Five quiet songs and two loud ones
9 minutes of calm background-music echo shimmers and synth sparks from a modular rack*. The note patterns were composed in realtime on a Synthstrom Deluge, by alternately adjusting patterns on the grid view and playing notes in the isometric keyboard mode. The title identifies it as ambient but this is a highly structured piece with a distinct, compelling emotional arc. If this was made in the 90s we'd have called it "New Age".
* With some good stickers.
- "Rossum Panharmonium + Instruo Lubadh + Plaits + Rings", Sascha Neudeck
This is an intense, fascinating ambient journey through a series of sounds and textures, with sparky serrated-edge waves cycling in and out of your perception. Intermittent scrolling subtitles at the bottom of the video explain, in an unhelpfully high level of detail, how the modular patch driving the track was created.
Stereo or headphones recommended.
- "Jamuary 02 2022", Waveformer
A virtuoso synth performance, leading you through a series of sounds and moods. Recorded live on the standard low-end setup of a Microfreak and three separate echo pedals, it's dark and expressive. If this had been recorded in 1990 it would have been distributed accompanied by a video of a long CGI tunnel like at the end of "2001", or maybe a slowed-down VHS of a handcam walking unsteadily through some woods.
- "found a hatch", riueru
This one's simple but strange, a randomly lurching tourgroup of synth lines driven by a randomness source and an irrationally-phased LFO. It starts suddenly and cuts off suddenly and in between shows a thoughtful, incredibly human degree of subtlety and emotional variation. But there's no human in the loop. It's beautiful and a little unsettling. The YouTube summary explains the piece as:
opening into the green
the group can leave behind the collapsed construction
through this exit
- "live @ Red Ink, Providence 5/6/23", Cryptwarblr
If I told you to trust me— would you take my hand and take a step with me off the edge, into the abyss? This is what I now ask of you. This is a ten-minute performance with unseen electronics on a card table at a leftist community bookstore. The noises here alternate quiet and violence– sharp, intense, unpredictable. You are being stalked by a monster and its name is Cryptwarblr.
There is a structure to this, I think. There is a meaning in here somewhere. I cannot see it but I feel it.
⬇️ Click below for sinewaves and doom metal ⬇️
- "MESS MOOG SYSTEM 55 WAVEFORM", Christian Hogue
Five minutes of sinewaves composed on the legendary and extremely rare Moog 1973 modular analog system, attractively illustrated on an analog oscilloscope. Starts with a simple line of tones and evolves into menacing, increasingly overdriven multipart antiharmony. Makes a really intense mood. Warning, parts are a bit high pitched.
- "Not Surprised", Boris and Uniform
Normally I'd say much of why I like Boris is they deliver metal without falling into the kind of squawky scream vocals I don't personally favor. Here tho they collaborate with an American group to make exactly that sort of metal, and it really works. Herein the genre of death metal is slowed down, disassembled and rebuilt wrong in a splayed-out open-skeleton structure. It reminds me of Pink Lemonade. This really did it for me!