Came across a fantastic new pedal through some online research a few weeks back: Montreal Assembly's Count To Five. http://mtlasm.blogspot.com/p/count-to.html

I picked one up last week and am just starting to get to know it. There are 3 different modes, all of which seem to have unique performance applications. This loop utilizes Mode 2; it's basically a buffer with variable playback speed/direction and with playback slice length & location variability controls. 

I've also been experimenting with an expression pedal version of Fulltone's DejaVibe. The foot pedal controls the rate of vibrato, which gives the Rhodes the some nice woozy pitch modulation possibilities.

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June 15 2016 (count to five, mode 2)

Digging into the Strymon BigSky reverb pedal a little more tonight. Does those big lush reverbs really nicely (maybe I'm using it a little too much these last few days).

This is a 4-layer loop on the 45000. The glitchy sound panned right is an interesting one I found by fiddling with the end of a patch cable and sampling it into the Count To Five (pitched down, reversed, and jumping around in the sample). That feeds the El Capistan in "sound on sound" mode... so it's kind of a loop that's recording over itself asymmetrically. 

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June 17 2016 (sunset loop)

i've taken the plunge into the world of eurorack... have been researching for several months and finally made some decisions on starter modules.

a weekend trip also provided the motivation to put together a small sub-system away from the rhodes. i limited myself to a few tools in order to delve deeper into manuals and explore some new processes.

this sound comes from the moog sub-phatty (a synth i've owned for a few years, but haven't explored too much outside of bass functions) into a mutable instruments clouds. an 8-second buffer of audio was frozen and randomly resampled. the position of the playback head is being randomly modulated by a qu-bit nano-rand. the nano-rand's noise output is also feeding a sample-and-hold circuit whose output is modulating the texture input on the clouds. this has the effect of randomly changing the grain playback envelope. lastly, the gate out of the nano-rand is self-patched to its noise algorithm input, which cycles through the 4 random algorithms.

i didn't have a great way to record the patch because i forgot to pack the appropriate stereo cable, so i recorded this sound as two separate mono layers panned hard left and right, as well as a cassette loop of the patch, recorded from my headphones and panned center in the final output.

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August 28 2016 (windowsill)

a companion to last night's exploration with the mutable instruments clouds and cassette loops. clouds records a few notes from a moog sub phatty and is scrubbed by a qu-bit nano rand. the resulting texture is sampled into the built-in mic of a cassette recorder. the original cassette loop is panned hard left, and delayed by several seconds into the right channel. clouds continues to randomly scrub through its buffer in the middle.

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August 29 2016 (windowsill 02)

finally got my hands on the beautiful xaoc device batumi quad lfo. 

in this first test, i used the batumi in phase mode (which allows shifting the 2nd-4th lfos 0-360 degrees out of phase with the 1st) to control parameters on the mutable instruments clouds and the mannequins three sisters filter. 

the clouds was fed by a mic recording glockenspiel into an 8 second buffer. the square wave output of lfo 1 was multed to both the position and texture inputs of the clouds. the sine output of lfo one was used to control the phase of lfo 2, whose own sine was controlling the cutoff frequency of the filter. the saw wave output of lfo 2 was used to control the phase input of lfo 4, whose square wave output was used as a clock source for the qu-bit nano-rand and whose sine wave output was fed into the fm input of the three sisters. the nano-rand's output feeds the size input of the clouds.

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September 20 2016 (batumi test)

3 loops:
a) rhodes --> ehx 22500, 
b) bowed glockenspiel --> ehx 45000
c) cassette loop, internal mic capturing speaker output

generative clicks: qu-bit nanorand as sound source, clocked by the xaoc batumi with heavy self-modulation and modulation from flame c3 knob recorder. clicks are filtered via mannequins three sisters and processed live by mutable instruments clouds. cutoff frequency on the filter and position and blend on the clouds are also modulated by batumi.

strymon big sky (in "cloud" mode) used as an aux send on cassette and rhodes.

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September 27 2016 (cyan)

live bowed glockenspiel improvisation into shure green bullet into ehx 45000. eurorack patch uses qu-bit nano rand digital noise as a sound source filtered by the mannequins three sisters filter and processed by the mutable instruments clouds, with parameters modulated by xaoc devices batumi and c3 knob recorder. dual asynchronous fender rhodes loops into exh 22500.

