Sonic Encounters is an Original Music Podcast by Synthesist Mark MosherMosher. 

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https://SonicEncounters.com/podcast

Review:
“Goosebumps and Deep Breaths… these rich soundscape “stories” sincerely do thrill my senses…
The concept for Sonic Encounters (so far, and in my interpretation) is this… You read a short text (sometimes the title is enough) on the premise of the “story” before listening. Then you listen to a purely sonic piece of field recording morphed with music, electronic manipulation, and performance, and you’re immediately transported via your own imagination’s 3D projection of his premise. Mark’s become a consummate sound artist. He creates powerful imagery and elicits surprisingly keen emotional response from the listener without being heavy-handed. His economy and value in precision is proof of his skill.
My favorite story so far is “Metamorphosis Under the Chatham Light”. I get chills just thinking about it. My very close second is “And What Do Trees Hear When the Wind Blows”. Read each premise before you listen. Or not. No matter, the pieces will creep into your consciousness and take up residence.” - http://BlindFlyTheater.com

Sonic Encounters: An Original Music Podcast by Synthesist Mark Mosher

This is Mark Mosher Playlist

Flip Phone is a one-take Octatrack live set recording featuring sci-fi samples, tempo changes, and synth textures.

This set showcases Octatrack sample mangling, drum programming, live synth, and classic sci-fi influences.

Released under Puppets Go Last my sample-flipping and beat-driven musique concrète project.

The performance which was recorded in one-take at a rehearsal for a summer run of shows. The album is divided into separate tracks for easy navigation while maintaining seamless flow.

I created original beats and synth parts in Ableton with Push 3, then loaded them into the Octatrack..

The Octatrack debuted in 2010 (I've used mine since 2013), when flip phones were becoming obsolete—fitting the retro vibe.

These ideas converged into the cover concept.

Thanks for listening. If you dig it, pass it on.

Flip Phone (feat. Mark Mosher)

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher (C)(P) 2021 Mark J. Mosher
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Composer's Notes:
Beware the rocky shores of the Like Machine. There be danger there.

Producer's Notes:
The song was performed live on a Synthstrom Deluge. Deluge was fed with various sampled "musical objects" as follows:

- Melody line was played live using a Sensel Morph in Live 11 using some very expressive MPE sounds created by the amazing sound designers Huston Singletary and Robert Bruce.
- Drones and rhythmic elements were made on an iPad with the granular synth SpaceCraft. 

The song was lightly edited in Ableton Live 11. Most FX are from deluge with a few reverbs and delay in Live 11 to sweeten the mix a bit.

SO4-E04: Beware the Siren Call of the Like Machine

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher (C)(P) 2021 Mark J. Mosher
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S04-E07: The Signal Within the Signal

This Sonic Encounters soundscape was improvised live in one-take using my 4U 62HP Eurorack musique concrète Instrument. It's the follow-on track to the "Droid 164 Gets Distracted by a Wildflower" https://soundcloud.com/markmosher/so4-e02-droid-164-gets-distracted-by-a-wildflower.

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher. Cover by Mark Mosher. (C)(P) 2021 Mark J. Mosher
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S04-E08: Droid 164 Searches for Survivors in the Forbidden Zone

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher. Cover by Mark Mosher. (C)(P) 2022Mark J. Mosher
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S05-E01: Singularity

Hello Soundcloud friends.

As we start this new year, I'm leaning on the power of music more than ever to lift my spirits. 

To this end, and to start the year off right, I'm happy to announce my first new single in 2022 is a super fun track called "Funky Glitch Machine". 

The song was created from scratch mostly in Ableton Live using my trusty Push 2. The song is loaded with lots of synth ear candy held together with some big beats, big bass synth and super tight electric bass lines, all seasoned with some glitch FX.

Enjoy,

Mark Mosher
https://linktr.ee/MarkMosher

Buy on Bandcamp

Funky Glitch Machine

Escape From Volcano Island

Join me on a journey into sample flipping, original beats, dub, glitch, and funk.

