In the 90s, along with many of my friends, I got really into 70s soul music. It was everywhere. On a trip to the wintry student town of Dunedin I picked up a soundtrack CD for a movie I’ve still never seen, just based on the songs on it. I rightly picked it was a super cheap way of getting many absolutely cracking tunes. This song opened that album and is still one of my favourite Sly Stone songs:
From there I remember living and breathing the chunky hits collection Anthology, and only much later bothering to check out the critical faves There’s A Riot Going On and Fresh.
What I was into back then (or what I’m going to unreliably reimagine 30 years on!) was how those recordings sounded so, well, fresh, because of the murky, ramshackle sound world on them. It was something they had in common with that other ubiquitous 90s alt obsession, the original Jamaican dub records. Big grooves, but sometimes often kind of sparse or weirdly mixed elements sitting on top and almost subliminal, often noisy layers lurking far in the back. Home organ drum machines and fx didn’t hurt.
Why I guess it still sounded so fresh was that it had the same kind of quality that was showing up in hip-hop and, yep, trip-hop records where producers were picking out and highlighting incidental and/or unintended sounds from records and making music where this was part of great grooves.
In these 90s producers’ efforts this was intentional, while I believe now a lot of the quality of these Stone records is due to pushing recording tech beyond what it could handle. But my point is the result was similar.
I also remember isolating and sampling various drum breaks from songs off Anthology that I spotted as already in use in hip-hop. I remember sampling only one channel of a stereo mix to try and cut down on the bleed of other elements in the mix, but still hearing some stray stuff in there besides drums, and eventually settling on the idea that that actually added character.
If you listen to the above or “Family Affair” the rhythm section is huge (and sounds great) and there’s immediately far away and off-kilter sounding instrumentation lurking in the mix. It’s noisy but never in an aggro way, just sort of scuffed and, I dunno, wooly? Anyway, this is definitely a thing I still really love. I still chase that kind of murky plus groove-heavy combo today – perhaps now leaning more into the murk in my own music, but still both in my listening habits for sure.
Back then I knew bugger all about the breadth of what Sly Stone got up to musically. I definitely didn’t know anything about his production credits for 60s San Francisco rock bands or any of that. I’ve got no reason to lay out what you can read anywhere about him, but just wanted to capture some of my experience with his music.
While I am here I will link to a great article by Jill Mapes reflecting on who gets the luxury of sanitising their own legacy, with reference to Questlove’s doco about Stone.
I’ve always found the usual words for describing someone who makes electronic music a bit messy. Thought I might capture some thoughts about that. Ultimately none of this ought to matter, but also we do need to talk and write about things, so…
Words like “writer”, “composer” and of course “producer” come along all the time and they always feel like only part of the picture to me. When you’re sitting in front of a computer or whatever electronic kit, you’re more literally making stuff than any of those words suggests.
“Composer” and “producer” also each have negative connotations for some people. A composer might be pretentious, stuffy or whatever. A producer might be knocking out functional, soulless dreck. A slave to a different kind of machine to the one in front of them, man. Mixed up in there are expectations about only making certain kinds of music. Almost mutually exclusive, where composers do arty stuff, producers make beats?
And then there’s “musician”, which I’m sure etymologically just means someone who makes music, but the usual use is a performer, contrasted with a composer and/or producer. I’m not so dumb as to think you can’t use a word in more than one way, but those connotations of playing something are pretty strong for me. There’s not much performing involved when I make music.
So, something broader?
Of course “artist” is now like the default tag for who makes the music: any music-related database or app would default to this. But there are multiple cases where it’s not the first thing I’d reach for. There’s some mucky stuff about attitudes towards “art” in here, which I won’t unpack now!
I settled on talking about “music makers” when doing the IA for my site Ambient NZ, and I really like it as a very prosaic and inclusive way of talking about electronic music makers in particular. Since then I’ve used the term generally, as well as just music making for the activity, and it feels easy.
Thinking about different strands of what gets called “ambient”, for example, you might have someone strumming a guitar and fiddling with pedals, someone manipulating other sound sources with other more esoteric boxes, someone editing audio on a computer screen… and maybe you might think of them as musician, musician or producer (?) and the last one more definitely a producer? I dunno. But the super basic “music maker” is incontrovertible and free of baggage: are they making music? Yes, yes they are.
Lucky last, #10 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
The name of this track is after a Cat and Girl comic and might be considered political.
It’s all one cheeky recording of a band warming up
(Almost.)
I hear and think of this track as being quite distinct from the rest of the album, but a nice way to wrap it up. It does just sound different to me, but I also know how I made it and just how different that was to what I’ve written about over the last ten weeks.
I live near a place where the local city council puts on outdoor concerts in summer. So, January 2024 I went outside with my little digital recorder, when I could hear a band warming up, got a bit nearer, and recorded for a few minutes. It was an incredibly noisy recording with a main road in between my microphones and the band’s PA.
I went back home, exported the audio to my computer, and wrote this entire track straight away in one evening. It broke a dry spell for me and felt really good.
First thing I chopped out of the recording was a flute (or maybe a keyboard that sounds like one).
Second was someone playing I’m guessing congas.
The only sounds in the finished track that are not from those two sources are a shimmery organ sound and a very subby synth bass note, which you might hear on headphones or good speakers slowly fading in under the organ sound here.
Two flute drones
The track starts with a very slowed and pitched down loop made from a smeared version of the flutes. It loops every 12 bars. Slowly a version that’s up an octave and moving twice as fast fades in, and then the lower version begins to fade. This happens over a long time: the higher part is at its full volume half way through this file.
I have no memory of what I did to make these loops.
From a bit of version history archaeology, I think I:
took the original flute sound, presumably EQed a lot to remove a bunch of noise,
made a second version, pitched up a fourth.
played both versions into a huge long echo chamber (Bitwig’s Delay+ with plenty of diffusion turned up),
recorded just the echoes, none of the original signal, and
made a loop from an even number of echoes.
Reversed flute phase
This sound also comes in right near the start and sticks around for most of the track.
I took the original flute sound, reversed it, and panned it hard left. I took a copy of that and panned it hard right. I changed the loop lengths so neither one is the length of a bar according to the master track, and the right side is 1/16th beat shorter than the left.
OK, it’s no kind of party at all, but to round out the track I looped two bars of the person playing percussion. The passing car at its loudest at the start of the loop provides a kind of punctuation, like the splashiest splashy cymbal.
The pitched down flute sample plays once and echoes away as the bongos wrap up, with some final echoes following after the cold cut ending on the percussion. I remember wanting that cold cut, an unnatural, abrupt close in a very mellow setting. Until writing these posts I hadn’t thought about how I like to very quietly make sure there’s at least some kind of friction in my music!
And that’s it, ten weeks of blogging done! I’d better get back to writing some more music.
Coming near the end of the album, I find it hard not to connect this back to other tricks and sounds I’ve already covered.
The structure: the way this track builds from something slippy and hard to pin down into a looping, more grounded thing reminds me of how ‘Data, Roaming‘ works. Even a bit of a similar vibe with a percussion part that sounds like knocking on wood.
Plucked strings: those guitar harmonics are the same software instrument I used on ‘Receding Airline‘, and if you count ukulele in the mix this is the fourth track in a row with plucked or strummed string sounds. For me it’s the signature of the second side of the tape.
I pair this track with ‘Trellis‘ in my head and deliberately put them at the same position on sides 1 and 2 of the tape, from memory. It’s about the reversed sounds and spaced out synth loops, something seems similar tonally to me. Also maybe because I know how I made both tracks and they both involved writing stuff, exporting it, and a kind of self remixing…
Beginning in reverse
When I talked to Tony Stamp on RNZ National I told him this track started with the big plonk sound, which I’ll cover next, and I spent most of my time talking about that.
Maybe so, but today my memory is I began by writing a bunch of stuff that ends up reversed in the final track.
I think this might be one where I had two track ideas on the go – the plonk and this stuff – and I combined them fairly early on to make one track.
So. I’m a big fan of reversed sounds, that cliche shortcut to psychedelia. I really do just find there to be something almost always trippy about them. Sometimes I rewrite melodies in reverse, so that I can then record them and reverse the recording. Sometimes I do this with chord progressions. And sometimes with the structure of whole tracks. Like if I know I want some sound to slowly fade in I figure out a structure where it slowly fades out, export the results as an audio file, and then reverse the whole thing. This is one of those.
A chunk of the reversed stuff you hear in the final:
What it sounds like before it’s reversed:
Damn, there’s some nice bits in here… I might need to revisit the sounds going forwards and see if I can do something else with them.
The big plonk
Nope, no better name for it, sorry. This sound:
It’s a stack of eight possible instruments, mostly a mix of short synth sounds and tuned percussion like marimbas and xylophones. I throw a chord at it, with some randomisation of when the notes play (more note fx as discussed re: ‘Receding Airline’), and every note jumps about pseudo-randomly between the possible instruments. There is something happening in those fx that effectively alternates between two chords, but a lot of the variation is about which instruments the notes get sent to.
This might be my final example of what I mean by “pseudo-randomly” for this series of blog posts. The selection of possible instruments is not actually random, they’re just selected in such a way a listener would never figure it out. Why not really random? First, so it plays back the same way each time while I’m writing it, but second so I can tweak which instruments get selected more often.