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October 11 2016 (cadmium)

an excerpt of a 45-minute improvisation with hiroshi ebina, in preparation for our first performance together this sunday afternoon in brooklyn.

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October 15, 2016 (with hiroshi ebina, preparation)

simple experiment testing two simultaneous cassette loops. one of the cassettes feeds strymon el capistan, the other feeds reverb. adjusting the speed control on each for glissandi.

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January 16, 2017 (simult)

submission to Disquiet Junto Project 0287: Digital Pause Tape
disquiet.com/2017/06/29/junto-0287/

over the last year, i've moved away from composing in a daw to almost exclusively working with a hardware- and modular-based setup. as part of this week's disquiet junto assignment, however, i returned to the daw as a compositional tool, using it to chop a previous composition into small chunks and reassemble them into a short cut-and-paste étude.

completing this project confirms that i am moving in the right direction, i.e. away from the daw. i found the creative work on this project more tedious and no more fulfilling than working in a non-daw-based environment. the ability to endlessly edit and re-arrange leaves me with little sense of closure or place.

nonetheless, it was fun to work outside of my usual paradigm and craft something more beat-oriented. i interpreted the rules of the assignment quite strictly, only using cut/paste and level adjustments. it did require some trial and error to find something musical to say within these strictures.

July 3, 2017 (disquiet0287)

first test of the makenoise 0-coast, paired with an earthquaker devices space spiral. eight layers of 0-coast, each with a different clock speed, envelope, and overtones. just trying to get a sense of what kind of tonalities this thing can produce... a lot to explore. 

nice to take a break from the rhodes, too.

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January 24, 2018 (multicoast)

an improvisation on the makenoise 0-coast semi-modular synthesizer.

the 0-coast is patched to an ehx 22500 dual looper then to the cooper fx outward pedal. the outward has its mix set around 50% which allows it to act as a a kind of aux send post-looping. the outward is capable is producing a variety subtle chopping, stuttering, and freeze effects depending on the settings of its other two parameters, size and speed, and by engaging the left footswitch.

in the beginning, the 0-coast is used to produce short impulses, little ticks and pops that are subsequently looped. it is later used to produce longer tones, ranging from pure triangle tones to noisier sounds. the square wave output is patched to the fm input and noisiness can be varied using the fm knob. the envelope of the tones is also varied using the contour settings, later moving towards shorter beeps and more percussive sounds.

two very minimal tonal fender rhodes loops were previously recorded in the left and right channels to provide a bed for the 0-coat to sit. in addition, a cassette recording of one of the rhodes loops is played back in realtime, using a 30-second cassette loop tape.

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February 1, 2018 (outward coast)

note:
please listen on headphones or good speakers to hear the piece as intended. very little of interest comes across on latptop speakers or earbuds.

i began by recording a single tone on the makenoise 0-coast into my daw. the tone was harmonically rich, with lots of overtones generated by using the slope section in cycle mode as an fm source. i then used izotope rx to slow the recorded audio file down by various very small amounts. this produced 4 additional files that, when looped and panned across the stereo field, produced interesting phase relationships, stereo movement, and emergent overtones.

next, i processed the tone using a hexe revolver pedal, recording 4 additional files into my daw.

i looped all 9 files (the original, plus the 8 processed files) added various lowpass filters to differentiate the voices timbrally, and then chopped up the audio files semi-randomly, muting chopped regions to create microrhythms and compositional development. 

the whole process took about 2 hours.

February 5, 2018 (disquiet 0318)

a first test of the avalanche run from earthquaker devices in mono.

source is a makenoise 0-coast, played via midi from a yamaha reface cp and looped with a tc ditto. avalanche is in reverse mode with manual adjustment of delay tone/mix + reverb decay/mix.

the patch on the 0-coast utilizes the midi b gate signal to trigger the random voltage generator (via the tempo input). this signal is split using the voltage math section and used to randomly adjust both overtone and balance. this produces timbral variations (with adjustable depth) with each press of the midi keyboard.

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February 10, 2018 (avalanche)

made a max/msp prototype of a looping device i've been on the lookout for for the last few years. the idea is quite simple: an 8-track asynchronous looper, with level and pan controls for each track, as well as flexible i/o routing from input to looper channels.

today's sound is the first thing i recorded after finishing the prototype, just a quick test to see if everything was working. i ended up really liking this little ecosystem of sounds... it's coherent as a soundworld, but interesting enough to listen to for a while because of all the evolving polyrhythms.

sound source was a makenoise 0-coast into a cooper fx outward and the earthquaker avalanche run.

hoping to develop the looping prototype further and post some more sounds later today.