Hang in there as the track really evolves from sample flips to machine drums, to electric bass vibes with glitch, to expressive acoustic drums, all sprinkled with some synth ear candy.

This track was produced and performed with Ableton Live 11 on Push 2.
credits
released March 3, 2023
Music and Cover Art by Mark Mosher.

Transcending Gravity (feat. Mark Mosher)

This  song debuted as part of the Rocky Mountain Synthesizer Meet Drone Day 2022 Celebration.  It’s the soundtrack to sci-fi short film of the same name which you can see here https://youtu.be/8WNZEwu1mEI?si=iNQ5rbtLxhpTvIGV.

This piece was produced entirely on an Apple iPad Pro 11 with Borderlands Granular and Luma Touch LumaFusion.

The music was performed in one real-time pass on the amazing Borderlands granular synthesizer which you’ll see superimposed on the screen. The source audio was based on field recordings of household objects, and on location in Iceland and Melbourne Australia.

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher. Cover by Mark Mosher. (C)(P) 2024 Mark J. Mosher
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S05-E02: Last Known Transmission

This song was improvised using MPE multi-touch to control analog modeled synths through a Frippertronics looper.  It was first performed at the Stellar Lounge astronomy concert which was a collaboration with the Colorado State Parks and Wildlife. 

More on this here https://markmoshermusic.com/2024/07/10/performing-space-music-colorado-parks-wildlife-stargazing-event-thursday-july-11/. 

In other words, the song is inspired by experiencing the vast night sky.

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher. Cover by Mark Mosher. (C)(P) 2024 Mark J. Mosher
Release date:
28 August 2024

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Get past season albums for your own library from my Bandcamp https://markmosher.bandcamp.com/.

Sonic Encounters is an original soundscape music podcast started by Synthesist Mark Mosher in 2015.

Each episode contains a story-driven original improvisational soundscape created with synthesis and sampling to capture, disassemble, reassemble, and shape the sounds around us. Episode covers are also Mark's original art.

Now in season 5, there are 35+ past episodes with over 4 hours of music! Show notes are in the description section within each episode on Soundcloud.

Review:
Goosebumps and Deep Breaths…I’m trying to restrain myself in writing this review as it’d be easy to come off sounding a bit hyperbolic… But these rich soundscape “stories” sincerely do thrill my senses… The concept for Sonic Encounters (so far, and in my interpretation) is this… You read a short text (sometimes the title is […]― BlindFlyTheater

Love Transcends

S05-E03: Love Transcends

It’s a sci-fi theme that uses intertwined conversational melodies to move the sonic story along and is loaded with synth ear candy that sounds great on big systems with subs. Give it repeat listens in headphones to hear some intricate stereo imaging and more detail.

Composed and performed on Ableton Push 3 Standalone and finished off in Live 12 Suite.

ARTISTIC NOTES
- Uses individual evolving melodies to build tension
- Avoids chords to make room for synth ear candy and melodic evolution
- Melodies are conversational
- Main motif is 1,2,3,4,5 phrase against 8 which creates some fun rounds
- Sense of a clock and time
- Cinematic orchestration and dynamics and tempo changes
- Hocketing
- A bit of a twist at the end

Decoder

Over morning coffee, I explored creating an ambient piece by routing radio waves through iPad AUM into the Delta-V Audio Spacecraft granular synthesizer and capturing live samples on the Octatrack using my Zoom L6 mixer as the central hub. The signal path involved sending radio audio through multiple mix buses, allowing me to process it simultaneously through Spacecraft's ethereal granular clouds while collecting fragments on the Octatrack for live manipulation. After getting some interesting buffers loaded up, I improvised a dreamy session with layers of processed radio waves, granular textures, and live sampling, recording both a stereo mix and isolated tracks for later editing.

