tom moody

"Escape from Spring" [4.1 MB .mp3]

A two minute post-chiptunes opera inspired by Poulenc.
Live MIDI performance by Travis Hallenbeck cut up, reassembled and rhythmically augmented by Tom Moody.
(A longer version was posted previously as "H.M.M.M. 2")

Libretto:

In a pastoral landscape in rural Virginia birds and crickets frolic among some old rusted trucks.
Enid, a hamadryad, listens from inside a majestic oak.
Some goths on mopeds enter the clearing to drink absynthe while sitting on the trucks.
Enid cries out from inside her tree, wishing to join them.
The absynthe opens the goths' frontal lobes so they can hear her and summon her from the tree.
Enid, personified as a teenage girl, jumps on the back of a moped and rides into the city with the goths.
Cruising through the night streets her song becomes an atonal wail of mingled pleasure and pain.
She yearns for her tree but prefers the speed, artificiality, and rootlessness of city life. The song ends with her riding the subway with her boyfriend, who drives a front end loader and still occasionally goes out to the Virginia woods for medieval role playing.

"RMV Study No. 3" [6.9 MB .mp3]

mildly spooky Latin robo-percussion.
all done with the Linplug RMV soft-sampler except the pitched bass tones, which are analog.
The djembe with the long pingpong delay (in the second half) gets me kind of excited.
Will probably add some e-piano parts to this, this is all-percussion.

"Metro Blorp 2" [2.3 MB .mp3]

Some electro drum loops run through a software delay and multi-tracked; the synth on top of them is the Reaktor 3X. Was inspired on the squiggly synth filtering by the work of Lory D, some of whose tracks I've recently found, after listening to one ("Bitter End 1," misnamed as Synapse's "Stealing Science" on Tony Thorpe's Electric Kingdom compilation) about a thousand times. He alters more settings in real time, but I've got several tunes going at once by the end.

A tune of mine ("Yog 2012") is used in a YouTube-documented sculpture work by Aron Namenwirth, titled I Can Hear You. An abandoned speaker is filled with soil, which is used to grow an oak tree seedling. The music emanates from the "tweeter" while the tree occupies the slot for the former "woofer."
Namenwirth is using cast-off furniture and other artifacts as soil cases for growing trees--in this case with a literal audio component. Back in the '70s there was much discussion and media buzz about talking to plants and playing music for them. That's somewhere in the cultural background of this electro-eco-botanical artwork. I like the lumpenfuturistic element--it works as an abject counterpoint to all the buff new media pieces that try to incorporate growing things, while still being straightforward in its urban environmentalism (Namenwirth plans to eventually plant the trees and let the casings rot in the ground).

"Fusion Disassembly" [3.9 MB .mp3]

Tunes were added to "Audrey (Royal Beats 2)." Much time spent EQing and compressing and rearranging to get this--it's about 10 tracks total, including three drum tracks, three basses, and two e-pianos.
Had in mind a kind of deliberately robotic, or MIDI-oid, fusion jazz, a collection of parts that come together as counterpoint elements as the song progresses. (But still feels "perky" and moves along, and with a fuller sound than old school "homepage MIDI.") So the tunes are kind of placeholders, that I start liking more towards the end of the song. (And it's only two minutes.) No idea if any of this communicates in the finished piece, or why anyone would especially want to do this.

"Audrey (Royal Beats 2)" [3.3 MB .mp3]

Another iteration of this Vermona drum machine beat series I've been working on. The device has three drums that can be kicks or toms depending on the tuning and the attack/decay envelope. Here I tuned them to different pitches and used them to play reductive melodies. Why not just use a synth? These toms sound really good to me, and filtering them makes them even more sensuous.

The bass is a long, distorted note recorded earlier on one of the toms, then given different pitches after the fact, using a software "tune" plug in. And am continuing to explore compression plugins to punch up some of the sounds.

This could be longer than two minutes--am thinking of ways to add to it. Also thinking about making the tom "solo" in the middle a bit less random. [Update: Changed a few notes in the "solo" and reposted the song.]

"Fuchsia Refraction" [3.1 MB .mp3]

Was admiring a minimal techno piece by Alessandro Crimi posted on Disquiet. I seem to be constitutionally incapable of doing anything like Crimi's--sexy, ponderous, deep, long. Every time I try, something silly happens like the slightly out of tune self-oscillating filter in this one. Then all the points seem to be made and the piece ends at 1:39.

"Audrey the King" [3.7 MB .mp3]

Fished this electric piano chord sample out of the bowels of a Reaktor sample map about five years ago--it's intended to be "mangled," as the beatmongers love to say, but I unmangled it.

It was added to the minimal beats two posts back, necessitating adding tons of other stuff to solve the resulting compositional Rubik's cube (it's not that complicated a song but the writing was slow, e.g. the bass/piano counterpoint at the end).

Earlier "the sample" was used in a tune I've been continuously massaging; see "Audrey Zapp (Light Industrial Remix)." It's a very "happy" sample.

"Caesura Salad" [3.5 MB .mp3]

Another on the "modular" rhythm synth. See previous post--same methodology. Some weird commercial electro beat samples were added to one of the "stanzas." The line breaks of the various stanzas are actually not caesuras but the pun had to be used.

"Audrey the King (Beats)" [3.5 MB .mp3]

Back to my "modular" rhythm synth. Decided just to record the Vermona drum machine with almost no effects at the recording stage (just some filtering on the bass). Then light use of a compressor plugin on the recorded file to make those kick/toms more punchy. Got this bare bones piece before filling it up with piano and such for "Audrey the King."