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February 12, 2018 (asynchronous)

cleaning off space from a few hard drives this morning, found this recording from last june.

if i remember correctly, this one was a dual loop created from a fender rhodes through a zvex lofi junky eurorack module into an electroharmonix 22500, sprinkled with shorter synthesized tones from the op1 in tombola sequencer mode.

reverb is a strymon big sky, probably in plate mode.

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June 22, 2017 (tombola)

(note: for best listening, use headphones or good speakers. otherwise all the bass info disappears and it sounds like a bit of a mess!)

endless ways to combine the organelle and the 0-coast. here's one method, which treats the organelle as a midi recorder/looper and the makenoise 0-coast as sound source. i programmed a simple patch in pure data which allows the organelle to record and play back midi data from its built-in keyboard. there's also a control (knob4) for octave up/down. after the sequence is recorded, it can be played back at a variable rate (knob1) with its own octave control (knob2).

using the emu xmidi 1x1 interface to take usb out from the organelle into the midi in on the 0-coast.also recorded 2 fender rhodes loops on the ehx 22500 pedal, which runs through a cooper fx generation loss pedal. the whole mess feeds a mixer with earthquaker devices avalanche run and cooper fx outward on aux sends.

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March 6, 2018 (overnight)

at the airport waiting to board a flight to london and decided to put together a slightly longer clip of a sound i posted the other day on instagram (https://www.instagram.com/p/BgC-kGkj9Jw). it involves using the critter and guitari organelle to sequence the 0-coast. i created a simple pure data patch that allows note entry with forward, reverse, and random note order playback plus a variable octave displacement parameter. 

the earthquaker devices avalanche run v2 is on an aux send in reverse delay mode with high feedback and long reverb.

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March 9, 2018 (terminal 4)

hold music, for disquiet junto project 335.

a live performance on makenoise 0-coast looped and processed by morphagene, nebulae v2, and clouds.

video of the recording process:
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bjh1iXRAGC8

june 3, 2018 [disquiet0335]

a simple experiment to learn my way around the mutable instruments marbles, which acts as sequencer here.

the two sound sources are 2hp pluck (right channel) and mutable instruments rings (left channel), fed by the X1 and X3 outputs of marbles in coin toss mode. the Y output of the marbles is multed to modulate the rings' position control and the pluck's damp control.

output feeds an avalanche run.

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November 27, 2018 (karplus hocket)

album available for pre-order now:
http://www.greyfade.com/releases/lp1
http://greyfade-label.bandcamp.com/releases

--

The debut recording from Grammy-nominated vocalist Theo Bleckmann and electronic musician & producer Joseph Branciforte. Vocal loops of hushed beauty framed by artificially synthesized tones, deep subharmonic oscillations, and gently layered sheets of noise, with a shared musical language drawing upon ambient, choral, microsound, and free improvisation.

In the early days of spring 2018, Theo Bleckmann and Joseph Branciforte retreated for two days of uninterrupted sonic exploration. In some ways it was a meeting years in the making, in others a wholly spontaneous encounter. Without a note of music prepared or a word of discussion, the two arrived at Branciforte’s Brooklyn studio, armed with an array of looping devices, guitar pedals, found objects, and sound-making machines. The results can be heard on LP1, a debut recording as finely distilled as it is wildly exploratory.

Branciforte had long been a deep admirer of Bleckmann’s work — he grew up obsessively listening to records like Bleckmann’s Origami and Ben Monder’s Excavation, later working as producer & recording engineer on Monder’s Hydra (2013), in which Bleckmann played a prominent role. It wasn’t until 2017, however, that the two collided creatively: Bleckmann stumbled upon an online sound journal that Branciforte had been maintaining, which contained his ongoing studio experiments with Fender Rhodes & synthesizers, elaborately manipulated via pedals and modular processing. A musical friendship was born, and two successful duo performances followed later that year.

In 2018, the pair was invited to perform alongside pioneering electronic musician & composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. In the days leading up to the performance, the two met at Branciforte’s studio to experiment, their first time making music together in a non-public setting. The four tracks comprising LP1 represent a musical snapshot of those improvised sessions, ranging from the edgy and dark to the delicate and pastoral. Through the process of live asynchronous looping, the pair builds and dissolves complex sonic structures in realtime, achieving an impressively immersive sound without the use of studio overdubbing.

