video: https://vimeo.com/ioflow/gloriousblue

live performance in one take. an ambient drone improvisation for modular synthesizer, monome, cassette tape, effects, and field recording. gentle music for winter weather.

it's been mostly cold and gray where i live; intermittent rain showers and chill winds. yet every now and then, the clouds vanish entirely, and the deepest, palest winter blue fills the heavens.

for this week's song, which includes disquiet junto project #0258 (http://disquiet.com/2016/12/08/junto-0258/) and weekly beats 2016 #49 (http://weeklybeats.com), i wanted to place all that loveliness into a song using a new workflow. i recorded four long improvisations on rhodes and juno 106 to cassette tape, each one mono track. the tape deck, a yamaha mt4x, got one channel of the mixer, and two more for the modular, one for melodic swells and one for the field recording of the rainstorm at home.

i played melodies on the monome grid, via earthsea (oscillator: mannequins mangrove into three sisters filter, then mutable instruments clouds), while also bringing the tape drone sequences in and out by sliding the faders in real time, playing it like an instrument. constantly shifting between the mt4x, modular, mixer, and effects pedals. yet there were some moments so surprisingly pretty that i had to keep still and let the waves wash over me, as i had not heard everything together before starting the live session.

a glorious blue between storms

IIKKI 003 : Lowlands. 
upcoming new album by Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer, which will go with the Ester Vonplon's fine art book photos, who traveled to Spitsbergen in the Arctic Ocean in summer 2016. 
the book and the vinyl will be released this summer,  each limited to 500 copies, between end of June / beginning of July 2017.

Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer - Migrations (Lowlands)

The first time I heard Emily Sprague’s music was on lines. Somebody posted a video of hers, 'Three Sisters + Harmonic Oscillator', that had captured their attention as a high watermark...and it’s easy to understand how. The straightforward and earnest exploration of a beautiful module, through a looped melody you could listen to for hours, seemed the work of a seasoned pro. Somebody else commented, revealing that the synthesist was Emily Sprague from the band Florist. While they brought up that Emily had just started working with modular synths in the last year, digging deeper revealed that the video was actually made in her second week.

Beyond the quality of her music, which has only swelled over the last year, what’s fascinating about Emily’s work is how public her process has been. While most whittle away for months, releasing new work only after long incubation, Emily seems to revel in sharing each step of her growth in realtime — a direct response to the trajectory of her own self-education.

If you’re new to modular synthesis, this is the episode for you. If you’re deeply settled, this is the episode for you. Emily has retained a beginner’s mind while leveraging her rich decade-long background as a musician, producer and engineer to create music that is playful and emotional, while remaining technically impressive.

As you’ll notice, there are more music breaks in this episode than previous ones — due to my own fandom and Emily’s generosity, you’re the first to hear the demos that will make up her much-anticipated modular album.

Beyond her talents, Emily is an insightful and passionate addition to the lines community and personally, I hope that her reflections help anyone who feels that their voice is un or under-represented in this field to join the conversation at llllllll.co

Emily Sprague: SOUND + PROCESS #8

Winner of the 20th Música Viva International Competition of Electroacoustic Composition (2019),
awarded by a jury composed of Gilles Gobeil (Canada), Trevor Wishart (United Kingdom) and Miguel Azguime (Portugal).

This piece explores the memory that sounds carry from the moment they were taped. In stitching together candid recordings made years apart, it attempts to conjure the relative events as well as to cast them in a sonic amulet.
The tension between the acoustic sources, the digital projections and their inmost content draw a network of remanences, a multiplex of signs. The work becomes a pool of possibles, never to be decoded but open for all to wander.

sutures

dn_xb

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