Derived entirely from physically modeled and recorded/manipulated piano recordings, some improvised, some "composed". Ideally this ought to be a spatialised multichannel mix (which may happen in the future). Gravitating around both the natural and equal tempered equivalents of the harmonic series on the piano's low A this piece presents the results of quite a lot of granulation, pitch shifting, harmonising, ring modulation, frequency shifting, reverberation and various other FFT processes applied to concrete recordings. Most of the sounds that appear like a "real" piano are actually physically modeled single notes mixed with "real" ones recorded on a number of different microphones and with different modes of attack. I have always found it difficult to write for the piano as it's a very black and white instrument to me: this project was an attempt to find colours and textures that I found interesting. I recorded various prepared, harmonic, muted, struck and plucked sounds on the piano together with what sounds like (and are) violent punching actions on the keyboard with fists and forearms.

As it's quasi-spectral it also sounds oddly tonal in parts (including what turned out to be a quite Messiaen-like passage in black-note forearm clusters). This is an avenue of work I want to explore further when I don't have multiple assignments to do at once.

PINGING (2016) for piano and electronics

Composed for and performed/diffused over 12 channels of spatialised sound this is the stereo mix of this piece. I will also post the binaural recording which captures some of the spatial qualities of the diffused mix.

This works best on good headphones. I'm especially proud of this as every sound derives at a material and even conceptual level from the journey home from the porno cinema where I work, via public transport and on foot, along with garbage trucks and goods trains with their singing brakes, moving via a little interlude in a park at night serenaded by currawongs just before dawn on a sunday morning, currawongs resynthesised via FFT duetting with simulacra of themselves that later explode into a leaping cadenza further on in the piece. 

The piece uses lots of cascading granulation modules with comb filtering and ring modulation and various tuned reverbs. What sounds like voices at the end are actually radically time-stretched moans recorded from inside the booth where I work: I like the idea that the fake moans in porn become slowly melting fields of microtonal harmony when you lay enough of them over one another. It sounds hellish at the beginning of the piece but comes back in full force at the end of the piece.

31 To 41 (garbage mix)

Derived from equal-tempered approximations of the harmonic series built on the ground of a series of pitches itself derived from the Bach Chaconne for solo violin. It's a kind of spectralist piece, given that the harmonies are also timbres. It also sounds very much like some of my favorite chords in Messiaen, those of the "contracted resonance" built upon the same reservoir of pitches but not registral placements. The harmonies in this piece, their implied scales are variously stretched or compressed throughout the piece. I used Max to generate brownian melodic "walks" around a reservoir of pitches related harmonically to the bass and triggered by events generated from a system of interwoven repeating rhythmic and metrical modules. This long piece explores what sound like almost conventionally tonal harmonies in the bass registers (the lower harmonics do outline a simple major triad)with often bell-like more closely spaced chords in the upper registers given that at those partials the pitches are very close together. The sometimes insistently repetitive high notes are only repeating because they are approximations of certain pitches that lie outside the fixed tuning of the instrument: one note may have to do the job of representing more than a single partial. 

Chaconne for two pianos (2016)

This is a live recording made on 18th October 2016 at the Melbourne Town Hall at a concert where students from RMIT sound programs were invited to compose a work for the grand organ which is capable of being controlled over MIDI. The concert was recorded on a SoundField ambisonic system and decoded to stereo for this document. 

This piece is derived entirely from the overtones of a low C (32.703 hz to be precise). In "Corrective Services" the electronics serve to present these overtones at their precise "natural" pitch whilst the organ attempts (and for the most part fails) to present these harmonies in equal temperament. The dissonances you hear in the piece are the result of the discrepancies between the equal tempered approximations and the pure natural ratios presented by the organ's electronic "double". For instance the centre of the piece is dominated by the entirely standard chord C E G A# which are the approximations of the 4th 5th 6th and 7th harmonics of C. In equal temperament the 7th (A#) is just a straight sharpened A but in overtone tuning the A# is closer to only a quartertone sharp. In general the prime numbered harmonics of any pitch are the ones that are most deviant with regard to equal temperament. Accordingly they are a constant focus in this and other works of mine. This piece hones in on the 7th (A#), 11th (F#) and 13th (G#)harmonics especially as they are most "alienated" from the "corrections" implied by equal temperament. Gradually through this piece the harmonic series is compressed down to 0.2 of its "natural" proportions, becoming the rising scales you hear at the very end. Simultaneously although most of the piece to that point has been focused on the overtones of C the electronic "double" of the organ appears to believe the instrument is now tuned to the overtones of F# which means that pitches like C and E and G now are grotesquely out of tune when previously they were the only pitches where organ and electronics agreed on matters of intonation.

"Corrective Services" for organ and electronics (live recording)

A short study from a series of audiovisual works about my workplace and the ways the acoustic of the space is crossed by lines of desire, hatred, greed, disease and stupidity. Our business has two primary spaces, the cinema and the internet area: this piece overlaps the two separate spaces making an imaginary space no person could occupy. I work in the cinema in a glass walled ticket booth with an Eichmann in Jerusalem vibe and where I regularly get to answer the question "are the movies real?".

In the internet area a TV in the corner loops desultorily around a banal sequence of chords that happens to match the high rotation of REM's "Everybody Hurts" on the in-store radio (actually just a Spotify playlist of the worst music of the late 20th century) and is almost in tune with it. It's also almost in tune with the proximity alarm inside the internet booths which beeps its way through the last section of this short piece. These booths have computers in them and run on coins, if people don't put coins in the alarm goes off. From inside the booths you can hear screams, moans, slaps, the distinctive sound of frantic masturbation, snoring, condom and lube wrappers being torn and over all of it this mashing together of music as if the space were not noisy enough already. 