So, technically, the trusty Instrument Selector (Bitwig is good at prosaic names!) is cycling through the eight instrument slots using a Steps modulator, this series of blue bars in the image below.
The also prosaically named Steps moves through, wellll, steps as the track plays, and in this situation each step selects a different instrument slot from the list alongside. When we get to a step with no blue bar, it’ll send a note to the first instrument. When we get to a step with a full blue bar, it’ll send a note to the last instrument, the eighth slot. When the bar is halfway up it probably picks the fifth instrument out of eight. And so on.
I’m sending a five-note chord into this Instrument Selector, and each time a note plays, the Steps advances one step on. So each time a jumbled, strummed chord plays, we advance five steps. At the next chord we pick up wherever we stopped in this kind of game of musical chairs. To add to the already impenetrable unpredictability, when the track reaches step 23, the sequence reverses. If you were counting along, you’d go “… 21, 22, 23, 23, 22, 21, …” at one end, then once you get back to the start, “… 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3 …” and so on.
After all of that, the array of instruments all runs into a big old echo, which reverses the notes sometimes and also has that nice sea sick wobble to the pitch. Techies, that’s Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro, and another preset from emptyvessel’s pack of presets.
Outro rhythm section
I’ve kind of run out of steam to write about this, if I’m going to be honest, but we have a mix of drum sounds and repeated short synth notes that have quite a percussive feel. The Visco sample-modelling drum machine I mentioned re: ‘Ashcan Edition‘ shows up here doing most of the work. Not that much more to say!
#8 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
It’s kind of hilarious to me that this is the fastest track on the album at a breakneck pace of 103 bpm.
A new name for “glitch”?
So, I had a moment staring at my phone where I thought the phrase “data roaming”, read out of context, could be read like noun + adjective…
There’s a person standing nearby.
Can you smell those cats yawning?
I can hear some data roaming between my speakers.
This led to me thinking of it as a way more fun way to label glitch or computer music or experimental electronic music. And once I’d latched on to this idea this particular track seemed a good fit, with its various crackly textures and lurching rhythmic stuff, especially at the start.
I chucked a comma in the title because I thought otherwise no one would give ‘Data Roaming’ a second thought.
The main, stumbling synth stuff
This is where the track began.
I’m sampling myself here and end up using three different versions of this recording in the one track.
First I wrote a wandering synth part, a chunk of which sounds like this:
It’s in D harmonic major. I have no memory how or why I went there. I think this is likely one where I just watched or read something about this scale and decided to try something out, rather than writing something and afterwards going “huh, this sure is a major scale but with a flat six, isn’t it?”
I exported out a much longer version of the above and loaded it into a sampler. I stretched it out and play it back down an octave, so what you hear in the track is 1/4 of the original speed as well as being lower in pitch.
What you actually hear in the track is me playing back random-sounding, two-bar slices of this sampled progression. Because the original recording has plenty of silence, these slices do too, and probably more so because it’s slowed down so much.
I’ve put an EQ on the sound and am moving the frequencies around, like if you sat in front of an old stereo with EQ knobs on the front and swept them while the music was playing. It creates the swirly, phaser-y kind of sound.
In the final track this then has a long, slow echo applied to it.
Added technical info for the heads: On the piano roll you’d just see two bars of C2 over and over again, and I’m modulating the sample start point with a wavetable LFO. Then I’ve got two other simple sine-shaped LFOs, one modulating the rate of the LFO and the other the index of the wavetable. So the LFO that picks out what slice of the sample we hear is changing shape over the course of the track. This is part of my weird obsession with not using true randomisation, so that any time I listen back to the track it sounds the same.
“I ate Daniel Lanois and he repeats on me”
The above is the hilarious name of a preset I am using to manipulate a second slice of the above synth part. The preset is from a pack of presets by Empty Vessel, a fine soul who also makes his own music as cole. I’m mentioning this because we’ve collaborated on an EP, which I’m very much looking forward to having out in the world!
So, from memory relatively late in the piece, I decided to reverse and further stretch a clip from the above recording and put a shimmer reverb on it. This being an effect made famous by Eno and, yes, Daniel Lanois. Greg / Empty Vessel’s preset did just what I needed. I’m manipulating the feedback amount, but it’s otherwise his sound.
Sans shimmer:
Avec shimmer, a bit longer because of the tasty tail on the end:
Stuttering doves and an angry light bulb
You’ll notice the final track starts with doves in the mix. I have a big folder of field recordings. In this track I dredged up two recordings from years earlier:
from early 2020, doves outside our window during a holiday in New Caledonia, and
from 2018 … the electrical hum and “pinking” sounds of a nasty flickering fluoro tube in the toilet of a government building in my town.
Equally glamorous locations, definitely the same vibes.
In the track, these alternately fade in and out, and get kind of mangled. The crunchy digital noise you hear in the final track is actually that second recording just processed.
Here’s the opening section of the track with just those two recordings dry.
Here’s the same chunk of time, as it is in the final track.
The stuttering effect is what’s called a high-pass filter that I am messing around with a lot. The name means that only the high frequencies of the signal are allowed to pass through the signal chain, to eventually reach your ears.
No, you do not get a Gandalf gif.
The stuttering comes from sweeping the filter really aggressively, so it’s jumping from an unfiltered sound with all the frequencies passing through to a fully filtered sound where if anything’s coming through it’s probably only enough to annoy your dog. I’m sweeping the filter at different speeds throughout the track, but also different speeds in the left and right stereo channels.
The sounds are then going into an echo with a phaser (the swooping sound) and a reverb. The reverb in particular has the effect of softening the potential nastiness of the hard-panned motion. I think!
Techies: this is all Bitwig default devices, apart from Valhalla DSP’s Vintage Verb in the delay’s feedback path. A stereo splitter, a high pass filter on each channel, and a similar kind of thing to earlier in this post, where an LFO modulates the filter cutoff but then other LFOs modulate the shape of the LFO. I’m making use of the Curves LFO, where you can hand draw your wave shape. Lots of spiky shapes! Then it’s Bitwig’s Delay+ with a Phaser+ and Vintage Verb in the feedback path.
A pretty ending
I don’t know about you, but I find the opening combination of the unclear rhythms and that stuttering stuff kind of full on, even if the harmonic material is not. While I started there and always liked it, I deliberately structured the track so that it gets nicer as it goes.
So, towards the end, as well as these earlier sounds and other ear candy I’m skipping over, we’ve got:
Full-sounding chords with an even pace and a trad resolution
Chill, easy to follow percussion with a one-bar repeating pattern, and
A lusher sound world.
Here’s the extra harmonic stuff separated out from the other things going on near the end:
You really hear the not-a-normal-major scale on the fourth chord in the sequence: the progression opens on F#m, goes to the root D major, D major again and then back up to F# but this time it’s the major chord. I really like it!
The chords are picked out on a synth sound but also stacked with, yep, me on the ukulele again. Just individual chords chopped out, and then layered down an octave for a bit more bass. That’s where a bunch of the noise is – you may have guessed I’m quite a fan of not trying to clean up shitty home recordings.
Then, adding to the lushness I was after, there’s the third instance of the same synth part I talk about at the start of this post, this one reversed, slowed down, and washed out through reverb. You can hear this part most between the other chords in the above sound file. This part is actually slowly fading in from about halfway through the track but is still pretty quiet throughout.
Everything goes out with about the most trad closing cadence: the louder synth chords ending on a V chord (admittedly inverted), resolving to a final, slightly murky I chord on just the sampled ukulele. Done!
#7 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Heck yeah. I really love this track, false modesty be damned. It’s one that I had finished before Also came out, but I didn’t find a home for it there.
The big chords
This is where the track began. My memory is it followed on from being really happy with a track of mine, ‘Not On The Cards Anymore‘, where there was a lot of space between events, and quiet chords slowly creeping up on you as the track progresses. I knew early on when I was working with these very ON/OFF slabs of sound that I wanted the track to start straight in like that, no other intro.
There’s three layers here, really.
The shorter stabs:
The very quiet pads:
The big, echo-y bass note:
The harmony
We’re in C# Phrygian mode, that mode I used in ‘Trellis‘ that’s like a typical minor scale but with a flattened second. We’re almost entirely sitting on a C#m7 chord, just once every 2 bars. But at the end of the 8-bar loop, those stabs do a quick descending run that says loud and clear we’re not in C# minor. We start on that flattened second, with a Dmaj7 in its normal voicing, then Dmaj7 but in its 3rd inversion (the C# that was the highest note is now the lowest note), and then Bm7. I like using inversions like this as a sort of stepping stone that indicates the direction we’re heading in.
The bass just hammers out C#, reminding us where home is right through the whole track. It lands every four bars, so is completely absent when the chords go else in the last bars of an 8-bar pattern. I remember experimenting with having a bass note when we arrive at Bm7. But, nah. It felt like too much.
The pads are playing a thinned out combo of what the shorter stabs are playing, and with some descending inversions going on. So we have some combo of E, G#, B for most of the time and heading into bar 7 we get a combo of D, F#, A.
There’s a couple of ways to talk about these chords, which comes down to that fun fact that any seventh chord is made up of a minor and a major chord at the same damn time.
Like, on their own it would be most obvious to say we’re just moving between E major and D major triads.
But given what the stabs and the bass are doing, I’d prefer to say that we start with C#m7 missing its root note, then the second chord arguably first operates as D major while those Dmaj7 stabs are travelling by, and then for the last two bars of the progression we’ve got the same kind of thing as the first, Bm7 missing its root note.