Having amassed a substantial amount of raw material, catalogue numbers were assigned to the improvisations and their subsections, a system whose logic is reflected in the final track titles. Editing, mixing, and further manipulation by Branciforte continued through the summer and early fall, with the album pared down to a concentrated 35 minutes in the end. The set is bookended by two darker pieces that stretch the harmonic and textural language of ambient, while the record’s center cuts tend towards sensuous and sublime abstraction.

Bleckmann is widely known for his arresting and hauntingly emotive voice, an instrument capable of producing all manner of tones and otherworldly textures. Contextualized here by Branciforte’s contrasting palette, his sound can be apprehended in a wholly new light. The warmth and fragility of the human voice is merged with the clicks and whirs of machines, the rawness of analogue synthesizers, and the grainy imperfections of decaying tape loops. Branciforte uses the entire surface area of the audio spectrum as counterpoint, extending Bleckmann’s three-and-a-half octave range into impossibly sub- and super-sonic realms. At other times, the two performers appear to merge together into a single sonic entity, the lines between voice and machine blurred beyond recognition.

While these pieces were born of improvisation, they display a patient and deeply compositional logic. LP1 manages to walk a fine line between discovery and restraint, emotion and form, identity and dissolution — outlining an expanded vision of ambient music that embraces narrative and arc as much as landscape and line.

Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann: 4.19 (from "LP1", greyfade 2019)

a max/msp sketch that generates impulses and processes them with short delay lines w/ variable feedback + bit depth reduction.

september 18, 2019 (impulse 1)

JOSEPH BRANCIFORTE is a multi-instrumentalist, recording + mixing engineer, and composer based out of New York City. 

As engineer, he has worked on over 200 releases for some of the most well-respected names in NYC's creative jazz scene, including Ben Monder, Tim Berne, Vijay Iyer, Nels Cline, Marc Ribot, Mary Halvorson, Steve Lehman, Mark Dresser, Jen Shyu, and Matt Mitchell. Branciforte‘s credits also include a growing number of classical, electronic, and alternative projects ranging from Florent Ghys to Son Lux and The Lumineers.

Albums he has produced, engineered, and/or mixed have been included in the NPR Jazz Critics Poll's Top 10 and Downbeat Magazine's Albums of the Year, and have received praise from publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and All Music Guide. His engineering and production work can be heard on ECM Records, Sunnyside Records, Pi Recordings, Cantaloupe Music, Cuneiform Records, Cryptogramophone, and Skirl.

He is also the co-leader, co-composer, and drummer of the the cellar and point, a "garage-chamber" septet formed in 2010. The group, which combines aspects of modern composition, jazz improvisation, and pop/rock songwriting has been called “one of the most interesting bands of the moment, perhaps able to answer the question ‘where is music going?’” (All About Jazz) 

The band’s debut record, Ambit - produced, engineered, and mixed by Branciforte - was released on Cuneiform Records in late 2014. All Music Guide lauded Ambit as “one of 2014's finest albums of challenging, engaging, and genre-defying contemporary music,” and John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s New Sounds, included the recording on his Top 10 Albums of 2014. BBC Radio commented on the album’s production merits: “Sonically, it's a fantastic record... well worth your listening on headphones. It's really well-engineered, beautifully produced.”

Branciforte similarly played the role of producer, recording engineer, and mixing engineer on Ben Monder's Hydra (Sunnyside, 2013), “an eight-song set of impossible, beautiful, mind-melting music” (The Village Voice / #3 Jazz Album of 2013). JazzTimes called the project “technically brilliant and radiantly produced,” while Stereophile Magazine awarded it five stars for sonics: "The sound captures every intimate string squeak, fat bass tone, warp-speed ensemble passage, and ghostly vocal swell.” 

Joseph is also in-demand as a location-recording engineer. He has engineered multitrack recordings at dozens of NYC clubs, halls, and stages including The Village Vanguard, The Iridium, The Stone,  Roulette, Issue Project Room, The Jazz Gallery, Central Park Summerstage, and Carnegie Hall's Neighborhood Concert Series. 

He has recently begun contributing as a writer for TapeOp magazine.

josephbranciforte

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