Marc Weidenbaum

I'm a big fan of the EMS Synthi and was surprised to see the ipad app for the iVCS3. This thing is lovely - Was not expecting how many sounds and how richly "analog" this app sounds and behaves. Recorded over the weekend, adding a moment here and there, until about ten minutes were put together. 

All sounds generated from within the iVCS3, played through a midi controller to a digital 8-track. Processed with Moog mf104 delay near the ending half.

Ten Minutes with the iVCS3

I've wanted to get a white-noise module for awhile, and finally added one to my setup. This module has 7 different noise sources, including white, red, grey, and blue. Each is being triggered by a different sequence. They're all in sync, though one is slightly delayed, which lends a tiny bit of character to the cadence, I think. The only reason I skipped pink is because I don't have any pink cables right now, and the color-coded cables helped me keep track of things.

You can blame this on someone who's listened to too many Chain Reaction releases, too much Consolidated, and too many scores to Michael Mann films.

Slightly more technical information: The sequences are all in CV Toolkit (a piece of software running on my laptop), and they're getting to my modular synthesizer via an Expert Sleepers ES-3 module. The noise-source module is the Quantum Rainbow 2. The white, red, and grey sources are all receiving sequences directly from the software. The blue source is getting a slight trigger delay (and a slightly extended length to the trigger), thanks to the Doepfer A-162. The whole thing is being mixed in an ADDAC 802 VCA Quintet, and out through a Pittsburgh Outs, through a Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. It was recorded in Audacity. 

White Noise Beat

I was asked by the Dutch musician Michel Banabila to contribute a remix to Marilli Remixed, a collection of reworkings of tracks from his very first album, Marilli, released in 1983. I selected the fourth track on the first side of the LP.

The original was elegant, but had percussion throughout. I wanted the ambient quality more formalized, and the percussion a little more muted and arhythmic.

. . .  

Here are some notes on my remix. I’ll note in advance, they’re fairly technical, as a notebook entry on what went into this, and what I learned in the process.

I used the my modular synthesizer (mostly filters, and a little triggered live sampler), the software Audacity (to sequence it, and also for some effects), and my Monome (running the mlr patch in the software Max). 

First I stretched a relatively percussion-less segment of the original track to get an ambient bed, yielding in the end something about 30 seconds long. I set it to run eight times in a row, overlapping to varying degrees at each repeat. 

Then I extracted a small percussion loop from the original. I did a "live performance" of that percussion loop with the Monome (four simultaneous tracks: one straight through, two running tighter sub-loops against each other a little quieter, and one in reverse even quieter still, though it's also the last bit to fade out of that sequence, so it has a little moment in the sun). The loop ran a little slower than the original, and I used a small Novation Launch Control to manage the relative volume of the four tracks within mlr.

And then I used my modular synthesizer to create variations on the ambient bed, which I layered in at various stages. 

In the end I had eight tracks in Audacity:

The 1st and 3rd tracks are the eight sequential repeats of the ambient sound bed, each intersection overlapping to varying degrees.

The 2nd track is a filtered version of the ambient bed, which has a slow LFO on it (giving it a light Laurie Anderson–ish "ha ha ha" feel) and some echo. This was done on the modular using a filter (either the A-121 or the A-136 or the Z2040 — my notes are unclear — influenced by a digital LFO, the Hikari Sine, and then run through an Eko module).

The 4th is the "live performance" on the Monome of the percussion loop, running mlr. It has four tracks of the loop doing different things. I used a Novation Launch Control to balance the volume of those four tracks.

The 5th is a copy of the ambient sound bed, pitched lower for the full length of the loop. This gives it that deep vibe for the penultimate repeat of the ambient bed. In track 1 at that same stage the volume of the original ambient bed is a little quieter, to let the deep version sound even louder than it is, in relative terms. 

The 6th track is a copy of the ambient bed but pitched higher, and I just use it for a very short moment, a final peak before the track fades out. 

And the 7th and 8th are two different instances of the same tweak of the ambient bed, which I did in the modular using a Harvestman Polivoks. It's a tingling, slightly irritating sound, a momentary breach in the ambience.

The whole idea is it opens with this expanse, and then goes to something a little tribal, and then returns to the expanse. I'll be honest about my influences here. The ambient bed is striving toward Brian Eno's Thursday Afternoon, and the rhythmic part has Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ in mind. The first appearance of the Polivoks "irritant" is then repeated toward the end to provide a sense of reflection on where the piece started, but in between is that percussion performance. The deep vibe in track 5 gives an orchestral sense of closure, and the peak in track 6 is little filigree, like the clouds breaking, before it all ends.

At least that's where I ended up. It wasn't where I started. When I started, it was all gonna be about this firecracker/rattle sound in the original, but in the end I went a totally different direction.

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"A4. Marilli Rmxd 14"

My Music Videos - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc_iQ5JFusPt9EIwKIZ5rew
Made a nice grimy drone in Magellan then cloned, eq’d differently and shifted slightly. Then brought out a field recording (from the iPad) of a turbine fan to another track. Copied those three tracks and chopped them up for a rhythmic element. Added a few different effects and played with a lot of panning and what you hear is the result. Once again made entirely on an iPad with Audioshare, Cubasis, Audiobus and a few effects I can’t remember on the field work :-O      @disquiet



More on this 240th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music in which a drone slowly, imperceptibly, gives way to something rhythmic and/or melodic” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0240/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Join the Disquiet Junto at:

http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Disquiet Junto general discussion takes place on llllllll.co and on a Junto Slack (send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion).