I dunno, it’s the same combinations of notes, but that’s what makes sense to me.
The sound design
All three original sounds are just out of the box Bitwig synths. From memory they’re presets I then tweaked a little.
If the split out audio above sounds clean and tidy compared to the final track, it’s because in the final track both the stabs and the pads are glued together and made grungy by an effect called, aptly, LO-FI-AF. Listen how much more noise is there in the stabs, plus how the pads sound less stable.
Meanwhile, the bass note has some heavy modulation of its parameters, so the timbre shifts a fair amount each time it plays. Those tweaks to the synth sound create the swooping, phasing kind of effect that is a big part of the final result.
The bass then goes through a chain of effects:
Bit crushing gives a digital grain like a Speak & Spell.
This then runs into a kind of smeary reverb created through spectral processing, the kind of tech in play in that sample-modelling drum machine I used in ‘Ashcan Edition‘. (This time Unfiltered Audio’s SpecOps.)
Finally, there’s long, slow echoes. (Bitwig’s most basic Delay-1.)
✨ Sparkles ✨
These shimmering sounds later in the track are a whole different set of chords, landing largely in between what I’ve called the big chords.
Messing with a piano roll “live” to create harmony
I went down quite a different route to come up with these chords, compared to what I’d usually do.
For the big chords, I went the normal route. I sequenced a series of notes, basically writing out instructions that then get sent to an instrument: play this note, at this time, with this loudness, and maybe with this much of a fully sick pitch bend to make it like an 80s keytar solo.
It’s like the successor to feeding instructions into a player piano, maybe: we make marks on a piano roll, feed that into the piano, and, when we hit go, the piano plays back exactly the notes on that piano roll.
Music software nowadays has actually standardised on using an interface called the piano roll, after exactly this.
But with these sparkly chords, while I used Bitwig’s piano roll, I’m then doing the digital equivalent of messing with the instructions between when they leave the piano roll and reach the piano. What you see on the piano roll is most definitely not what you hear.
Here’s what the un-messed-with piano roll for the sparkly chords sounds like. Be warned, it’s ugly!
The software I use gives you a whole set of what they call “note fx”, to do this manipulation of note data. Here’s the stack of these note-wrangling devices I set up for these chords.
I won’t go into the full explanation (although hit me up if you want it!), but if I wrote this like instructions, it might be something like this:
Tidy up any notes that aren’t in C# Phrygian, by moving them up or down.
Wildly rearrange the timing of the notes each time they play, but err towards keeping them pretty close to in time / on the grid.
Add some randomness to how loudly each note plays.
Finally, at the start of the track, only play the very lowest notes. Over time let through higher and higher notes until every note from the piano roll gets through.
What’s on the piano roll?
I deliberately made a progression on the piano roll that is hardly in C# Phrygian at all, knowing one of the note fx in the chain above was going to push everything back into that scale.
Some online chord finder reckons the first chord, the one I started with, should be described as an inversion of an E dominant 13th chord, inverted around C#.
While that chord does fit in the scale, I then just copy and paste it either up or down a semitone, repeatedly. The first, higher set of chords walks up from C# to E, while the lower one that comes in second is doing the opposite, the chords walk down from E to C#. So, it’s pretty spectacularly messed up.
When writing this post I toyed with actually doing the equivalent of printing the results of the note fx on to a fresh piano roll, to figure out what the resulting notes even are. But this post is huge enough and I may as well leave some mystery.
Why, Michael, why?
The fun for me in this kind of thing is to get out of habits and surprise myself. I reckon music is a lot about intuition, what feels right, and the process of making changes that intuition, so over the years your sense of what should happen next gets a bit narrower. Doing something arbitrary like I’ve done here usually throws up an unintuitive result, and it’s often fun to respond to that. I still feel really engaged in the writing process, especially when I’m combining these kinds of antics with the other more traditional, fully-in-control approach to other parts.
Not sure if it’s interesting, but I have tried to do even more generative stuff, which is where you’re almost (or actually) programming and telling your software to basically make a piano roll for you from the rules you gave it. I don’t find much joy in it and I usually feel distant from the results.
It’s probably clear I’m interested in harmony and in rhythm, and if you’re basically just telling a computer to spit out some set of notes that fit a scale and in a rhythm that fits say 16th beats… it’s just a bit “so what?” for me.
But some amount of coaxing the machines to intervene on what I had planned can be really exciting and, yeah, fun.
I guess all I want to comment on here is that the fraught business of trying to navigate consumer choices perhaps unsurprisingly extends to making music, the tools you’re going to use at least. One minute you’re having a good time with some quality product and the next cognitive dissonance sweeps in, colouring your memories of making the music as well as, of course, affecting what you say and do next.
#6 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Name from a pop rap hit
I explained the name for this one and talked a little about making it when I talked to Tony Stamp on RNZ National, and it’s briefly mentioned on the page I’m linking to, so I won’t repeat myself here. The guts of what I’ve written here is also in that interview, but what follows goes into more detail and includes audio examples.
Another rework, more 11 8 time
As with ‘Patience and Glue’, this had a previous incarnation I considered finished and then just parked, with a sense that it was fine.
Here’s the version from 2022: almost all of the same elements are actually in there, but mixed quite differently.
More wonky time signatures, counting to make life easier
Compositionally, the big difference between 2022 and 2024 is that the track is not in the same time signature. This older version is in 11 8 time, like the first section of last week’s track. What are the odds of two tracks in 11 8 cropping up in a row? Stupidly low, but given my first ever released track was in 11 8, back in 1996, I am 100% certain that predisposes me to thinking of it when I decide to get into oddball rhythms.
There was a drum troupe (is that how you spell it?) in Wellington back in the mid-90s and I remember talking about my first released track ‘Seeper’ to one of its members. She said to me she just thought of rhythms as groups of 3s and 2s. If she could count “1 and a 2 and a 3 and a 4 and” that was easy, while saying “it’s in 11 8” sounded a bit scary. That was a revelation that still makes heaps of sense to me. It’s not everything, but it’s one really helpful model.
Think how many pop songs you could say are 4 4 but you could more helpfully count like “1 and a 2 and a 3 and”, the tresillo. Alternating groups of 3s and 2s comes pretty naturally.
Vocoder percussion
Anyway, ‘Small Things Popping’ is not in 11 8! The first thing I did was to explore the percussion patterns that are front and centre in the above version and drag them about on screen to find patterns I preferred. I ended up on a pattern in 7 4. Without the bass in there this is not so easy to count, but here’s the percussion soloed.
I wrote about vocoders when writing about ‘Trellis’. Here I am working with individual drum hits sliced from a drum pattern going into a vocoder. So I am using them as samples, playing them back at different pitches (mainly up and down octaves) to create the pattern.
All of this then goes into big dub effects that are sometimes much louder than the dry drum sounds. I like that. Classic dub records often trigger that feeling of overwhelm, like everything is exploding and might fall apart shortly. Not sure anything I make will ever quite walk that line, but I was at least walking in sight of it?
Ukulele and birds up front
I also strongly remember wondering if I’d like the track more if I swapped the foreground and the background some – and that turned out to be right.
So, in the finished version, we start straight away with loud ukulele plucks, which are really present throughout.
What you’re hearing is basically the first time I tried mucking about on a ukulele. I recorded it on a somewhat soggy long weekend with friends in the Wairarapa, summer 2022. A friend had brought her uke and I, being me, had brought my little audio recorder. In some quiet moment I just sat outside the rental and faffed about with this one chord voicing I had learned. I can really vividly picture where I was sitting and the feeling of being there, under a verandah with light rain coming down. Mostly ukulele, but plenty of birds. Welcome to New Zealand.
Modern audio software lets you very easily drag about the timing of events in recorded audio, and I did a lot of that, so that strong notes land on at least an 8th beat. It’s stretched and looped throughout, so it repeats itself every 12 bars.
After that, I’ve added echoes of varying intensity throughout.
elelukU
There’s actually another layer of ukulele and background sounds in the finished track, recorded on the same weekend, but this one is reversed and processed plenty.
Raw version:
Heh, this recording is almost more cicadas than anything else. Those jerks! I guess the rain had stopped.
In the track:
The recording is reversed, then I’m only letting the middle of the frequency spectrum come through (bye bye, cicadas, up in the crispy high end) before two different layers of echoes wash out the sound. The 1-minute-ish recording is looping, with no regard for how that lines up with the tempo of the track, so loud parts will come and go at different places relative to whatever else is happening. It’s all smeary and quiet enough that any shifts in emphasis are really subtle in the final track.
For the production wonks, that’s Bitwig’s Filter > free plugin Valhalla SuperMassive > Bitwig’s Convolution reverb with a very synthetic impulse response that spits out a series of filtered delay taps, called “Spectral Repeats 07”.
#5 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Blending two tracks
This track’s title fits a classic pattern for me, where I wrote down some wordplay, riffing on some existing phrase, and found a home for it later. This track is a medley of two tracks, and the two parts have different tempos (= times) and time signatures (beats per bar, and measures are another way of saying bars).
I wrote the two parts of this track separately and, unable to find a structure for either part that I liked on its own, I decided to combine them.
There are many ways you might combine two musical ideas, including just doing a cold cut between sections. In this case I tweaked the tempos so they flow in a way I like and added a new synth part, with notes in common, as a bridge.
