practice, entering a forest to find the right plants for a suffering client than a mediator attempting to invoke mindfulness. Gibbs says this practice yields results that suggest an aural form of creation akin to coagulation, a formal movement that gives the sense that a flow of sounds can emit something bearing resemblance to solidifying objects. 

In 2020 Jafa asked Gibbs to work on the soundtrack for a work in progress called “The Wave''. When they got together to work on the soundtrack, Jafa played Gibbs a selection of sounds that included random moments of (probably unwanted) feedback on 70's Miles Davis records, Pop Smoke's Brooklyn drill, the music of Bernard Gunter and Darmstadt-style compositions made with test equipment. Those sounds, filtered through years of conversation with Jafa about Black creativity and the possible evolution of Black music, formed the sonic vocabulary of “The Wave”. 

Over time the sonics evolved and “The Wave” became the piece Jafa calls "AGHDRA". This soundtrack incorporates and expands upon the sonics composed for “The Wave”. Gibbs mentions although the work with Jafa has always skirted these lines of evolution, this side of his vocabulary has been generally neglected, until now, due to his current jazz musician/jazz festival-centric focus and radar. 

The result of this parallel exploration is a deep excursion into a nuanced sound world. The rich tapestry of textures allows one's mind to explore and project within this bed of curious investigation of sound. The bristling, itching, restless, clicking, diving nature of the electronic sound world presented by Gibbs, is abstract and unearthly on the surface but closer listening (which it demands) reveals a very human quality to these austere shapes.

Anamibia Sessions 1: The Wave

Ibo Code

Melvin Gibbs 'Ibo Code' (EMEGO291)

ZOZIZSG

LMRA3

John Chantler And Daniel M Karlsson - 6.12.23 [excerpt]

Aquaeductus vestibuli

D.A.Wilson is an Electronic Engineer, Sound Designer & Vintage Synth Specialist with a particular interest in combining vintage tube, classic analog and modern digital technologies working as a synth engineer looking after a very considerable amount of vintage studio equipment for Will Gregory (Goldfrapp / Moog Ensemble) and a number of other internationally celebrated electronic musicians and producers.  Having undertaken several major restorations and produced custom electronic designs for a number of major artists including Jean-Michel Jarre, Dani is also known for fully restoring two out of the world's four remaining 1979 Crumar GDS and partially restoring 1938 Novachord 346 (the only known operational Novachord in the UK) to playable order along with developing and producing the popular MIDI Front Panel Animator (FPA), Filter Defeat Module (FDM) and XD-280 Drive Emulator upgrades for the AKAI S612 sampler.

Demos of the S612 Upgrades in Action: 

https://soundcloud.com/hideaway-studio/sets/hideaway-studios-s612-front


Hideaway Studio Kontakt Sound libraries may be purchased directly from: 
https://www.lootaudio.com/category/kontakt-instruments/hideaway-studios
 

..and a nice introduction by Cory Pelizzari to the Hideaway Studio Kontakt Libraries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-C7a3ChC9U&feature=emb_title


For more on releases from Hideaway Studio for Kontakt please visit the blog at:  www.hideawaystudio.net

Oramics Optical Waveform Scanner Prototype: Exploring New Timbres...

Hideaway Studio

Related tracks