S05-E04: Radio Waves Improv with Coffee

"The Beauty Comes Out of the Spider's Nature" is a sonic experiment on the Synthstrom Deluge groovebox that explores sample manipulation, glitch effects, and granular warping through dramatic tempo changes.

CREDITS
Music & Cover Art by Mark Mosher © 2025 (CC BY-NC)

PRODUCER NOTES
- Composed, sampled, sequenced (no commercial loops), and produced on a Synthstrom Deluge groovebox.
- Performed in one-take on the Synthstrom Deluge using the Open Source Community Firmware
- Recorded into a 1010 Bluebox
- Mastered in Ableton Live with Ozone 11

COVER ART
-Light painting with a GoPro Hero 12
-Graphic design in Canva

$ Buy on Bandcamp

The Beauty Comes Out of the Spider's Nature

Doppelgänger

5 4 3 2 1 (feat. Mark Mosher)

Game Over (feat. Mark Mosher)

Stardust Redux (feat. Mark Mosher)

Shall We Play a Game (feat. Mark Mosher)

Was That Some Kind of Acid (feat. Mark Mosher)

Story: 
The sound of what is going on inside the HAL 9000’s mind as he’s speaking “I’m Completely Operational, and All My Circuits Are Functioning Perfectly” to the crew.

Artist Notes:
This piece was improvised and performed on the Nord Lead 4 and the Elektron Octatrack. It was recorded in one real-time pass with no edits.

Instruments and Instrumentalities:
All the synthesized source sounds are from my original Lead 4 presets. I live sampled and looped the Nord Lead 4 into the Octatrack and performed most sonic movement in real-time on the Octatrack.

Music, Sounds, Stories, Notes and Cover art by Mark Mosher 
© 2016 Mark J. Mosher
http://SonicEncounters.com
http://ModulateThis.com

Sonic Encounters Volume 01

SO1-E09: I'm Completely Operational, and All My Circuits Are Functioning Perfectly

Story:
The swarm of the Nanobots is approaching.

Artist Notes:
This microtonal mayhem is an exploration of swarming notes and joyous distortion that was inspired by the Dewanatron Swarmatron instrument.

Instrumentation & Instrumentalities:
I performed and recorded this in one real-time pass with no edits on an Elektron Octatrack.

From a sound design perspective - I was working to emulate an instrument called the Swarmatron http://www.dewanatron.com/instruments.php?page=swarmatron.

"The Swarmatron was created to produce eight tones tuned approximately to one note, each tone slightly different in pitch to produce a complex and natural choral effect. These eight oscillators can be played with a single ribbon controller (variable resistor) to move the pitch center up or down. The span control expands the sound of a swarm of eight notes spread just a few cents apart into a wide chord of equidistant pitches spread over the entire spectrum. The player can "taffy pull" the resulting chord by using the span control and pitch ribbon in tandem. Swarms of sine waves evoke swarms of angels congregating. Swarms of sawtooth waves evoke the swarming of bees. The sound of a host of voices, earthly or unearthly, has a unique character recognized by the ear even when they are folded together in unison."

To pull this off with an Octatrack, I sampled sawtooth wave from the Nord into track 1 of the Octatrack using a Flex machine. I used the on-board audio editor to normalize the audio; set start, end an loop points to zero crossings; and then cropped the sample. I duplicated this idea on to tracks 2-7 in pointed Flex machines for those tracks to the same source sample. I went through each track and panned and slight detuned each one. I configured each track to have slightly different effects. So some had chorus delay. Others had filter and phaser etc… all in the box. Track 8 is a master track with filter and reverb in Part 1 and in Part 2, comb filter and reverb - so my Swarmatron is 7 voice :^) I made some scene B variations so the crossfader would either detune or change the playback speed emulating the swarm. Like a real Swarmatron, I use the track mutes to bring oscillators in and out.

I performed using mostly chromatic trig mode and manually modulated parameters with the crossfader and manually manipulated parameters. I used a little sequencing of some notes with "slide trigs" to emulate playing notes on a ribbon (in addition to manipulating pitch and swarm with crossfader).

