August 19, 2021. Experimentation with the Microcosm Looper.

Smeerenburg

"I had this tape loop of me pluckin' on that 'lectric git-tar you gave me. One day, I accidentally put the loop on the machine wrongside-out, so's the backside of the tape was runnin' cross the heads. It still played, but they wudn't no treble...it'as all garbled, like it was under water or somethin'. I wound up kinda likin' it, 'specially when I run it through the Echoplex an' put a couple other sounds with it."*

Bayou Bartholomew is the longest bayou in the world, winding a convoluted course from Pine Bluff, Arkansas, across the Delta flatlands until it meets the Ouachita River near Sterlington, Louisiana. (I remember, as a boy, tracing it on a map and wondering, "How could a bayou be that long? Don't they have to call it a river?" Only recently did I learn of its status as the longest of them all.) It was a favorite hunting and fishing area for Uncle Hassell and friends.

Photo: Hassell and Til (Henry W. Tilbury, Sr.) fishing near the mouth of Bayou Bartholomew, 1960s--from the Hanklebury archives

*Uncle Hassell, taped interview with HT, May, 1989

Bayou Bartholomew

Sometimes you set up parameters to explore, plug in, and see what happens. Sometimes it feels pretty good, and it goes places that surprise you.

This piece is an improvisation for electric autoharp and two square-wave-modulated delays in my digital audio workstation (Presonus Studio One). Long ago, I was inspired by the recordings of guitarist Henry Kaiser, who used this technique extensively and wrote about it in Guitar Player magazine. I was a recording engineer at the time and had access to studios equipped some of the very expensive gear that would produce this effect, and I would often try it myself after work was over. It was a delightful thing to play with, and I missed having it available after I went on to "civilian" life. Fortunately, I've lived long enough to find I could re-create this effect on a DAW that cost me all of $50.

I won't go into a description of how square-wave modulation works...but here's Henry Kaiser explaining it pretty thoroughly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbJFlX_L6To&t=514s

Unexplored Corridors #1

This is a deep space track comprised of music created primarily on a modular synth setup.

- Adrift In A Sea Of Stars (final)

Due to overwhelming demand for more tracks featuring the wildly popular combo of gourd banjo and organ, I've added a keyboard track to this little improvisation from a couple years back. It will be one of the many diverse tracks on my album, "The Beast With Five Strings", coming soon to a Bandcamp near you.

Photo: On the Kansas River, September 2016

Pre - Dawn Preoccupations

A piece of music written for my wife on her recent birthday.

Photo courtesy of Rakicevic Nenad.

CA V041120a

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Located in the Midwestern region of the United States. I use this space as a Sound Journal for my frequent Electronic Improvisations and Sonic Meditations. Most moments are Live Improvisations recorded to a stereo track and on rare occasion, multi track experiments. I own many different electronic and acoustic instruments... however, my current set up utilizes solo, or together:  1980 Rhodes Suitcase, The Ciat Lonbarde  Cocoquantus, Ciat Lonbarde Sidrax , Chase Bliss Habit, Zoom MS70CDR, Ellitone E64, Soma Lyra-8, Critter & Guitari Organelle, the Elektron Digitone, the Teenage Engineering OP-1 and  the Hologram Microcosm.

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Todd Gerber

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