Month: April 2019

about a dog who found two bones

Resist and be free: More than false choices and options, the highest freedom lies in being true to oneself and defying the expectations of others

Hmm.

The new album is doing pretty well by my standards: a few people so far have voluntarily paid for it (thanks!), there have been some appreciative comments, and a DJ is to play something of mine in a show called Sonic Tapestries on Resonance FM based in London.

Having a theme for each album is a strength, compared to no theme or retroactively renaming things to fit a theme when the album is 3/4 finished. So I’m brainstorming a bit about the next thing. I’ve already decided against overt political themes, though.

The selling-off of old gear seems to be progressing nicely — putting stuff up on Reverb instead of relying on forums really helps. I turned some of those proceeds around to preorder a Rossum Panharmonium, which I suspect might be even more full of surprising uses than Erbe-Verb.

I’m also doing a bit more research/homework on synthesis techniques. I think I finally have a good theoretical grasp on phase distortion as used in the Casio CZ series — which was pretty neat and relatively easy to work with. Casio’s foray into professional synths was pretty brief and a little rocky, and nobody else really picked up the PD synthesis ball probably because FM was more versatile, and samplers and virtual analog were really taking off by then. reFX PlastiCZ imitated the CZ synths nicely, u-he Bazille has PD as one of the things its weird but versatile oscillators supported, and I think there’s a CZ Eurorack oscillator or two. Some of the tools in XFer Serum are technically phase distortion too, though not with a similar style to the CZ. But it’s still mostly the black sheep of the digital synthesis family, and that makes me want to explore it some with the ER-301 and perhaps the E370.

details

Mastering’s done. I’m happy with the sound and I’m working on the image and the words. I have some patch notes and a bit of explanation to write up. That was going to happen tonight but I wound up exploring some sound experiments a little instead, and reading The Rhesus Chart.

I don’t often like to choose single favorites among wide categories. But it’s safe to say that The Laundry Files is my favorite series in the horror-comedy-spy-fantasy-software development genre. It’s up for a Hugo award this time (and it’s got good company; the Sick Puppy bloc aka “everything must be made by, for and about white manly men” must be too busy with QAnon or MAGA rallies these days to bother with merely extinguishing diversity and creativity in genre fiction).

A survey of the patch notes from Passing Through told me:

  • As expected and hoped, the ER-301 has taken a central role.
  • Surprisingly, Kermit was the second most referenced module. It’s become my go-to LFO, it makes a nice modulation VCO, and has a unique and lovely-weird sound on its own.
  • The E370 is still a good workhorse, and I discovered two new techniques with it which will get some more exercise in the future.
  • I only used the Natural Gate in one song, and the Dynamic Impulse Filter not at all. Me, the LPG junkie (according to the designer of Natural Gate and my own admission)! There are a bunch of plausible reasons and one weird one (putting all my black-panel modules together makes them visually blend in with each other). Regardless, I’m holding onto both of them for now, especially the NG.
  • Tides 2018 was underused. Even with some of its extra abilities, it’s just not pushing my buttons even when I try pushing its. So I’m putting it up for sale.
  • tanh[3] is a good module, but not an everyday module and I can do what it does in the ER-301. I’ll probably let it go too.

The newest synth trade show, Synthplex, took place in California last weekend. Less news than I expected came out of it given the amount of hype around it, but the Rossum Electro-Music Panharmonium stood out. It’s basically an FFT spectrum analyzer which then controls a cluster of analog oscillators — not quite a vocoder, but an odd and intriguing take on a spectral resynthesizer. I literally had dreams about the thing. I may find myself picking one up before Knobcon after all, once I’ve sold a little more gear to fund it 100%.

Speaking of synth trade shows, Knobcon has now also missed its postponed date for opening up ticket sales. The Facebook page still says March 1, with no updates since January. The website itself still says “Tickets On Sale in March 2019” and the “Buy Tickets” link still goes to the exhibitor registration page (which sometimes appears broken or closed). I hope things are okay with everyone involved.

writing while listening

Writing this while mastering the album. A few tracks have given me minor difficulties, and Sound Forge Pro 10 continues to be about as stable as a game of Jenga running on a Packard Bell laptop running Windows Vista on the back of a neurotic chihuahua on a ship in a storm. Or something like that. But it progresses.

Because listening to the same new songs several times in a row and making minor adjustments isn’t enough I guess, I’ve started a sequential listen through my Starthief albums. And I noticed something.

A few months before starting Nereus I had felt like I’d “found my sound” and was refining it. If you listen over the course of a few hundred songs in 2017 it does sound a bit like I’m closing in on something, and Nereus is the pinnacle as well as the end of that phase. The album is full of sequenced bass/melody lines with hard attacks and exponential decays and octave leaps; lots of snappy LPG plucks and saturated triangle waves, and backgrounds made busy with exotic modulation techniques.

And then there’s a line. Or perhaps an ellipsis…

And then there’s Shelter In Place. That was when I really got into the improvisational, drones-and-rhythm thing. As I listened to it, my thought was “I bet that was when I traded away the 0-Coast.” I just doublechecked, and yes, it was. In a sense, SIP is really the first proper Starthief album, and Nereus is the end of the transitional phase that created Starthief.

My 2019 albums felt more like they stood on opposite sides of a line: this change from “modular 1.1” to “2.0” that I kept on about. One saw me paring down my gear, the other saw the first usage of a lot of new stuff. But the gear change was carefully arranged to preserve and streamline the things I wanted to keep doing, and so these two albums really aren’t very far apart in composition, technique or sound.

My interpretation of the Passing Through theme varied per song — sometimes I carved out more breathing space (which is where I think the album sounds a little more different), and sometimes I layered things on like those interpenetrating energy fields I was talking about. In both cases, I was exploring some new technique as well as the gear. But it all still sounds like Starthief to me, and I should know 😉

the next medium-sized thing

I’m declaring Passing Through “feature-complete,” as is sometimes said in the software development business. I’ve got everything recorded and have the order worked out, I just need to do some minor editing, and then mastering and artwork and that’s that.

I thought I had a pretty neat idea for a title for the next album, but it turns out to be the same title as a Christian Rock song. I’ve already had the displeasure of seeing one of my album titles as the title of a novel on a convenience store shelf.

…You know what, I’m not even going to check if “Passing Through” is already the title of something because it’s really a common enough phrase.