All the distortions are intentional (as in I'm not over-driving the inputs). I'm super happy with the non-linearities in this and I think this shows once again that digital can be unstable and organic when you use feedback in effects circuit models in the proper way.

Credits:
Music, Sounds, Story, Notes and Cover art by Mark Mosher
©2016 Mark J. Mosher
http://SonicEncounters.com
http://ModulateThis.com

SO1-E10: Swarm of the Nanobots

Story:
This is last known transmission the expedition to explore the undersea cave of the giant.

Composer Notes:
I sketched the cover image and used it as a graphical score.

Credits:
Music, Story and Cover Art by Mark Mosher
© 2018 Mark J. Mosher
SonicEncounters.com
NewEcho.com

S02-E04: Last Known Transmission of the Expedition to Explore The Undersea Cave of the Giant

Story:
A secret mission in the Arctic to recover the ancient artifact begins.

Composer Notes:
A real-time performance with single synthesizer. Improvised and recorded in a single take with no edits.


Credits:
Music, Story and Cover Art Painting by Mark Mosher
© 2018 Mark J. Mosher
SonicEncounters.com
NewEcho.com

S02-E05: Operation Polynya

"Of Snow and Light" is episode 8 of the Sonic Encounters podcast season 2. It's an original soundscape featuring some warm classic synth sounds and pads.

Photo is from a very unique skiing experience I had at Copper Mountain Colorado where I got to ski at night in a snow storm with only a headlamp and ambient light.

Music and cover art by Mark Mosher
Copyright Mark Mosher 2019

http://SonicEncounters.com
http://MarkMosherMusic.com

S02-E08: Of Snow and Light

Story:
It appears the menu has changed. Please Press 3. 

Subscribe:
Links to subscribe in Apple Podcasts or your fav podcatcher here http://SonicEncounters.com

Composer Notes:
I thought I'd kick off this season with something more experimental with lots of extreme tempo changes ranging from 80 BPM - 764 BPM. Enjoy.

Music, voice, lyrics, cover art by Mark Mosher
Copyright Mark Mosher 2019

My artist site is here http://MarkMosherMusic.com

Sonic Encounters Volume 03

S03-E01: Please Press 3

Story:
Quite some time ago an alien child instantiated our reality using some silly game they found on their parent's hand-me-down computer. As time went on they noticed the rainforests were being destroyed for a variety of reasons which would soon end the simulation. The child was quite attached to some of the people in the simulation and of course didn't want to have restart the simulation all over again from beginning. So, without their parent's permission, the child opted to buy the in-app purchase to heal the rainforests by turning back the rainforest clocks. Play now continues.

Subscribe:
Links to subscribe in Apple Podcasts or your fav podcatcher here SonicEncounters.com

Composer Notes:
Improvised using original field recordings as sources from Australia including the city of Melbourne, and The Healesville Sanctuary (https://www.zoo.org.au/healesville/).

Cover Art Notes:
I manipulated a photo I took while walking to  through the rainforest of Great Otway National Park on the way to Henderson Falls. Some of the trees are estimated to be over 200 years old. 

Credits: 
Story, Music, Cover Art by Mark Mosher
Copyright Mark Mosher 2019
My artist site is here MarkMosherMusic.com

S03-E02: Turning Back the Rainforest Clocks

Composer's Notes:
Things have changed and now we're all ghosts of the time and space that we once knew. Here is a song about it it as a new Sonic Encounters episode featuring the track "Ghosts of Time and Space"

Producer's Notes:
This was improvised on Ableton Live 10 with Push 2. While I mostly do my own sound design I've been enjoying using libraries from others to introduce pleasant surprises ("chance operations") into some of my improvisational pieces. All the source samples are from the Ghosts sound pack which I bought from my friend and independent New Zealand based sound designer Greg Cole (aka Empty Vessel https://store.emptyvessel.co.nz/ ). This was originally released as a samples and presets for the TAL sampler, but I brought these into Ableton (notes on this below). Greg takes such great care in producing and mastering his source samples I'm happy to report he also just provided these samples as a stand-alone WAV editon here https://store.emptyvessel.co.nz/p/cl3h5w/.