What it sounds like when I’m counting along
Here’s the transition section with me counting over it. It’s pretty rough, but hopefully enough of an idea. (My voice fades in.)
Matching up the bar lengths
The first part is 11 8 time and the tempo is 96bpm. I count each bar “1 e and a 2 e and a 3 and a”.
The second part is 4 4 time and at 70.4bpm – which is a bit of a precise tempo, but means each bar in the first part takes the same amount of time to play as each bar in the second part. This part wasn’t originally this tempo, but somewhere close, so I matched it up to see if it would work. I just count each bar “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”.
Bridging the two parts, harmonically
The kind of soaring synth string part that bridges the gap is the bit I wrote after.
I picked out 4 notes in common between the keys of the first part and the second. I’m just playing one note per bar, so, because of the tempos, this plays out at exactly the same speed throughout and there’s no clashy polyrhythmic subdivisions to be heard. You couldn’t tell if this was 11 8 or 4 4, in other words.
Notes-wise, the first part is G# Mixolydian mode and the second part is F#. The progression uses F#, G#, C# and A#. These notes are not at all spicy in either harmonic setting, so I reckon it flows effortlessly.
Using “out of the box” sounds
I don’t have too much to say about the separate tracks, but do want to say that almost all of the synth sounds in both parts are using default devices from the software I use (Bitwig).
I want to say that because sometimes music makers get funny about using niche and cool tools.
The second part has marimba and xylophone samples on top, hardly messed with. Again, as a sound source they’re nothing fancy. Not fancy like Holger Czukay, anyway.
I do use a software drum machine called XO primarily to audition sounds more easily than browsing directories. It doesn’t affect the sound of my music at all, if I do use it I then export sounds and patterns to Bitwig devices and clips pretty quickly. It’s a game changing workflow hack, though – as the broducers out there say.
I also tend to use some delay and reverb fx from Valhalla DSP, Unfiltered Audio and AudioThing (Reels, Wires).
#4 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Self-remix! Trying a new structure
The main feature of ‘Trellis’ is that I basically wrote a whole track and then chopped it up, in a really systematic way, to see if it would make it better. I really liked the results and did some edits to maximise the good times, to my taste.
I often find it really fruitful to establish a system or process, follow that, and then bail on the rules I set myself when I’ve gone far enough that I know where I want to go next. This is an example of that.
Here’s the pre-cut-up version. On some level it might sound really familiar already, because the material is most of what you hear in ‘Trellis’.
The parts are basically:
A fairly constant, shimmering bed of sound, an echoing arpeggio based on one chord, with some looping and other stretched sections layered in.
Some long, single synth notes on top, coming in loudly near the start.
The piano-like layers that come in later in this version and slowly evolve. They’re shorter and punchier than the above: an electric piano, an acoustic piano, a couple of synth sounds.
Incredibly mooshy drums.
I exported something that I could have called finished (yeah, the above audio), chopped off the end and then sliced the rest into two-bar phrases. Say I took 96 bars, that would give me 48 slices.
Then I swapped all those slices around, moving the last slice so it came between the first and the second, the second-to-last slice so it came between the second and the third, and so on.
Here’s an image to try and demonstrate, using 24 slices so it’s a bit less hectic than with 48. The top row represents the order of the original audio and the bottom row is how I rearranged it. (Click to enlarge if it’s really tiny.)
I made some edits afterwards, from memory I chopped out 8 bars here and 8 bars there to tighten things up: obviously the final track isn’t almost 8 minutes long like the above audio!
On top of all of this I repeated the process with some piano parts, but I reversed them.
One chord, but picking notes out of it
This track really sits on one chord throughout, with the individual notes picked out as an arpeggio. There’s a lot of echoes so notes often overlap and once they pile up it becomes a bit of a wash, the “shimmering bed of sound” I mention above.
The most traditional voicing of the notes being played would give you a D#m7 chord with a flat 9 (E) on top. We’re in D# phrygian throughout, which is like a minor scale with a flat second (that E note).
But I’ve got those notes really spaced out, so much so that I reckon it feels incredibly open and ambiguous, and not like a minor 7 chord much at all. The notes span over three octaves. Here’s what they look like on a piano roll.
More than one time signature at once
I’m not actually letting that washed out arpeggio play out, even in the pre-chopped track. Instead I sample and loop 1 beat in every 10. The track is just in 4 4 time, so this effectively creates a polymeter of 10 over 4, I guess. Another way to think about it is the loops are 2 1/2 bars long, given the track is in 4 4.
I think Ilove polymeter and use it so much because it’s kind of disarming: after decades of getting deep into techniques of music making, I can honestly never listen to music like a normie does, but making patterns I find it near impossible to follow is one way to try to get past that technical brain. (This is called a post hoc justification, gentle reader.)
Banging on metal, fed into a vocoder
There’s only a couple of sounds that I added on top of the sliced up track I’ve been describing so far. I’ll just write about one.
When you’re brushing your teeth, do you ever change the shape of your mouth and notice how the sound changes?
So, that’s the guts of how a vocoder works. (I mean it’s even closer to a talkbox or what Peter Frampton did with his talking guitar, but shush.) You take a fairly constant sound (a synth playing a melody or chords) and you shape how much of that synth reaches people’s ears with a second source, very commonly a person’s voice. ‘Around The World‘ is a classic vocoder-led tune, but you can go back to a zillion ’80s electro classics.
The robot voice stereotype is entirely legit, but you’ve probably heard more subtle uses of a vocoder without noticing it before. You’ve probably heard drums sent through a vocoder, like Royksopp’s ‘Remind Me’ or the later part of Stereolab’s ‘Refractions in the Plastic Pulse’. (That Stereolab album has been a big influence, btw – connect the “dots” to Mouse On Mars and Tortoise members on production duties.)
So, let’s break down a vocoder part that comes in around 2m15 in ‘Trellis’.
This is the absolutely awful sounding synth part that I’m playing.
Wow. I’d like to apologise for bringing shame upon my entire family.
Anyway, then I’m shaping that synth sound with this recording.
That’s me banging and tapping on a telecom tower, on the top of Te Ahumairangi Hill in my hometown. I used contact mics taped to the tower, so I’m recording the sound as it travels through metal rather than through air. Most places in Wellington are very windy and there are many birds, so contact mics are handy when you don’t want either of those things in the recording.
So here’s the vocoder magic. I really like this combination of the above sounds already!
Finally, I send that through a big ol’ reverb. Here is what you hear in the final version of ‘Trellis’, as a kind of added sprinkle on top of the cut-up sections.
#3 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Did I mean to say this track sucks?
An “ashcan edition” or “ashcan copy” is a comic that was knocked off and published solely to lay claim to some IP, so it’s associated with poor quality. I really liked the phrase, but it’s majorly self-deprecating in hindsight.
“Hey, this track is just a throwaway piece of crap!”
What a cool guy move!
I actually really like this track, it’s one of the ones that came together fast and really immediately conveyed a curious little sound world that I wanted to explore.
‘O Superman’ chords
But wait, I can pretend that the name is drawing a super sketchy line from this track to a Laurie Anderson song that has a comic book superhero in the title, because both tracks have the same basic two-chord motion!
That’s not at all true, but oh well.
That chord progression involves practically playing the same chord over and over, but dropping the lowest note down a semitone, then back up. In this case we’re in E major, so the chords alternate between an E major triad in root position (E, G#, B) and then when the bottom note moves it becomes the second inversion of G#m (D#, G#, B). Those chord names sound fancy compared to what’s actually happening if you just sit at a keyboard and play it!
These two chords are played on multiple instruments, which sound pretty similar and blend together. There are points in the track where I invert the bright, sparkly chords for a little bit more motion. So, the first chord becomes the second inversion of E major and the second chord is just G#m in root position.
Ringing percussion
A big part of the track is a drum loop fed into something that makes it resonate or ring out like you’re hearing it from the other end of a tube… Here’s that loop dry, then through the tuned resonator, and then through a reverb that washes it out some. The dry loop is probably unrecognisable.
I feel like it’s pretty unromantic to reveal that the resonator is a template given away on a YouTube tutorial, but it is. If you’re a Bitwig user reading this, I recommend you download the template. It’s cool.
As you can hear at the end of the file, the resonator changes pitch so it’s basically it’s own riff.
Blurpy vocals to add friction
I decided the resolute niceness of the sparkly synths needed something to offset it. That’s what I was aiming for with this noise that punctuates the end of phrases. It first shows about 22 seconds in.
This sound’s pitch is often quite clashy with the rest of the track, but I kept it fairly low in the mix so it’s hopefully the right amount of weird.
I think this is one example where it’s worth being specific on the tech involved. I’m using a “sample-modelling drum machine”, a bit of software called Visco, which lets you load in two sounds and move between completely sound 1 and completely sound 2. I mean, it does a lot more, but that’s what I’m doing in this track, playing with the territory between the two sounds. You can see this blending in action from 41 seconds in on this video.
When you load a sound in, Visco doesn’t just play the recording back but instead analyses everything about it and tries to model it with a synthesised version. Why? Because then you can play with those settings. When you morph between two sounds it’s not like fading out one recording and fading in the second one, it’s more like you’re recalibrating all the settings on a synth to find some middle ground between the settings that give you the first sound and the settings that give you the second. This creates freaky and unpredictable effects, and in this case, really wonky pitch stuff. That’s because I loaded in two short phrases of a woman singing from some R&B acapella, rather than loading in drum sounds. (I have a whole ripped DVD of acapellas from the late 90s (thanks Alan!) that I’ve dragged from computer to computer since. They’ve shown up on Jet Jaguar releases since 2003.) In the two phrases, the singer is not hitting the same note, so when you morph between them the results are … unreliable, let’s say.
