Watch the accompanying video: https://youtu.be/qrWdyiw30bk

broken guitar —
in its hollow body
a whisper of C
(from the 2025 British Haiku Society Members’ Anthology)

A haiku, a generative patch, and a robot’s dream of music.
This piece begins with an improvised out-of-tune acoustic guitar recording — the same Atelier structure as the earlier music box patch, reshaped into something moody and oddly atmospheric.

The visuals? A robot trying (and failing beautifully) to play guitar — an AI imagining itself as musician, all bendy fingers and impossible strings. A perfect mirror for what generative sound really is: identity blinking between intention and accident.

🎶 built in GRM Tools Atelier
🎥 visuals generated + reinterpreted
📖 haiku by Darren Bourne (halF unusuaL)

✨ perhaps failure is the most honest play

visuals (YouTube)

halF whispereD

This turned out a bit more Hallowe'en than I was expecting, but given the date, maybe that's OK 😁💀🎃

an autumn nightfall
the skeleton of a huge fish
drawn back by the sea.

Saitō Sanki (1900 – 1962) was a dentist who discovered his passion for haiku poetry in his mid-thirties, when his colleagues at the hospital in Soto Kanda convinced him to write a haiku for a collection. Later, he became one of the most important exponents of wartime haiku: he was imprisoned in 1940 during the government’s World War II persecution of controversial artists, and was officially forbidden to write until the end of the war.

haiku by Saitō Sanki: https://www.littermagazine.com/2023/07/review-sanki-saito-selected-haiku.html

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

more halF unusuaL

halF skeletoN [naviarhaiku617]

I LOVE creaky floorboards. ❤️ Always have. They’re the little confessions the world doesn’t know it’s making. How could it?

This particular set — oh, these sonic beauties — were discovered in a small museum in Lille, France. A place so very quiet you could almost hear the air move somehow. The curator said the building used to be a tailor’s shop. But the neighbours reckoned it had been an intelligence post during the war; the kind of place where secrets secreted themselves into the grain of the wood.

So I waited until closing time. Set up my recorder. And walked. Slowly.

Every step had its own personality — one a whisper, one a sigh, one a shriek like a door … perhaps remembering something it shouldn’t. Somewhere between the third and fourth creak, though, the air changed and tilted weirdly. You know that cold, coiled feeling — when you’re not sure if you’ve just been noticed by someone? But I was alone ... I WAS alone.

I kept recording.

Later, when I played the sounds back, there it was: a super faint shuffle beneath and between the creaks. A pause. Then two extra footsteps … that weren’t mine. Perfect rhythm. Perfect distance. Like a partner in a dance waiting years for the next cue, which had now arrived, years later.

So I built the track around that. A haunted duet between spy and spectre, each trying to decode the other’s silence.

Enjoy … if you dare. 🎃😈

More on the 722nd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Spook Street — The Assignment: The Assignment: Make music for a haunted spy film — at https://disquiet.com/0722/.

halF spooK [disquiet0722]

Nearly 5 years ago, I uploaded a track called halF nutS ... https://soundcloud.com/half-unusual/half-nuts ... Who'd have thought I'd be going nuts again now! 😁

This is another GRM Tools Atelier noise experiment ... and you can see the accompanying visuals (as well as the original nuts recorded for mangling) on the halF unusuaL YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/At3lfc1nK6M

Oh, and you can see me turn into a sock puppet ... 😜 Weresock transformation around about 1:30 ... 🤫

halF nutS 2

Long time listeners may remember this little snippet of Birmingham market ambience used before for the Naviar Haiku Challenge number 480: https://soundcloud.com/half-unusual/half-heavenly-naviarhaiku480?si=b07fd7c2edbd4e95912344b2d2dc119e&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing ... That's more than two years ago ... but I still enjoy what it evokes in me ❤️

the harp player
moves under cover
market day

kjmunro cultivates poetry on the traditional territories of the Kwanlin Dün First Nation & the Ta'an Kwäch'än Council in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, Canada. She founded & facilitates ‘solstice haiku', a monthly haiku discussion group in Whitehorse, & manages a weekly blog feature for The Haiku Foundation called Haiku Dialogue. She is the recipient of the 2023 Borealis Prize – The Commissioner of Yukon Award for Literary Contribution, her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, & her debut poetry collection is contractions (Red Moon Press, 2019).

haiku by kjmunro: https://kjmunro1560.wordpress.com

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

halF marketeD [naviarhaiku618]

The brief for this week’s Disquiet Junto challenge noted how the singing of ‘Happy Birthday’ often falls apart around the name stage … This idea of musical collapse immediately made me think of Anglican church services, when the organ - along with those who are confident of the hymn being sung - sometimes falls into desperately trying to pull everyone along, never far from falling apart. In this piece, a recording I made of a service I attended a while back (which has its own backstory) becomes the material for electronic mangling and rhythmic snipping for my take on the idea of repeated collapse. It’s VERY far from being in the same league, but parts of the result remind me a little of Jonathan Harvey’s extraordinary Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) - one of my all-time favourite electroacoustic masterpieces ... 