The cover art for this episode is based on a photo I took at the Cafe Campana at Musee d'Orsay Museum in Paris in 2018.

Video:
A video of this recording session is available on on YouTube https://youtu.be/gu8xJfs4J64. 

Credits:
Music, Photo, and Cover Copyright 2020 Mark

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Subscribe Exclusive

S03-E05: Ghosts of Time and Space

A chill psychedelic meandering trip to an ancient savanna sandwiched with a bossa nova. Some lush synths throughout.

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Credits:
Music by Mark Mosher
Copyright Mark Mosher 2019
My artist site is here MarkMosherMusic.com

S03-E03: Ancient Savanna (A Post Modern Ambient Bossa Nova Ice Cream Sandwich)

Story: 
A dreamy cinematic ambient song to accompany your time mirror viewing sessions.

Composer's Notes:
This song was inspired by sci-fi movies, tv series,  and books that explore peering into the multiverse and time-travel. The title was inspired by the Outer Limits episode "Demon with the Glass Hand".

Producer's Notes:
This song was produced in three sessions:

Session 1: I composed 4 layers off-grid varying  between even and odd bar lengths ranging from 4-9 bars performing on Ableton Push 2. The interplay of these even and odd lengths results in melodies and motifs that round-robin in interesting ways and often result in call and response. I improvised a lead melody line with all these layers in motion performing on keys. You hear this melody in the final piece starting around 1m9s. The notes in the bell sound throughout are triggered using varying levels of probabilities to add variety throughout the piece. 

Session 2: I did a real-time mix down and arrangement session using Ableton Push 2 to perform with these "musical objects"  to turn them into this song.

Session 3: I did a mastering session doing some lite editing of all the automation for synth parameters and volumes. I added and additional automation envelope to the bells layer at the end of the piece to introduce increasing pitch randomization to the granular synth engine to cause the bells to drift to become more dissonant. 

Credits:
Music Copyright 2020 Mark 

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SO3-E06: Shimmering Light from the Time Mirror

Composer's Notes:
Music Concrete improvisation performed on Push 2 using mysterious shortwave radio signals from the cold war era. 

Producer's Notes:
Samples are manipulated and performed as musical objects using Ableton Simpler, and Granulator II.

Credits:
Music Copyright 2020 Mark 

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More Info:
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S03-E07: The Mysterious Shortwaves That Haunt Our Airwaves

An experimental piece re-purposing improvised phrases and motifs with more classical instrumentation as "musical objects" which I further manipulate in a 2nd improvisational pass.

S04-E01: A Brave Attempt to Plod Along Unnoticed

Sonic Encounters Season 03 has come to an end which means the album containing the songs from this season is now available on Bandcamp here https://markmosher.bandcamp.com/album/sonic-encounters-volume-03. 

Bandcamp is waiving artist fees on Friday September 4th so it's a great time to buy songs and albums on Bandcamp to support your favorite artists. 

Note background song in this announcement is track 6 on the new album "Shimmering Light from the Time Mirror ". 

Thanks again for listening and tell your friends.

Announcements: Sonic Encounters Volume 03 Album Now Available and Season 04 is On the Way

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher (C)(P) 2021 Mark J. Mosher
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SO4-E02: Droid 164 Gets Distracted by a Wildflower

An ambient improv performed solely on the Deluge.

Credits: Composed, Performed, and Produced by Mark Mosher (C)(P) 2021 Mark J. Mosher
Cover: Mark Mosher
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SO4-E03: Approaching the Artifact

Synthesist, Electronic & Experimental Musician, Multimedia Performance Artist | Founder of the Rocky Mountain Synthesizer Meet and Synth Patrol

Mark Mosher Music

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