#2 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Mood first
My memory is this track came from an idea to just make a certain kind of mood happen. I can’t really articulate even what that is, just a certain set of sounds that might have a certain feeling. Sparse, loopy, dub vibes but more ambient than either reggae or techno.
Descending chromatic harmony
Having said last week it’s easy to fall back on progressions that stick to one key, this is another one with a chromatic descent that steps outside of a traditional key. The track is in D minor, for sure, but the opening plonky stabs are hanging around A much more, and to be honest I’m not even sure how to describe some of the chords. 3 out of 4 notes are the same in every stab, but in each bar there’s this line stepping down in semitones. This introduces a flat 2nd in the third bar (E flat) before that descending line lands on D.
The stabs are both percussive enough and murky enough that the pitch content is kinda obscured anyway.
Shortwave over the internet
One source I added to this was clips of a shortwave radio station picked up via a Dutch university’s website. I played about on that site until I found a sound I liked, made a recording, and then added random-ish slices of that recording almost like punctuation into the track.
For the music production nerds, I did this by loading the recording into a sampler and modulating the start point of the sample so each time a note is triggered a different section of the sample is played back.
I’ve done this trick since the late 1900s.
I added stereo space using all-pass filters, as well as a different low-pass filter on the left and right channels with modulation on various settings so it shifts around. (Bitwig’s Blur, Stereo Split, Filter+ devices…)
Coming to land at the end
I remember very intentionally deciding to switch up the bass so the track kind of comes to ground after being much more floaty, and when I went there it felt like that was a fun, surprising place to stop almost straight away. So the way it plays out the last 8 bars pick up a little… and then we’re done. It makes me smile.
Serendipitous hailstorm
I recorded a hailstorm happening outside my home studio, complete with hail bouncing off the windows.
That’s the raw recording.
I dumped this straight over the track as I was structuring it. There’s really no special production tricks here:
I EQed out some of the noisy low end,
I faded the start, and
I faded the end!
There’s actually an email notification from my computer just after 2 minutes that I didn’t do anything about in the track.
#1 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
How I approach names
Someone asked about how I come up with names, specifically in the absence of lyrics.
When I save a project on my computer I have to give it a name, but that almost never sticks. It’s usually just reaching for some random association from what’s happening in the day and honestly might be influenced by things like “man, I keep saving files with names starting with G, let’s not.” Maybe surprisingly, Also, title track of my last album was one of the exceptions – it was just a quick project name on the day that slowly grew to fit the music. Which leads me to the fact that often I find an after-the-fact justification for how a name fits.
I have zero memory where the phrase “patience and glue” came from, but it was on my list of possible names and I invented a way it made sense. This track took forever to reach its final form, with elements coming from different places and times (years!). This kind of matching of name to music could be about the resulting music, the process to get there, or just some intuition that this goes with that.
Ridiculously, this project was saved as “eggs for my evening meal”, a spoken phrase I sampled off a tape probably 30 years ago, but which clearly stuck in my head. At the time I probably thought it would be like something Aphex would have in a track. It has nothing to do with this one.
Isn’t it about a Taiwanese soy drink, though?
An old friend sent me a phone recording that I dragged and dropped into this track early on. It’s a guy on a 2-stroke motorbike inviting you to buy the classic soy milk drink “dao hui” (Taiwanese / Fujianese pronunciation of 豆漿).
You can first hear it from just after 1 minute into the final track, but it’s pretty buried under electronic squelches. I like it best almost as a background detail.
If you read this and have a weird voice note on your phone, feel free to send it my way!
Anyway, eggs? Soy milk? Something a bit queasy-making about it all. I didn’t want the name to be food related – depends on your attitudes to glue, I guess.
This track started with the chords
I think, before the vocal sample, this song started with me pushing myself to make something I liked with a chord progression that’s not strictly diatonic harmony (all in one key – think only white keys on a piano, as an example).
I’m a clicker, as I’ve heard AG Cook / PC Music put it. Mostly I make my tracks with (computer) keyboard and mouse, drawing notes on screen. Nowadays touch screen comes in a bit more. In this way of working it is so, so easy to pick (or identify mid-way in) one key and build everything from there. Heaps of great music, including many pop songs, actually doesn’t do this. If done successfully, a normal human won’t find it weird at all. I think the techniques I ended up using make the track more “pop” than when I just hover about on a single chord or two (pretty classic ambient moves) and that might have contributed to being uneasy with early drafts of it – but also partly why I felt like it was an album opener.
Modal interchange
So the main chords, right at the start and through most of it, are I’d say in B. Maybe the relative minor, because I’m playing the same note (G#) in the bass under every chord. It starts on a C#m7 which isn’t the tonic of either.
The simple bit where I deviate from the key is at the end of the phrase, where I go for an Em7. It should be a major chord to stay in key and especially with that minor 7 on top it’s introducing two notes that are not in the scale we’ve been in.
Apparently this is called modal interchange and is a very Beatles move.
Then I briefly play the opening chord again at the very end of the phrase, so we’re back to the opening C#m7. This descent of the same chord shape down a minor third (E->C#) is pretty easy on the ears, for some reason.
Bass pedal with a chromatic descent
In the bass, having been pedalling along on G#, I descend chromatically on the last two chords – G under Em7, F# under C#m7. Again, this kind of stepping down by semitones is strangely accessible. And both of these notes are the 3rd note of the respective chords, which might make it sound easier too.
How much was I thinking about this stuff while I was working? Actually, in this case, probably a lot. Other times I fall back to theory only when I’m stuck and reaching for tools to get me unstuck.
Defensively, I’ll say it might seem very robot meep-morp dry to start a piece of music with this kind of formal puzzle or challenge, but that might also be why I filed the thing for a couple of years, because I want to be confident I really enjoy the results too.
A take from 2022
I’ve said this track sat for ages. (I think super normally) I hold on to tracks until I think I’ve got enough that fit together as one release. So when I do release an album the music on it was written over 2 to 3 years – some will be older than most of the material on the album that came before, and so on.
Just for curiosity’s sake, here’s how this track sounded when I thought it was done in 2022. I didn’t love it, but revisited it in 2024 and reworked it – and now I’m happy.
Yeah I played with the sounds and such a fair amount, but the main change to my ears is that the descending piano riff does the same thing over and over and over. In the 2024 version I basically muted most of it, unmuting different bits each time around, so it’s just picking out occasional notes. It never plays that whole descending line intact.
Here’s five recommendations from the …66? releases I’ve picked up since last December.
I can’t believe I haven’t done one of these posts the whole year! (I’m still listening to all of those releases from last December btw.) But I’m trying to be the opposite of just linking to the latest thing I’ve heard.
Oren Ambarchi, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin – Ghosted II (Drag City)
The first of two picks that are trios playing maybe kind of live. That’s a bit outrageous, given the amount of my listening time spent on electronic stuff. Anyway!
Do you know Aussie band The Necks? You wouldn’t mistake this for them, but it has some of the same appeal for me: a minimalism I associate with that electronic stuff I mostly listen to, but when you pay attention it’s never really sitting still, and the players are being awesome in the least flashy way. Just a great sound, floor to ceiling.
The guitar harmonics-led second track is particularly pretty.
James Devane – Searching (Umeboshi)
Something really appealing about the soft, chill techno building blocks of this record, being made a little strange in the way they rub up against each other. Off-kilter loops and patterns you can’t keep track of, but it still feels pretty accessible.
If you’re interested in process, Phillip Sherburne interviewed Devane and I found it fascinating: Devane wasn’t satisfied with the mellow techno album he wrote, so essentially wrote his own randomising software to throw the basic blocks of what he’d made into a blender and spit them out in weird combinations. I can only imagine it must’ve taken a lot of picking and choosing the good bits…
Other Joe – Jealousy Tulip (Best Effort)
There seems to be heaps of great music going on in Australia. This was actually released March 2021, but I picked it up this year and have listened to it heeeeeaps. Another that’s very vaguely in the territory of mellow techno, but this is perhaps more ambient and more textured? Mind you, it’s also more directly melodic on some tracks.
It’s funny, James Devane came from a beatless ambient duo (En), this guy Other Joe has gone beatless ambient since Jealousy Tulip.
Atte Elias Kantonen – A Path With A Name (Soda Gong)
A beautiful and sometimes spiky ambient glitch record from September 2023. Definitely one I’ve had on highest rotate all year. There’s something about the combination of music that, on one hand, I find really relaxing, but, on the other, is built on these rich sound worlds that I find pretty stimulating and buzzy.
People often talk about this kind of thing as perfect headphone music, but I’d also recommend cranking it on a decent system. It sounds mint.
Sam Wilkes, Craig Weinrib, and Dylan Day – self-titled (LEAVING RECORDS)
Immediately worth it for the version of Jobim’s “How Insensitive”, imo. This is is an electric jazz trio – guitar, bass, drums – just playing together on someone’s porch, from memory. While I’m sure there’s overdubs, the whole thing feels really unadorned in the nicest of ways.
