hvb

someone somewhere else's something

chiptunes

glitchscapes

video game music

digital fusion


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iiiit's time for your daily song post! in case you didn't know already, i'm posting one song per day on youtube and then writing a little bit about the song, right here on this very website! hopefully you think that's cool and check them out sometimes! because i'm going to keep doing this, even if just for myself, but comments and questions and so on are welcome~

<-- the previous day's song | the next day's song -->

today's song is: salamanders' radiance, the second track from my ambient glitch EP Elemental Chaos

this one's probably my favorite out of all four tracks; i felt like i got more of a progression of mood over the course of the song, and in particular i was happy with the build into pure fiery, blazing chaos essence. it also took the longest by a pretty wide margin... probably the most ambitious of the bunch. not to pat myself on the back too hard or anything but i really like this one.

i said yesterday i'd talk more about the actual construction of these songs. as mentioned before, the "samples" are all recordings from either my Roli MPE keyboard, my Zoom field recorder or the Pianoteq VST. (this track specifically also includes some percussion recorded from SampleTank, but it's the only exception) but most of the time spent was on the arrangement thereof, rather than the recording.

principally my main strategy for this kind of music is to slice the heck out of the waveforms and build in my own stutters/repeats/glitches/reverses/etc. this should be quite visible in the videos! part of this is on a macro level, where there's certain segments of audio i want to be matched up together, so i need to cut it somewhere to make space. but once things are roughly in place globally, i also enjoy cutting out chunks of "cool parts" to repeat, pan around, detune, add effects to, and so on. for field recordings this usually just means an interesting little part of the audio (the crackles of the fire in this case, birdsong in the previous case). for the pitched instruments, i especially like to add flavor where there's a held note... so i'll cut out most of the held pitch and replace it with stutters or reverse the attack+tail or something. sometimes it's just a cool flourish that i like to repeat a few times before moving on (as in some of the piano parts in "sylphids' majesty"). i'm also not afraid to just delete parts of the recording entirely.

honestly, i really like doing this stuff by hand; i enjoy the capabilities of VSTs like Digitalis for this (highly recommended btw) but a large part of the fun, for me, is figuring out what to cut up where and how. ultimately the goal is to create a surreal, tempestuous atmosphere out of pretty recordings; and to make something unnatural and otherworldly out of the natural. glitched out piano and field recordings accomplish this nicely for me. it's like the feeling of the world breaking down around you.


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in reply to @hvb's post:

This is so great. As someone who knows some of the philosophical and spiritual lore behind the four elements and such it would give me great comfort to be a fire-proof salamander in the heat-wave that may come. Contending forces cause friction and chaos and I can hear it in the breakdown of l as the fire burns larger through the song ;)

In other words I liked it so I bought your album, conceptually you're 100% on the money with your ancient-world physics in this song so I'd like to hear the rest.