More on the 723rd weekly Disquiet Junto project, Do the Collapse — The Assignment: Make music that falls apart repeatedly — at https://disquiet.com/0723/.

halF collapsE [disquiet0723]

🎉 Ten years of halF unusuaL on YouTube! Here's a soundtrack for your next birthday party! 😁 Check out the visuals: https://youtu.be/clpyDqbWqM8

From the first visual experiments and glitch loops to hand puppets (real and imagined), music boxes, and all kinds of sonic oddities — the halF unusuaL YouTube channel has become the visual twin to halF unusuaL’s sonic world, rooted here on SoundCloud.

To celebrate, here’s a birthday tune like no other:
🎵 a real music box plays “Happy Birthday” — wound and fed on-screen — while a well-meaning sock puppet battles with birthday candles in true unusuaL fashion.

Created using VideoSync 2 this piece marks a decade of curiosity, rhythm, and the joy of not quite knowing what will happen next.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s watched, listened, commented, or stumbled into this strange corner of the internet over the years.
Here’s to the next 10 … and to whatever weirdness lights up along the way. 🧦✨

📺 Subscribe: https://youtube.com/@halFunusuaL

halF BirthdaY! 🎂

The third GRM Tools Atelier workshop is now available on the halF unusuaL YouTube channel. This is the audio-only final piece, to simply enjoy sonically, with no distraction. 15 whole minutes of audial intrigue ... I would normally edit a track like this down, but it might be good to hear the whole thing as a companion piece for the video.

If you'd like to see the video and hear me explain how it all comes together, then you can watch at xxx

The video explains how halF weT was formed from some samples of my rainy day in Nottingham, the amazing new GRM Tools Atelier and the older suite of plugins from GRM Tools - first released in 1992! - a fusion of old, new and wet! 😁😜 Enjoy! 😊

https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/grm-past-present-and-future-experimental-music/

halF weT

almost black
deepening purple
ripe grapes

Regarded as the father of contemporary haiku, Masaoka Shiki was a poet and literary critic during the Meiji period Japan.

He advocated realistic observation by “sketching” (shasei) poems and going out into nature with notebooks, thus abandoning the traditional subjects of haiku of the time. His advice for an aspiring poet was, “Use both imaginary pictures and real ones, but prefer the real ones.”

Haiku by Masaoka Shiki: https://mypoeticside.com/poets/masaoka-shiki-poems

To find out more and participate, visit https://www.naviarrecords.com/haiku-music-challenge/

halF deepeninG [naviarhaiku619]

I’ve been meaning for ages now to make a track using only one single suite of plugins … and this week’s Disquiet Junto brief has finally inspired me into action! ALL of the sounds you hear in this track are courtesy of wonderful Sinevibes plugins, and it’s been really fun to explore more of what these genius little plugins can bring … with plenty more exploration to be had! @sinevibes

This track uses Torsion as the main synth source, with Diffusion also providing sounds from its wave shape modelling synth engine. As you can hear, I’ve gone slightly mad on the effects front! I’ve made use of Sinevibes’ Emission, Hexonator, Inertia, Luminance, Multitude, Cluster, Drift, Droplet, Octagon, Array, Zap, Albedo, Atom, and Dispersion …!

Enjoy! 😁🤗 It's been enjoyable, and there could easily have been a 20 minute version of this! 😂

More on the 724th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Work It — The Assignment: The year’s almost over. Do that thing you’ve been meaning to do — at https://disquiet.com/0724/.

halF vibE [disquiet0724]

Welcome tσ th!s εvσlving space … inspired by thε playful sp!rit of hai (meaning “fun” or unμsuΔl, like in haiku) …

I dig around thε edges t0 uneΔrth non-mμ§ic musics — sliding into nσ!§ε, glitch, chΔnce, Δ$MR, and σther soundwσrlds that feel oddly familiar in their oddity …

✨👂 L!§†εn cΔrεfu!l¥ … 👀 εxplσrε dεεpl¥ … 🎵💫

And for the full hΔlF unμ§uaL trεΔ†ment for your eyes Δs well as your εars, check σut the Yσutubε channel… ░▒▓█ ᵒ(≧▽≦)ᵒ ░▒▓█▒░

Thanks f0r joining thε journey! Your support kεeps this all afloat — HUGΣLY Δpprec!Δted 🙏🥰

(o≧▽≦)o ♪ ♪ ░░▒▓█▒░▒▒░▒▓█

New tracks tagged #unusualaural