A real palette cleanser for an electronic-obsessive. Something I’ll often pop on first thing in the morning.
So, a couple of weeks back Adrien hit me up to contribute to a compilation of hit em tracks. I contributed 3 tracks in 3 nights, during a stressful work week, and holy shit it was a good time. The original tweet being about a rave, I focused on dancefloor sounds that I’ve always loved: give me disco ahead of the entire history of rock, in a heartbeat, says the troll in me.
So those music-making nights were Monday to Wednesday, and then on Friday I watched the Eno documentary (perhaps an Eno documentary, given how it works?) and listened to Eno saying how he found it incredibly difficult to get out from under his own preconceptions of what he needed to do next, having had success with a particular sound. In a later scene he talked about how we all have a child who wants to play and create and a critic who wants to tear every choice apart, and that it is a good thing to just push the critic out of the room and let the child play.
While I’d never compare myself to Eno with regards levels of success, this stuff was incredibly relatable. Trying to just do whatever you found enjoyable and not throwing out the seed before it could germinate? The reflections of this talking head seemed incredibly apposite for what I’d been doing earlier in the week.
The stuff I was banging out might’ve been formally constrained, but was a lot of fun, and perhaps the key reason for that was not really caring about the results in any wider sense than just “shall I stop now?”. I was just trying to follow the brief and apply what I love and enjoy about dance music to it, and, you know, after 30+ years of music making, that came pretty easily.
I guess it’d be easy to be snarky about bandwagon-jumping, but I’m sort of reminded of B-Real’s opening lines on Illusions: “Some people tell me that I need help / Some people can fuck off and go to hell”. In making the music I didn’t give a shit about whether it’d get attention as part of this hit em fad. If no one listened to these tracks it really wouldn’t matter, same as any other music I release. It was a fun idea and a cute thing to be a part of.
This is a bit of a random one, but I wanted to just do a bit of a link dump. There’s been an absolute shed load of noise about generative AI and LLMs in the last year or so and here’s some of the writing I’ve found most interesting.
Molly White is great on this stuff. She’s big on opinions, but opinions based on what’s there, rather than thought experiments and hypotheticals. Her takedowns of the last big tech grift topic were fantastic to read.
This is as hilarious a polemic as you could hope for, which is compelling in a really different way to White’s deliberate and explicitly measured approach. Absolutely unequivocal and maintains the same tone you get from the title. My day job is helping folks organise information and so specific quips that cross over with that, like this one, were particularly lol-inducing:
Everyone is talking about Retrieval Augmented Generation, but most companies don’t actually have any internal documentation worth retrieving. Fix. Your. Shit.
My fave of the three things I’m dumping here is the longest and arguably not so much about what’s wrong with AI, although AI is its subject. It’s the author’s write up of her experience being invited to be the closing, “honorary contrarian speaker” at a tech industry conference on conversational AI.
It really makes it clear, to a lesser or greater extent, that almost none of the misgivings about AI are really about the (or any) technology, and a huge amount about shit (social) systems (such as the tech industry). If you’ve ever been in the industry and witnessed the enthusiasm and the conviction and come away feeling intense cognitive dissonance, this one’s for you.
Preston’s stuff about her experience playing as Mechanical Turk behind a chat bot for some kind of property management company is really grim, and it’s worth reading the whole essay for just that bit, IMO.
I guess there’s a reason I approach labels to release my own stuff, right? So no surprise there’s a couple of Sound as Language selections in here. This album sounds mostly like processed guitars and this particular moment doesn’t, but I wanted to mix the sparse beats of the next track with something purely tonal and this (This) felt like a cool place to start.
1:10 Minced Oath – A Game Of Skill and Forethought (Countersunk)
I got hipped to this EP via an online DJ mix, and while it might seem circular it felt nice to put something from that into my own mix. The EP has two beatless tracks and two sparse rhythmic things, and I love both those latter tracks. They’re so open and cool, trance-like though not like the genre.
3:48 Adriaan de Rooever – Dank u (Dauw)
I’ve got plenty of respect for the label Dauw and keep tabs on what they’re releasing, but find I’ve drifted away from being passionately into most of what they put out now. I think it’s me that’s changed, not them. Anyway, this de Rooever album is one of the most recent things in the mix and it’s got some spiky edges and variety to it that got me immediately excited. So I wanted to include something here and it turned out one of the nicest bits, this track with its guitar twangs and such, worked best. The string-like keys and monster bass remind me of Alva Noto, and the I think literally inhuman vocal noises really add something.
7:50 Ulla – Somewhere Else (Motion Ward)
Ulla is just one of my definite faves of recent years, though I don’t think she’s put anything out for a while. I was going to go for one of her sparse beat tracks, something closer to the Minced Oath one, but ended up with this quiet maybe-guitars number. “Maybe-” is my fave genre descriptor, heh.
9:47 Erik Mowinckel – Utsikt (Breton Cassette)
This was one of a lot of tracks I collected up with the intention of having them make up most of the mix. They all have a kind of contemporary electronic lounge feel, but not entirely easy listening. The mix ended up going another direction, but I have played the release this is off a lot this year so far. Those dusty textures, the cruisy bass part, the wandering piano… All things I reckon land perfectly here.
12:26 Usof – Goodbye Forever (Enmossed)
I thought of this as another very new selection, but it’s 6 months old. Is that new? I think of Usof as being part of a nexus of young music makers who have a bit of that turn of the millenium “clicks and cuts” kind of vibe – blends of electronic dub, dance music influences with digital glitchiness but chilled right out. I love these shimmering chords and the very slight edge that bright, insistent tink tink tink sound brings throughout.
15:05 Alexandra Spence – Air Pockets (Room40)
Spence does cool things with very very unadorned electronic sounds (no fancy studio polish) field recordings and a bit of ASMR type spoken words. But here I think she’s literally capturing air under a container and recording the sound of it bubbling up? I just knew this would be another fun open kind of track to mix with other things. Such as…
16:28 Belly Full of Stars – Tidal Crossings (Fallen Moon Recordings)
The evolving drone of this is cool on its own, but it was fun to cross-mix it with Spence’s number above. This is off a split Belly Full of Stars with Meg Mulhearn. I found their conversation about that album really interesting. Kim’s someone I encountered online through the Disquiet Junto – and of course in that classic small world way, it turns out even though she’s in Nashville she knows another Wellingtonian making ambient music there (Dream Chambers).
19:16 Zachary Utz – Evinrude Rising (Sound As Language)
I love how bright and full of life this whole album is, and decided to include the first track I heard. Something about very abrupt, digital editing / processing of “nice” and acoustic sounds really does it for me. This was the next album after my Epiphytes on the same label and I really felt like I was in good company when I heard this. I should actually contact the guy! I wrote some more words on the album last December.
21:17 Carmen Villain – Subtle Bodies (Smalltown Supersound)
And I wrote about the album this is off earlier too, 18 months ago now. I actually thought of Villain because she plays a lot of flute and I thought that would flow from Utz’s track, but I ended up back in the hypnotic, drum-having territory and was very happy to go there.
25:54 Picnic – Homework (Daisart)
I wanted to include something from Daisart because the label has just shut it doors. Like when a cool TV show wraps up while it’s still going strong, it’s kind of bittersweet! Like, well played, but I’ll miss the sounds… I think I found Picnic via C-Minus, which I think is based in Kansas City, while Daisart and maybe Picnic are in Melbourne. Anyway!
28:26 Olga Wojciechowska – All I Have Not Seen (A Strangely Isolated Place)
I think I’ll always hold Wojciechowska’s album as Strië, Struktura, dearest, but I wanted to bring the mix back towards piano and something quite sweet and, yeah I’ll go there, “cinematic”…
32:05 Atte Elias Kantonen – Leafcomb (Soda Gong)
… so I could contrast it with something more abstract I’ve been loving recently. This album is so heavy on the sound design in a way I find so compelling. The spiralling, glitches and that impossible submerged boom… If you’ve ever heard completely improbable natural sounds like fish chatting and Weddell seals and such – this almost feels like it’s coming full circle and we’ve got electronic emulations of nature doing things that sound artificial! Like with the Utz album I want to say this one is full of life. Micro activities.
34:45 Roméo Poirier – Statuario (Eli Keszler Remix) (Faitiche)
And to round stuff out, another in that kind of lounge-but-a-bit-weirder vein. Keszler adds some jazz flavour to Poirier’s exotica loops. If you haven’t heard Keszler in his own right, he’s an insane drummer, but keeps things super restrained here. This is on Jan Jelinek’s often-interesting label – Jelinek who feels like a bit of a daddy of a whole lot of that new era I was trying to describe when writing about Usof.
I’ve been thinking about music in shops. It’s a cliche surely that people, if asked, would never say they wanted more or louder music to play in a shop. But I had an experience that got me thinking about the alternatives.
Last week I was in a shop that was some kind of converted industrial space with exposed pipes in the ceiling. It was raining heavily and this created two different drips in different pipes. So I was aware of two gentle “bong” type sounds happening occurring in different spaces above me, and in different rhythms. They might have both been constant but at different speeds. I certainly couldn’t predict when they happened. And then there was a third, electronic sound related to the shop door. It was a burst of maybe six repetitions of the same sound, like a skipping CD. It was a mix of something tuned and a crackle of noise that went dig dig dig dig dig dig and then stopped. It reminded me plenty of glitch music from about 20 years ago. It happened about every minute. Maaaaybe some kind of doorbell or something about air conditioning?
