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This is track 3 from my new release on the Vuzh Music netlabel, “The Quiet Sun”.
For more information, and to download and/or stream the album in its entirety for free, please visit http://vuzhmusic.com/releases/sun.html.
Game of Drones (Andrew Hannah and me) at The Zoloft. Photos by Lou Eastman.
Nothing profound, just an excerpt from an impromptu session at home, applying a series of effects to a chord from a Drone Lab and playing with control voltages. The effects all have LFOs, which are interconnected via a fairly complicated CV configuration.
The audio originates with the Drone Lab, then passes through a Gristleizer into a MuRF, the two outputs of which go to a ClusterFlux and a Phaser, each of which sends its own stereo signal to the mixer. The Ekhadl Moisturizer provides reverb and filter antics.
I’m not going to detail the control voltage signal flow, but it includes all of the above devices (including the Moisturizer, which also has an LFO) and a CP251 Control Processor. Only the Drone Lab was not involved in the CV circuit, because it doesn’t do that.
Recorded, as usual, from mixer directly to Zoom H4N. Edited only to establish a beginning. The ending was done in real time.
The image is called “HIT Isotropic Turbulence” by rreis on Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rreis/3903308301/) and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.
Last night (March 23, 2013) at 119 Gallery. Photo by Kathleen.
This piece starts with a bowed crystal bowl, the sound of which passes though a ring modulator, then a resonating flanger, then a resonating delay, then a delay in a long continuous loop. The sound is further processed by a reverb. Everything is analog except the the looping delay.
Throughout most of the piece, I take long, slow draws of the bow against the edge of the bowl, with several seconds between each stroke. As this is going on, I progressively modify the other devices to modify the sound in various ways. The general shape of the piece is to slowly lower in pitch as it grows spatially, and eventually to come back up. Perhaps something like a fainting spell and recovery in slow motion.
You can see the setup of the equipment (in my studio) here: http://daveseidel.tumblr.com/post/44468330521
Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pietro_Longhi_027.jpg (Public Domain).
This is an entry for this week’s Disquiet Junto project
The instructions were:
Step 1: Devise which three sine waves you will employ. They should be different from each other in some evident way.
Step 2: The track should open with just one of the sine waves.
Step 3: Add the second sine wave at 5 seconds.
Step 4: Add the third sine wave at 10 seconds.
Step 4: Only at 15 seconds should you begin to in any way manipulate any of the source waves.
I wrote a Csound program that generates three sine waves.
- The first tone is a 240Hz tone that sounds for the entire piece.
- The second tone is higher, starting at a ratio of 31/16 relative to the first tone (sharper than a major seventh, derived from the 31st harmonic).
- The third tone is lower, at a ratio of 16/31 relative to the first tone (the reciprocal of the second tone).
- After 15 seconds. the second tone starts gliding downwards in pitch until it reaches the ratio of 65/64 (flatter than a minor second, corresponding to the 65th harmonic).
- Also at 15 seconds, the third tone start gliding upward in pitch until it reaches the ratio of 64/65 (again, the reciprocal of the second tone).
The sound file is just the output of running the Csound program, with no other manipulation. I will be happy to send the Csound source code for this piece to anyone who would like a copy.
The image is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SierpinskiTriangle.PNG and is in the public domain.
More on this 60th Disquiet Junto project at:
http://disquiet.com/2013/03/07/disquiet0062-lifeofsine
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
Xfest 2013 at 119 Gallery, Lowell, MA. First set on Saturday night, Feb. 23, 2012.
Jack Wright: tenor and soprano sax; Jed Speare: laptop; Dave Seidel: electronics; Ben Wright: acoustic bass; Dave Miller: drums.
As is generally the rule for Xfest sets, this was an ensemble that had never played together before.
A 60Hz drone meditation, as usual recorded direct to Zoom H4N from the mixer, with no post-processing other than adding a fade-in at the “beginning”.
This piece is dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. I didn’t know Aaron, but I’d known about him for years and read many of his writings, and had great respect for his integrity and accomplishments
The basic drone was formed by a Moogerfooger FreqBox (oscillator output, no input) through a Moogerfooger Ring Modulator. The LFO from the Ring Mod was patched to the waveform control on the FreqBox.
This was routed through a Trogotronic Iron Hand controller into three separate streams: a Moogerfooger MuRF (center), a MoogerFooger ClusterFLux (left channel) and an Electro-Harmonix Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai (right channel). The omnipresent Ekdahl Moisturizer was in the effects loop.
The picture is from the field in front of my house in southern New Hampshire, taken about ten minutes after I recorded the piece. The original is on Flickr. This is what it’s been like here for the past couple of days, except at times the fog has been heavier.
An improvisation from about an hour ago. I wasn’t planning anything, just experimenting, but it eventually got to the point where it seemed appropriate to hit the record button and this is what ensued. Recorded off the mixer to Zoom H4N. The only edit was a fade-in at the beginning (once I figure out where the “beginning” was).
This was done with a single oscillator (the carrier output of a Moogerfooger Ring Modulator), going through the Repeater Noise Swash, which I somehow happened to catch in an unusually sedate mood. The signal is then routed through an effects loop consisting of an Ekdahl Moisturizer and a stereo Deluxe Memory Man with Hazarai. The DMM is in a pseudo-frippertonics mode with a three second delay.
That’s the audio portion, but there is also a fairly complex control voltage configuration going on involving a Moogerfooger CP-251 Control Processor, with three different LFOs (from the CP-251, Ring Mod, and Moisturizer) running at very slow rates and modulating each other as well as various aspects of the audio.
Image: “Nowhere in Spain” by swizzled on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.
This is actually a revision of an earlier piece called Palimpsest from Sublimation (now available as “pay what you will”, which can be nothing). For background, see the notes for the original release. This version retains the same basic structure, length, and tonality, but with a number of changes. I removed one note and added two others (the piece consists entirely of two three-note chords), changed the envelopes from linear to exponential, along with several other tweaks.
A significant change was to use a completely different kind of reverb. Palimpsest (and most of my other Csound/computer pieces) use an algorithm called “reverbsc”. Here I decided to try convolution. The impulse response I used is taken from York Minster, a major gothic cathedral in England, and comes from the excellent Openair project. As such it is attributed to www.openair.org, Audio Lab, University of York. Openair makes all of its impulse responses available under Creative Commons.
Despite all the changes, the piece is made from very simple ingredients. It is constructed from nothing but sine waves, albeit a very large number of them (typically 150-200 at any given point once it gets going). There is no filtering or any other processing, no effects other than the convolution reverb.
The image is “Transpiration” by Brian Vallelunga on Flickr and is licensed under Creative Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/citezein/2389221060/.
