music - tm

"Phlogiston Phloat"

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"Phlogiston Phloat" [mp3 removed]

Have been fooling around with Reaktor effects plug-ins and softsynths. (Reaktor is like Max/MSP in that you can design your own synths but I've done very little of that--the pre-built ones alone are like working complex puzzles, at least if you want to understand how they function and make songs that are intuitively "yours.") In this song the drums have been treated with the Cyan and Fusion Reflections plugs, which fattened up a standard 808 loop in different ways. Through computer speakers you can't hear the bass at all but at normal volume with a decent home stereo the drums dominate. The pretty chord pad is a preset from the Akkord synth. The lead synth riffs are non-Reaktor softsynths so this isn't a total product endorsement. Am talking about mostly "formal" issues here because it's harder to nail the content, even if I wanted to--it's mostly about conflicting moods. Phlogiston was the element that everybody thought caused fires before the discovery of oxygen and its combustible properties. At the rate we're going these creationist f*cks will have us all believing in it again.

"Cribtonomicon"

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"Cribtonomicon" [mp3 removed]

One way to approach softsynth presets is like a sculptor hacking away at marble--you go into the dense mass of sound representing the overkill of the designer showing everything the synth can do and and you carve away until you get something minimal that you can actually hear. In this case the instrument was the Reaktor instrument "Krypt." The presets of treated beat sequences were just too dense, cacophonous, and ultimately inert, to this ear anyway. So the bpm was slowed down to 80, step patterns shortened from 64 to 16, and drum voices gradually removed until only a few remained, still laced with the instrument's signature effects (in this case granularized samples randomized in various ways). Dorky, rockin' synth parts from the Electribe Amkii groovebox were then dubbed in to disrupt any lingering artiness.

"Nebbishes"

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"Nebbishes" [1.6 MB .mp3]

Another short song using the Electribe AmkII and RmkII midi'd together. I thought about demo-ing these next few tunes at the Blip Festival open microphone event but felt that I used too many bits. I don't want to make the folks making do with less feel bad.