Day: February 14, 2019

Keep Min 2 Dot, "Wounded Golden Section"

Comments Off on Keep Min 2 Dot, "Wounded Golden Section"

wgs

A quick review of a Bandcamp LP, Wounded Golden Section by Keep Min 2 Dot.

The instrumentation is traditional but varied -- guitar, keyboard, reeds, bass, drums -- but doesn't follow roles assigned to the typical jazz combo.

WGS shares affinities with free jazz or RIO but exists in an ambiguous state of "might be studio/might be live performance." It doesn't sound overtracked and it's not evident if "the computer" or DAWs were employed at all. It feels very organic and live-improvisational.

Structure-wise, it's "full" in the sense of sonically and compositionally rich. Each song is a mesh or skein of granular moments -- like atoms -- consisting of a cluster of instruments, tunes, or rhythms.

Each atom has its own mood and set of musical associations, and feels as if it could be spun off into its own composition.

The overall mesh of the tune works like a complex abstract painting, with threads that could be pulled or followed.

All that said, it is not dense, sonic bombardment a la noise music but an "open weave" with overlapping moments flowing from one to the next.

The performances on all instruments are good-to-excellent, almost like samples of "great licks" since the quality or excellence is not in the service of any kind of traditional song structure or development.

In other words, enjoy that guitar chop because you probably won't be hearing it again. On to the next chop! (In a good way.)

"Premonition of Discord" - notes

Comments Off on "Premonition of Discord" - notes

Production notes for "Premonition of Discord," from the Terra Organization LP:

premonition_of_discord_650w

full size screenshot of Tracktion Waveform page

I had an idea of doing a noise piece but I can't seem to escape structure so call it rhythmic noise. This track started with a "master clip" of some NI Battery beats ("Messed Up Kit" from the early '00s) playing randomly in Tracktion's Multisampler plugin. Sounds from the clip were recorded "live" into the Doepfer A-112 8-bit sampler module (that is, by manually punching the "record" button) and played back with analog filtering (either manually or with a MIDI sequencer, I can't remember), for recording back into the DAW. This grungily resampled audio was then trimmed selectively to make loops. The loops (and additional sounds) were reorganized into this tune.
Tracks:
1. Recording (1) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips
2. Recording (2) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips
3.-12. Multisampler rack on "bus" track, with regular, that is, un-resampled, NI Battery hits (separated into zones in the sampler) assigned to their own submix tracks so they can be given different effects treatments. On Track 9, for example, automation curves control the reverb wet mix on a single hit, as it is being triggered by MIDI.
13. Multisampler kit plays a single sample, Scrape C4, from an E-Mu Modular soundfont file. An LFO Modifier inside the Multisampler, set to sample-and-hold, controls the filter cutoff as the sample loops continuously (triggered by a single depressed MIDI note).
14. Noise sampled from a noise musician.
15. Different noise sampled from the same musician. The noise snippets in Tracks 14 and 15 are looped so they become beats, each with their own time signatures independent of the project's time.
16. Recording (3) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips -- slightly more mangled at the modular stage.
17. Recording (4) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips.
18. Recording (5) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips. Some additional FX at the modular stage (reverb, compression) are incorporated into the audio in these clips.
19. Recording (6) of A-112 module, trimmed into new clips. These are the most musical of the A-112 clips.
20. Audio from Tracks 3.-12. is rendered and sliced into a new Multisampler kit, for variation in pitches of some of the drumhits.