Over the top of all of this was some pretty shit indie rock playing all the time. And every time a track faded out I felt both relieved and excited, to hear these three other genuinely ambient sounds do their thing.
As might be obvious by my even bothering to write this up, I wish the music music wasn’t playing, because I heard the other sounds as music and enjoyed them much more. I guess I’d be in the minority, but it’d be a kind of fun experiment. It made me wonder if there would be certain types of shop/product that would be more or less appropriate for a gentle collage of noises.
It’s been 8 months since I’ve done one of these. It’s not an end of year list – I would be more interested to know your top 10 of 2018 right now, tbh.
Anyway, some things I reckon I’ve fully digested and really rate. I’ve been picking up a few things lately that I’m pretty buzzy about, so I might write again in another few months. See if the buzz remains.
Isolée – Resort Island (Resort Island)
Good old Isolée made one of my favourite house (-adjacent ?) tracks 25 years ago now. His releases since then, especially the albums, have been pretty patchy, but Beau Mot Plage was so good I kept on checking in. He’s had this thing over the years where he’s dancy but it’s weird and the results are often uncomfortable – in particular he does weird things harmonically, which I think usually put me off. Not like “I’m jazz!” but “I dgaf about tuning!” This album is much friendlier than usual and I happily play it start to finish anytime. It’s even quite lush compared to older stuff. Good times.
The Japanese House – In The End It Always Does (Dirty Hit)
I was faintly amazed some Newsroom quiz mentioned The Japanese House recently, but my partner says her music has been on various TV shows and such. It’s indie pop, I guess, and she used to get compared a lot to The 1975. This album is much, much more mellow and gentle than those times. Like the first single, Boyhood: “Lets build some hype with something so chill it verges on nondescript!” 😅 OK then. But the whole thing has sunk in and now I love it.
Zachary Utz – Pop Wheelies (Sound As Language)
This is the next release on the same label that put out my Epiphytes, and I can’t tell you honestly whether that influences my opinion of it. It’s a really intriguing mix of often quite glitchy noisy stuff and lushness: most tracks involve some mix of guitar, flutes and vibraphone and some cheerful and exotica-leaning harmonies and melodies, but stuttery processing, distortions and pinging electronic sounds make it spiky, occasionally bordering on abrasive. At least you can’t really relax into it, and in this case I like that about it.
The closest thing I can think of is Autechre remixing those chilled out Tortoise instrumentals, and it’s not that close.
J. Albert Meets Will August Park – Flat Earth (29 Speedway)
Another combo of electronic processing and acoustic instruments, but in this case piano-led jazz cut up and looped to create a way more sedate and laid back feel than the Utz record. Chill, but with plenty of substance.
I did another walkthrough of one of my tracks, this one for ‘Spiralling’ off Also. It went pretty long, (really) just shy half an hour, so here’s some text if you’d prefer that. But you do miss out on understanding the joy of the high rising terminal in New Zealand English.
Here’s an embed of the track if you want to listen and read along instead of the video.
First up in the video I talk about the field recording that underpins the track, which is a phone recording from a ski field. I describe this as a poma lift. I talk through various subtle fx to give a mono recording space and a bit of variation.
Here’s a pic of where I made that recording. So the “clank” is people letting go of the platter or poma or whatever at it pinging upwards towards the overhead cable and hitting the end of the track.
Next, I talk about the main “plonkiness” melodic sound you hear throughout, which is 3 layers of marimbas spread in stereo space. I’m using what Bitwig calls “note fx” to push the original pattern around in time in various ways. I use modulation to bend the tuning of each of the 3 parts in different ways towards the end of every phrase. The track is in G Dorian mode, and I use a trick to moosh everything back into that scale.
Then, I talk about the chords and how I had spent far too much time on a technique that listens for any note on the “plonkiness” track and bumps up the cutoff frequency of the synth every time. This is definitely a technique I learnt from a YouTube video, but I have no idea how to find that video.
That’s the first half of the video!
Next up, the bassline is a series of sustained notes that are sent into an arpeggiator that is never changing the pitch but just shuffles the timing. Different modulation sources affect the speed of the arpeggiator steps, so it becomes faster and slower, sometimes straight and sometimes dotted.
I describe an arpeggio that comes in later, which is a vocoder as a cheap way to create a vowel-shape filter. The harmonic content is the same chord progression as the rest of the track, arpeggiated. The carrier is just a sawtooth synth, and then the modulator source is me trying to hold one note while changing the shape of my mouth to mess with the formants. I use modulation of a sample start point so that each vocoder note in effect has a different vowel shape.
About 22 minutes in, I explain that I took a field recording of me tapping a telecoms antenna with contact mics taped to it, and chopped it up to trigger each tap as a drum machine. Each sound in the drum machine is triggered by a different note pitch. I sequence a pattern on one note, then modulate the pitch so although the rhythmic pattern is constant, the particular sounds that are triggered are constantly changing in an unpredictable way.
Second-to-last, there’s a little synth hi-hat sound near the end of the track that is sent through a delay fx chain to give it interest and the delay length is modulated by a step sequencer that is not in sync with the time signature. So the delays on the hi-hat are shifting around. This sound is faded into the track by bringing down the cutoff frequency of a high-pass filter, rather than fading in the volume.
Finally, I describe some dishwasher sounds, how I chopped them and then made a sequence that alternates between forwards and backwards. This goes into a series of delay fx, then I used a sidechain modulation on the volume of the whole thing so that when the poma lift recording is at its loudest, the processed dishwasher sound is also at its loudest.
Mildly overwhelming review tbh, I’ve been rabbiting on recently online about how what I like about the Crucial Listening podcast is how the host really seems to engage with what he listens to, and here goes Tony Stamp doing the same with my own music.
I’ll be honest it’s super gratifying when these days releasing music sometimes feels a bit like throwing pebbles down an empty well. You kind of wonder if you’ll hear something, some kind of response. I certainly only make music for me, but I’m still human, a social animal, and still hope that someone somewhere is into it! There might be some music makers not like that, but that’s not me. Too old to pretend otherwise too, ha.
I made another video breaking down how I made one of my tracks. It’s a kind of low-key marketing or promotion that I don’t feel gross about – and previous times have actually stimulated some good chat with fellow electronic music makers.
What I like about RSS feeds is they’re really low distraction and unmediated. Email newsletters are pretty close, but they still arrive amongst other emails (to state the obvious). I like going to my reader when I want to and find there’s not much of that stressful vibe I associate with most contemporary online stuff.
I’ve not been really into that much new music in the last 5 months since I did one of these, so not had that much I wanted to write.
Partly I’ve been busy in work life and not listening while working, which was definitely a big part of remote working for me. But for whatever reason not much music has been grabbing me and inspiring me to play it again, in the face of the “content” churn:
Shuffling dumb pop hits and 80s soft rock via one of the big bad streaming services.
Audio books.
Podcasts.
And of course watching stuff, instead of listening:
movies,
TV, and
videos about
music,
movies,
TV…
Weirdly, despite feeling like I’m not really engaging with (other people’s) music, the days when I don’t listen to new music are absolutely the exception. Right now I have 175 Bandcamp links bookmarked in a “music to check” folder in my browser. I stack them up from links on social media and via announcements from the 450 accounts I follow on Bandcamp, telling myself I’ll listen to this stuff when I can give it a fair go. Then on top of that there’ll be “out of cycle” stuff like a friend’s new album or the new Everything But The Girl where I know I want to jump in right away.
So it’s not like I’m not listening, but it’s almost like a depressed thing where I just … note whether I reckon a piece of music is well done or not, rather than feeling it. The joys of being really busy all the time? The realities of the ever-increasing volumes of new releases? The dumbness of putting pressure on yourself to do something that’s supposed to be enjoyable?
Anyway, here’s some stuff and some responses to it.
Loscil // Lawrence English – Colours of Air (Kranky)
I’m always interested in what both of these folks do. Did you know Canadian Loscil released a 12″ via New Zealand label Involve Records? Cool cool cool.
Anyway, this album is all very simple sounding ambient music, but really is perfectly refined. “Great production” can be such a slap in the face, such faint praise, but if that’s how you want to describe what’s happening here it really is important and really is what separates this from much more boring shit.
English has a kind of physicality to what he does, even when you’d call it ambient. It sounds like it would hit hard over a big system, I guess. Meanwhile Loscil stuff can be a bit too washed out and distant for me, even while I love his more dubby stuff to bits. I find this album the best of both worlds, even the most simple repeating synth lines hitting hard and often sounding huge in a purely good way.
Arovane and Taylor Deupree – Skal_Ghost (12k)
Another first-time collaboration between two ambient music heavyweights, but one I’ll admit I was pretty sceptical about. I don’t often like Arovane’s music and recent Deupree hasn’t been essential, IMO, however much I adore e.g. Shoals. On top of that, the point of focus for this is gear, which sets off alarms.
Anyway, maybe these relatively low expectations contributed to how much I’ve been enjoying this. Exquisite moody sound sketches.
Peace Point – Cycles (Strange Behaviour)
OK, I did a remix that shows up on this, so maybe it looks bad to then blog about it, but fuck it, I’ve been listening to this a lot and I really enjoy the original tracks. (I mean, I really like my remix too, but you can’t say that.)
