happy sunday, folks! i'm here to share my daily post of a DAW or tracker video of one of my songs + write some stuff about that song here on cohost! i hope you enjoy!!
<-- the previous day's song | the next day's song -->
today's song is: gnomids' endurance, the last track from my ambient glitch EP Elemental Chaos!
this one is pretty close to being my favorite, too, insofar as i'm particularly enamored with the vibes, the form/progression, and the thematic relation to the element of earth. the middle portion of the song has the closest thing to "a groove" on this entire album, thanks to the chunky bass guitar (which was a single improvised take!). in the future, this somewhat jazz-inflected style is something i want to explore more, probably with actual drumset parts (and probably with plenty of sample manipulation on them too). i'm sure there's some Naruyoshi Kikuchi and Masayasu Tzboguchi in there, avant-jazzers whose work i dig a lot.
i also love the intense, widely expressive lead that plays for the first 2:30 or so; it took especially well to being sliced up, and i think the transition into the section with the bass guitar is really powerful because of it. this album would definitely not exist without the Roli keyboard so shouts out to that little thing βοΈ
i tried to further integrate the "earth element" in my chopping process for this song; you can see there's sort of a physical element to the waveform slices in the video, large chunks taken out of several clips at once, which i would liken to earthquakes and chasms and sinkholes. (there is a case for the large strings of repetitive tiny clips in "undines' grace" being reminiscent of running water or rain, too...) it might've also been thematic to overlap them a bit (plate tectonics!) but that's especially chaotic on volume so i didn't go that route.
one thing i didn't talk about much yet with this album is the panning (a large part of the automation seen in all the videos); i definitely revel in making incredibly stereo-busy music already, but i tried to keep most parts moving in a direction, whether slowly or quickly, rather than staying still (my worst enemy). i like to alternate or slide panning around, especially during the glitched "sample retrigger" bits where ping-ponging is fun, but i also just pay attention to how many things are in a given area in stereo space at any given time, and try to balance that over time as things shift around.
also, moreso in this song than the others, i did a lot of duplication (or triplication) of few-second-long clips, panned them to either side, and tuned them up and down for a faux-chorusing effect. (sometimes i also reversed them, especially the piano takes well to that) i took it to a sort of extreme in the final section of this song by tuning some of the clips off by a quartertone (+/- 50 cents), so parts of this are kind of microtonal in how the samples relate to one another - just not within the individual clips.
i talked a lot this time, but i hope you enjoyed the writeup about this EP! it remains, and probably always will remain, one of my favorite works that i've ever made, and feels like a codified, cohesive statement of one of the coolest ways i've been making music the last 2.5 years or so. thanks for listening/reading/being cool!
