Hello All,
I’m happy to tell you all that I’ve got another album out called divide, conquer. It is made as a partner to another collection of music that I’ve also released today: a collection of piano pieces that you can read about here. Both albums start from the same minimalist philosophies, but take them in opposite directions: Soliloquy with the focus on the gentle sounds of tapes and piano, divide, conquer oriented around electronic timbres generated in VCV rack and arranged in Audacity. There are 3 tracks on this album, each occupying a slightly different timbral space, but all centred around the juxtaposition of human and machine, an often interesting concept especially in electronic music.
advance is the first track and is based around 3 phrase seq 16 sequences running in tandem. They are all clocked with the same pulse, but each have different sequences running. The top one is the bass sequence, and keeps a steady 8 bar loop going. The other two weave and interplay over the top of this, constantly shifting both of their own generative accord, but also due to live tweaking and suggested notes from the twelve key controllers controlled by human hands.
attack is controlled entirely from human input - there is no clock, but instead a big button used to drive 3 sequences in parallel. 1 bass, 2 melodic, and 1 detuned oscillator are controlled by these sequences, and are then processed through effects, both human and machine modulated.
retreat is built upon a patch and idea from @martinl1968 entitled “Plateau of Tranquility”, and used with his permission. The original can be found here. I took this patch and edited it somewhat to fit my purposes. Then over a recording of this generative soundbed, I spliced a recording of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech. These are words that speak deeply to me, particularly at this current time, and they fit well with the background.
In my eyes all 3 of these pieces show the connection between human and machine well, but each in their own way: advance with its constant pulse and sequential patterns, but interaction with and development from the operator; attack with its human dependable clocking and note changes, but machine modulated effects and parameters; retreat with its no input generative background, but labour intensive spliced speech over the top. This is an idea that greatly fascinates me, and I look forward to pursuing it further in the future.
If anyone wants any more information on the patches, they’ll eventually be up on patchstorage, but feel free to ask here too.
Thanks for reading,
Jim
