This is my most chill album. Ambient, with some generative songs, imaginary environments you can close your eyes and inhabit. Laregly made with VCV Rack, with some assists from Bitwig Studio.

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LVO 2021: Electrons at Rest

After my last two albums of modular, ambient and generative, I hit the composing side of my craft with Moods. It's kind of like Pictures at an Exhibition, but electronica. From an SQ80 visit to 40 years ago, so storysongs and psychic spaces to inhabit. Many of these would be fodder for game music, loopable versions for extended meditation can be made available.

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Moods of Lanavishnu

My favorite album, evoking the early age of electronic music.

Solace In Dark Times

This is an album of songs and moods and even a story. I recommend it. It was mostly made using  VCV Rack, with Audacity for editing and Bitwig Studio on a couple of the tracks. I wrote a lot of music in the early 2000s and this is my return to making music. I hope you enjoy it.

The Feigenbaum Constant

This VCV Rack patch is controlled feedback through two delays and a tape loop. There are three synth voices and a drone. Some of the signal gets routed from one channel of the delay through another delay and modulated back in. The other channel is sampled by a tape loop and played back then recorded and played back. One of the synth voices is a metallic bell tone, one is a folded wave form with the folding modulated randomly. The notes are triggered in such a way that neither sequence lines up with the others nor are they played in a linear path, and probabilities of gates being triggered on different steps of the sequence. In other words, even I don't truly understand the signal path. But I find it a good sonic space to exist in as it plays for as long as I want it to play.

A version of this is on YouTube to see the patch in action, but the SoundCloud version is the better performance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKpjPrLlJh4&t=8s

Arbitration by Meditation

For the record, I would not go in a Desert Cave with an imaginary theremin. I'd be afraid of non-imaginary tarantulas.

There are three voices in this piece:

The opening voice is controlled with sequences and gates from ShapeMaster, the expression of wave folding for left and right voices are subtley modified by other Shapemaster channels. Additional copies of the signal are sent to granulators and a multitap tape delay for the bubbly sounds.

The second voice is a Basal and TS-L run through copies of Bass to give envelopes and accents. The sequence is from a gridseq with irregular triggering to make it less linear. Both voices are mixed and sent though a delay, a filter and another delay. I have buttons setup to fade this in while the first channel of the first voice is fading out. I leave the bubbly granulated and tape delayed versions of the first voice running. The accents and some other random modulations make these voice change a lot as they play.

The third voice is powered by pair of LFOs - a triangle subtracted from a slower sine, attenuated to provide the right voice range. The voice is triggered on a slow clock through a bernoulli gate to catch a sample of the LFO signal, then a second bernoulli gate, triggered bu a faster and more irregular gate signal to add bursts of gates from the sample and hold of the LFO signal. This yeilds held notes and runs of notes and fills the roll of a self playing theremin. I added a slight bit of slew to the pitch to aim for a more theremin-y sound.

My role in performing the piece is to control fade-ins and -outs and manipulate some probabilities. The patch does the rest.

YouTube video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDjXYNH0Nc

Desert Cave with an Imaginary Theremin

A short little ambient track featuring some electronic jungle animals.

This was something I was playing with in VCV, making some beats with MindMeld's new ShapeMaster, some drums and Elements for some wooden drum sounds.

So, I added a Vraids and set it up to be responsive to aftertouch and the mod wheel and recorded some riffs - two melodies bits, some bloopy sound effects and  a little high pitched accent riff.

Omnivorous Beats

Funky Morning Music

When the oscillator harvest is complete every year, the entire village gathers to celebrate.

Festival of the Oscillator Harvest

This song started with laying out some chords using a nice pad. They were pretty and sad.

Floating Chords

I was working on a couple of projects and decided they would work well as a suite.

Three Short Movements

This is a recording from 2374 once civilization has been rebuilt following the climate crisis. It is a future powered by endless and cheap fusion.

The recording was made as part of the world tour of the wildly popular band Boundless in a stadium in Rio. The name of the song is generally considered untranslatable due to changes in language and meaning.

Sci-Fi Funk

A track that would make a great game loop.

Stealthy Raccoon Mission

Triumphant Strut

So, I found an old SQ80 emulator from 10 years ago hiding in my archives. I installed it. I used it for everything in the track (except an equally vintage string synth on one track) and my FX arsenal in Bitwig. Cuz let's face it. If I had a string synth and an SQ80 in the early 80's I'd have used my boxes of guitar pedals from pawn shops and my 8-track studio to do the same thing.

SQ80

I'm learning Reaper as a new DAW, because it's cool and lean and tight.
I have a YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq5SLSa4v9w and this is the soundtrack of it.

It's a loop, it's short. But I could expand this out by leading to this point. This is the payoff.

Hardcore

This is the meditation track of the album. Play it twice, if you need it. Something hardcore is reputed to be ahead.

Eightfold Path

It's a race, it's a chase, it's in space. And moving fast. Faster than light, I've been told. Remember, it's a really bad idea to fire your energy weapons while in FTL.

Under 12 Parsecs

My latest modular creation. My wife says it sounds like it could be the opening theme for a new FX series. Really, I wanted to play with the chord module,  the formants module, and get better at sequencing. And make a distorted synthtar. It was too much to run in a single patch, so I had to mix the parts down and play the samples in sync to the synthtar patch.

Retrowave

A Sunday project, folding you in and enveloping you in modular sounds. This patch was nearly too complex for my computer to play. Which is odd, since it's a just a bit of whimsy.

Enveloper

I've been working on building the instruments that make up this track in VCV Rack for a week. Recording samples, assembling the samples into the music track. I wrote and recorded the script and then back into VCV Rack to perform the voice samples and mix it.

In fond remembrance of Don Joyce, sound collage and spoken word artist.

Dreaming

This started out with me playing Kalimba and making a wind chime in VCV. Then I went a little off the deep end, using the Spectral Madness mode of Texture Synthesizer and turned my wind chime into a cosmic storm.

Dark Matter Storm

An ambient track driven by randomness and chord changes. I took a few lessons from Omri Cohen's latest tutorial on Plaits, but used a different approach, plus mixed in a string-like pad I'd been using to work out some chord changes. I really like the re-win quantizer with it's four channels and support for scenes. I've also taken to using the cf mixers with envelopes and gates to control the gain.

And go watch Omri make something nice out of the most annoyingly harsh sounding model of Plaits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJgLd.... You can see the lessons I took from that tutorial to make this patch, and watch the VCV master at work.

C-Beams

A few songs from a 2005 project  -- Dr. Laniac's Bad Attitude

Gray Sunshine  Part II

Hills Are Very Small Mountains

Mental Weather Report

Mountains Are Very Large Hills

Ode To The Crimson King

Swimming At Night

An experiment in long evolving and complex  envelopes

Starlight

Spacewave

Mangled SDR radio samples - a crazy end of days preacher and a Ham Radio Operator mixed with some weird synth sounds

Weird Sounds

I've been making music my whole life. I made some albums 20 years ago and have returned to it in the last three years. I do it largely for myself, but I hope you find it enjoyable as well.

The Lanavishnu Orchestra

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