I find situational "remixes" or "mashups" like this fascinating. It also explains to me the delight I have in switching all this toxic garbage off at the end of the night as it's like working inside an earworm. My earworms are such that common harmonic patterns evoke all other songs with those harmonic patterns in them: they are intolerable to me and the stacked earworm explains nearly everything about how popular music often sounds to me (which is why I actively avoid it).

I hope this piece conveys the acoustic character of these spaces and something of the affects they construct. There is no mixing or EQ or "correction" applied to the recordings at all: they are merely superimposed.

I made a long recording of this space and overlaid a recording made of one of the interstitial advertisements for a brothel, recorded with a microphone close to the glass of the ticket-booth where I stand for 8 hours or more a night: this astonishing text, spoken by an actress (it's amusing how often men ask me who she is), constructs a fantasy of the sex worker as a person with no limits, no tastes other than submission to male sexual entitlement. "PLEASE" come and see her, she wants you the text assures its listeners, you're almost doing her a favour! 

It contains the delightful admission that "she" doesn't need to use her university degree, she's "living the dream" which was the moment I used to place the two recordings, I simply ensured that statement fell in one of the longer cracks between the repetitions of the annoying TV ad. 

Why does this imaginary woman say this? Because it allows the potential customers, the men who pay for sexual services (to which she cannot do anything other than agree), to believe she does this by choice and of her own "free will". Not because she's a single mother who needs to keep a low profile because her meth-head ex-husband will find her and possibly kill her. She's "on the same wavelength" as the men who listen to this ok? Sex work isn't just "work" in this ad, it's what she most fervently desires, it's fun and not at all connected to the horrifying statistics around the actual life expectancies and experiences of the women who do sex work. These men listening become aroused by images accompanied by the sound of women choking, screaming, gagging but she understands them and their "special needs". What is the meaning of "consent" or "choice" here then if she could never refuse, is effectively an empty screen onto which the listener's desire can be projected or reflected back to him? 

Living the dream guys.

Living The Dream/Everybody Hurts (2017)

Part of the large project I'm undertaking setting the text of Kafka's "In der Strafkolonie" to music. Setting the text to music by means of metaphor and allusion, framing and allegory seems to me to be the "correct" way to set a text that is effectively a deconstruction of representation itself. It could not become "theatrical" without falsifying the implications of the text itself. The resolved "beauty" of this piece, the cimbalom soloist surrounded by a halo of ringing harmonics, is entirely, and literally, sarcastic. The presence in a lot of my work of a solo "voice" surrounded by a string-like aura is usually a reference to the ways that Bach in the great passion settings surrounds the words of Christ with string chords and figurations, setting his words apart from the narrative of the Evangelist. The Bach passions are a formal model for this whole project as my reading of the Kafka text interprets it as a bitter parody of the Christian concepts of redemption, divine justice, sacrifice and communion. 

I'm particularly pleased by the way the rhythmic dimension of the piece is constantly wavering between recognisable rhythmic figurations (regularity or "dotted" figures) and what seems like arrhythmic chaos.

". . . HOW WE BATHED OUR CHEEKS IN THE RADIANCE OF THAT JUSTICE . . ."

An experiment with granulating, stretching and manipulating - bringing out harmonies and making sustained chords out of fleeting pitch events. I may end up using this as an orientation track (audible to the performer alone) for a piano piece devoted to the idea of "picking notes out of the air" that "hang together" in some etiolated, fragmentary way.

höre Ich nur diese Weise

More smearing and stretching, distortion and citation with a bank of comb filters tuned to the chord and its resolution that slide their way through this piece between those two poles. These kinds of textures will play a big part in my work this year.

die so wundervoll und leise

This piece is for two player pianos to be installed in a public gallery, excited into action by coughing spectators: this is a simulation of that. It's about "(dis)placement", like everything else (the 2 player piano parts are in a 10:11 polyrhythmic relationship and harmonically derive, defectively of course, from the series of "Gruppen", subjected to a mechanical process of gradual transformation). The "field recording" in the background is a recording made in front of the Rothko painting described in the title. Cover image is from the wonderful site "great art in ugly rooms".

“UNTITLED (RED ON ORANGE) (1956)”

A study in Audiomulch transformations of piano sounds - lots of tuned granulation and comb filtering/resonating. All about the conflicts between natural tuning systems and equal temperament. All derived from my sound work for the film (the cover for the piece here comes from the film). All derived ultimately and resonating with the harmonies of Tristan und Isolde, a source of all my work for Advanced Studio this semester. The title comes from a recording I made of street conversations which is included in the film version of the piece.

"THERE WAS LIKE A SPECIFIC FREQUENCY"

I work alone under various aliases including the dark ambient project called Wolftöne ("Wolf tones" are resonance phenomena that cause problems with stringed instruments in particular), and the oblique, undanceable, prime-number obsessed take on techno called Vulf Turner. I also perform in an as yet unnamed live electronic drone project with Dave Coen (Whitehorse/Sow Discord/Hans Harms). 

I have plans as well for a queer political music and language outfit to be called HPDL (Homosexual Panic Defense League) and a side project as a hard sexy but minimal techno duo called Hunter Green.

I'm also active as a painter and installation artist with 5 solo exhibitions so far over the past decade. 

Works of mine can be seen at http://keithwclancy.tumblr.com/

I make little distinction between the aims and processes of the painting and installation projects, indeed most projects share essential procedural and formal characteristics with either another painting series or another series of sound  works. 





Keith W Clancy

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