There’s an upbeat but still super mellow beat-y number, there’s one with bass guitar, but mostly some really tasty synth-based ambience. Definitely worth your time.
Inner River – Inner River (Atomnation)
Adrien had recommended this one before and I’d thought it was pretty good, but it really clicked this time around, just in the last month. Reminds me of territory Nicolas Jaar covers, but I like this a lot more than his music. Chill doof? Often beats, often wandering synths and mellow electric piano kind of stuff, as well as wordless vocal slices echoing about. Good times.
Got to be my favourite compilation of the year. A weird thing: as a whole it feels like it could be from one artist, just variations on beautiful, dreamy, synthy ambient from folks I’ve never heard of. But it also doesn’t all sound the same. A second weird thing: several tracks remind me of what I’m trying to do in recent months with my own music. Strange synchronicity.
Funki Porcini shows up, with a nice floating thing with far away voices that is nothing like what I remember him doing on Ninja Tune back last century. Mind you, I could point to someone else who did downtempo beats stuff and is now much more in the ambient camp. 😇
Some of the same artists are doing dancey vinyl on New_Words’ sister label and the album is tagged “grime”! 🤔 I guess if anything that weird, beatless version of grime that I never quite understood as a kind of dance music? It’s got the kind of sound selections and vibes that show up in dancier contexts, but no sign of drums here.
I hope New_Words are selling well off Bandcamp, because it’s bizarre how few people seem to have picked this up. Previous releases quote write ups from other music shops, so… 🤞
Teebs – Did It Again (self-released)
A nice wee single with Panda Bear from Animal Collective singing on the first track. Teebs is a producer with connections to that LA beat scene that included folks like Flying Lotus, Gasface Killer, Ras G, et al. He doesn’t release often, but when he does I pay attention. His style’s prettier, more delicate than most, often featuring acoustic sounds such as guitars, harps, and so on. Still groove-based in a very good way.
Nueen – Diagrams of Thought (Balmat)
I’m really impressed by this guy. Mostly drum-free, so I guess you’d say ambient, but in a bright and quite melodic way, not droney. And then there are beats and bassy moments that definitely sound like he must listen to plenty of dance music, even when sometimes those sounds are more like punctuation than a steady dancefloor thing.
I smile because it’s literally Balearic music – he’s from Menorca from memory – but not sure it sounds like how people use that as a genre descriptor. Great, anyway.
Cleared – Of Endless Light (Touch)
Beautiful softly swelling tracks, at their best when they have a bit of a metronomic slow mo pulse under them, not vying for attention but just stopping the drones from feeling settled. “Dawn” is heavy in a great way, but the title track is superb.
James Devane – Beauty Is Useless (Umeboshi)
It strikes me everything I’m writing about this time around is something that sounds like it could’ve been released a while back, with a few contemporary flourishes. This is slabs of kinda dubby, but also pretty and bright, techno, reminiscent of Kompakt about 15-20 years ago. Something like the Burger/Ink collaboration maybe.
When I say “slabs”, most tracks don’t really change. Like Devane’s set up some kind of musical system, hit record, let the system run for a bit, then at some point stopped recording again. I kind of love that in this context. Easy to get lost in it.
Loving this US trio’s throwback ambient techno vibes, like the best of 90s R&S or something, but the definite standout for me is the pair of remixes by xphresh (Ben Bondy/Special Guest DJ). Cheeky use of a pop acapella recontextualised beautifully, plus a close to instrumental version if vocals aren’t your thing. I see there’s vinyl on pre-order if that’s what you’re into.
Jack Woodbury | Peter Liley – Unfathomed Waters (Genre Defying)
Beautiful textures and moods from these Wellington NZ composers. While it leans really ambient, I also love the noisy explosive stuff near the end. There is no way those later tracks, distorted duets between crashing drums and roaring sax, are not directly influenced by Colin Stetson, but I’m fully into it. “Enter the Temple” in particular.
I do find the name of this Rattle Records sub-label pretty cringey. 😬 Oh well! I’m definitely going to write this one up for AmbientNZ.com when I get a minute.
Accelera Deck – Alligator (self-released)
The idea of a 2-hour, 15-track single is hilarious. But it was a rec from a friend and I read what the artist has to say and was immediately into it:
“…I usually start each new recording with a rough outline, or concept. Maybe just a single word…, with Alligator I decided to treat the beats as textures and explore all the permutations in a similar spirit as how I think Seefeel or Basic Channel/ Rhythm & Sound would”- c.jeely
I normally immediately avoid huge releases, keep it punchy (even if the music isn’t) I reckon. But I’ve really enjoyed just chucking this on shuffle and dipping in and out of as much or as little as I feel like. Tasty ambient dub kind of thing. I like the sound of it in the literal sense and the conceptual one.
Dettinger – Intershop (Kompakt)
Not at all a recent release, but I loved revisiting this recently. The remaster on Bandcamp sounds cracking.
I bought this at the Kompakt shop in Köln in 1999 and listened to it on my Discman as I travelled across Europe by train. So really nice memories there, which surely contributed to how much this blew me away, influenced my own music making and has continued to make me happy over decades. Track six is one of my favourite pieces of music.
There’s a thread of contemporary stuff I like (c.f. those xphresh remixes of Purelink 👆) that picks up from where folks like Dettinger left off, whether it’s coincidence or influence. I bought Jan Jelinek’s first album as Gramm at the Kompakt shop too, and I’m hearing that loungier end of his sound these days too. I listened to some really relevant thoughts from Kode 9 about how music actually develops, which I really agree with. It’s not a straight line.
Womb – Feeling Like Helium (Sonorous Circle & Arcade Recordings)
I never quite got Womb’s 2018 debut album (“got” in either sense!) but this single stood out and stuck with me, so four years late I shelled out and picked it up. It’s a beautiful song, but I reckon what probably lifts it for me is that re-played vocal part. The kind of thing I might expect in either some carefully produced pop or electronica, but being played live in the context of a quite loose indie band… it gets me in a way that this technical description probably doesn’t do justice to.
I secretly enjoyed breaking down the track “Griselinea Lucida” a couple of months back, so had another go with “Tonal Drift”. These are both off my most recent album, Room Tones. This time around I focused a bit more on how I went about writing, rather than just what parts make up the final track.
Ha, I’m contractually obliged to mention Adrien’s latest, since there’s a track on here called “Upton In Berlin”.
The album reminded me straight away of Adrien’s release back in the day on Move D’s label, where he was virtually/label-ly rubbing shoulders with Jan Jelinek, Moufang himself, and so on. The connections are the dusty hazy chords and dubbed out atmospheres and the switch between muffled drum machine beats and breakbeats.
It doesn’t feel like a throwback though – it’s also hard not to also think of the new schoolers who are on that retro cycle and bringing these sounds back, rejuvenated and exciting again. I’m thinking of that unnamed, loose collective connecting Kansas to Berlin (and Australia via Ben Bondy and also the Daisart label), names like Huerco S, Uon, Ulla Straus, Exael, and on and on.
Floatinghead – Live at The Third Eye (self-released)
My idea of tasty jazz. I somehow never went to the Third Eye, which I think is now shut? This reminds me of what I like from Sam Gendel, Sam Wilkes and associates. Super tasteful sparse synthy passages, a lot of groove from start of finish (never a shuffle), catchy melodic bits, and when it all goes skronk it’s welcome contrast. Horns from Lucien Johnson and Bridget Kelly are great, but it all works together really well. A great set!
Carmen Villain – Only Love From Now On (Smalltown Supersound)
The opening track with Arve Henriksen is so beautiful it’d be easy to miss just how good the album is as a whole. The insistent, ringing percussion and shimmering layers work so well with Henriksen’s playing. Easy to draw the dots to Jon Hassell but I also find it pretty distinctly its own thing. Elsewhere a lot of flute intermingling with the electronic beds and soft percussion. “Subtle Bodies” is another fave.
Bad Channel – INTLBLK005 (International Black)
Nice dub techno two-track from Harvey Sutherland and Kane Ikin, excellent Melbourne producers. Not sure what more to say. Sparse, warm, rounded off (not spiky), and every element placed beautifully to serve the groove. I wrote “sparse” to dodge the usual implications of “minimal” suggesting something abstract or cold, I don’t get that vibe from this at all. Sutherland’s love of house comes through.
Kris Keogh – Processed Harp Works, Vol 3 (Muzan Editions)
Exactly what it says on the tin. Northern Territory-based harpist and electronics bod, Keogh dropped the first volume of this via New Weird Australia 11 years ago and I still listen to it. Beautiful lush harp parts and really really digital managing of that acoustic source. Sometimes harsh and jagged, sometimes sparkly and dubby. The combination really really works for me, such a rich and beautiful sound source, and then the frisson created by the digital processing… something about that really hits the spot.
I made this video, breaking down the track “Griselinea Lucida” from my latest solo album Room Tones. It was a pretty interesting experience. I run software training as part of my day job and that set me up to be pretty relaxed while making the video, which I did record live in one take, and pretty self-critical afterwards. 😅
I never, ever want to be a “content creator”. But I do really like to share and I have learnt so many useful and musical techniques for my current music-making environment via videos. I was also partly inspired by Auckland musician Kraus breaking down his track “Candy”. This video is all about a relatively different way of making electronic music to how I do it, but it was still just fascinating to me and great fodder. I hope stuff I share and perhaps take for granted will trigger ideas for others.