Season of our Disquiet

Something In Here(disquiet0240)

disquiet 0245
Disquiet Junto Project 0245: Practical Music
Write a piece of music for getting things done, suitable for playing on repeat.

Clean up, routine, tiding up....that leads me to repetitive stuff.
I played a simple riff on my “diaz custom5”  drake bass guitar, very repetitive and yet variations going from A to D to D/E with no real structure.
Added a synth bass drone, and a Wurlitzer A200 electric piano improvising a bit.
Then some repetitive voices (tah-tah-tah-tah...) in four part harmony/
My usual rhythmic delays played a big role, here in 1/8th and 1/4th notes.
You can loop this, there’s no lead in or lead off.
Love
DD
Recorded in Paris, France September 9th  2016.

More on this 245th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Write a piece of music for getting things done, suitable for playing on repeat” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0245/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0243-synth-trial/4288

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

Image associated with this project is by jurek d. and is used thanks to Flicker and a Creative Commons license:

http://flic.kr/p/npLwcU

clean it and loop it - disquiet0245

This is based on a Pure Data patch I made called "Oval Noise" because it reminded me of Markus Popp's ovalcommers-era sound. 

The patch is a mess since I just kind of threw it together with 3 oscillators playing one of four pitches randomly, with 2 of them summed up and the other being sent to another effect along with being summed with the other 2. 

Pure Data measures tempo by millisecond, so I started at 500 (i beat every half second), then divided it by 2, 4 and 6. The last little bit is divided by 8. 

Recorded into Audacity where I cropped it and fixed some clipping issues. 

||||

More on this 246th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Compose a piece of music that increases speed in stages as it proceeds.” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0246/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

http://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

http://llllllll.co/t/double-quadruple-sextuple-music-disquiet-junto-project-0246/4549

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

Image associated with this project is by Oliver Gouldthorpe and is used thanks to Flicker and a Creative Commons license:

flic.kr/p/sMDxq

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

Latticeworks (disquiet0246)

All source sound in this small (and experimental) piece is from "leftover" eurorack modules - conforming to the few kinds, that this weeks challenge from the Disquiet Junto, #381, allows. 

The sequence/sound has then been imported into ableton and MANGLED like crazy - and a few drums then added...

More on this 381st weekly Disquiet Junto project — Shared System / The Assignment: make music using a free software synth assembled by Scanner — at:

https://disquiet.com/0381/ 

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

disquiet0381 - short con/fused

Disquiet tempted me, and lured me away from the blessed hilltops of analogue signal flow, down into the unholy valley of virtual modular instrumentation. This exercise in wretched debauchery began with almost an hour of confusion and frustration, untilled I finally discovered how these cursed devices operate.

Joking aside. I do like what some digital modular can do, but good gravy is it unintuitive. I am planning on finding a way to add some virtual tools to my tangible rack someday, but this won't be it. I found the setup strange and restrictive.

Oh well. I can't say I didn't try.

Heathen Offering [disquiet0381]

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0383-interstellar-ambience/22125/9?u=eptc

The Orbiting Space Station's Daily Routine (Disquiet0383)

I figure it might be kind of noisy in a typical spacecraft apartment--noise abatement = weight and cost. The apartment depicted here is in the cheap part of the spacecraft--buried deep in a warren of vents, pipes and driveshafts. But it's cozy and the price is right!

The ambience here comes from:

--5 separate noise generators, each run through a low-pass filter featuring a different cutoff frequency and modulated at a different rate by a LFO. The high-frequency filters used fast modulation (up to 10 hz) while the lower ones were low (down to 0.001 hz!). 
-a 'struck bar' generator (randomly chosen preset)
-a 'shaker' generator (randomly chosen preset)
-background sounds; I ran the microphone through a 10-second delay and reverb

except for the background sound (which is always on), everything is triggered at random for random lengths, with a bit of randomness in stereo panning, reverb and volume. The background sound is pretty random too; I stuck the laptop in the basement and went about doing housework and so on. My only interventions: at one point I played a Nixon speech on my phone, and then played "Also Sprach Zarathustra" by the Portsmouth Sinfonia (a wink to "2001" ). 

I ran the main bit for 30 minutes but in principle it could run any arbitrary length (in the main loop in the code change "30::minute" to "1::week" or "1000::weeks" as you wish).

It gets quite loud at points and very soft at others. I didn't do any post-processing; I don't know how Ableton would deal with a file this length.

If I had world and time I'd probably think of some correlation structure for the noises (human behavior tends to be positively autocorrelated at short horizons, I suppose) and add some 60 cycle hum.  

here's the code:

https://github.com/charliekramer/ChucK/blob/master/disquiet0383.ck

More on this 383rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — Interstellar Ambience / The Assignment: Record the sound of an apartment in a large interstellar ship — at:

https://disquiet.com/0383/ 2

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/ 3

Subscribe to project announcements here:

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

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0383-interstellar-ambience/ 1

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet 1 for Slack inclusion.

Disquiet0383 Interstellar Ambience

sorry ive been gone so long, new ep coming very soon.

forgetting you

DREAMWORLD EP. Samples from final fantasy, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Demon Blue

dream

gold

victory!

Dark, Electronic, Ambient, Experimental, Retro, Post and Drone.
HypoidSound@YouTube

Something In Here(disquiet0240)

Hypoid

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