notes: Call & Response

Some history…

I’ve always loved things that make sounds, but I started down a path toward seriously making electronic music in about 2003 or so. My pattern for many years had been to go into a frenzy of music making for a few weeks, release something, and then go idle for months., I’d fill my time with games, books, movies etc. but not create anything until the pressure built up to uncomfortable levels.

So for 2016, inspired by Jonathan Coulton’s “Thing A Week”, I set myself the goal of finishing something every week.

At first, this felt like a chore. Sunday afternoon would roll around, I’d realize I hadn’t done the thing yet, sigh, and open up my DAW to crank something out because I told myself had to. But the more I did it, the easier it got, and the faster and better I got at it, and the easier the creativity would flow. I started looking forward to those sessions.

In early spring of that year, my MIDI controller keyboard died and on a whim, I picked up an Arturia Microbrute to replace it. I fell in love with its simplicity and boldness immediately. Working with it meant switching from offline rendering to real-time recording. That primed the pump to play it live instead of using MIDI, and to improvise. It also predisposed me toward analog patching, so when Mutable Instruments offered several Eurorack modules in a charity auction, I took the plunge. That led to an even stronger wave of enthusiasm and inspiration, and by the end of 2016 I had finished 120 tracks, with an additional 266 in 2017. In 2018 I began releasing albums in earnest.

All of this was valuable practice and a lot of fun — but just as importantly, I listened to my old work a lot. Some of it had been more fun to make than to listen to, but some of it was pretty good or at least had interesting elements. I developed a feel for what worked and what didn’t, and started to focus my efforts.

Meanwhile in the present…

After I released The Light of Day Vol. 1, I had planned for Vol. 2 to feature material from these two pivotal, exploratory, rapid-fire years. But while reviewing it — looking for tracks that sounded like what Starthief became — I didn’t find nearly as much of material as I really wanted. What I found instead was a bit of inspiration.

The track “Sarah: a Dialogue” (see below) got me pondering the concept of dialogue in music, particularly call-and-response. I decided to make this project a dialogue across time, responding in 2026 to four remastered pieces from 2017.

The cover art was originally a photograph by David Underland on Pexels, my go-to source for royalty-free images. No AI was used in the artwork, music, or text, and as far as I’m aware I don’t use any vibe-coded tools.

When I released these tracks in 2017, I posted some brief notes about each. These are shared here as originally written [plus some editorial commentary from the present].

Something about the sound of “Cat Bells You” reminded me of Nora the piano-playing cat of internet fame, with her imperfect but insistent rhythm. I also thought of a cat’s claws snagging on a taut string. So I started with something plucky (thanks always to Natural Gate), using 0-Ctrl’s irregular time sequencing. The belltree/chime sound was a lucky accidental part of another voice (generated by Mimeophon self-oscillating and triggering Rings), with a combination of modulation pushing it into higher frequencies that are then enhanced with a delay effect.

03 < Sap (May 4, 2017)

I had planned to come home from work, get two of the three chores on my list done first, and then work on music. Instead I kind of interleaved getting stuff done and making two tracks while resting. But the main thing is I got stuff done.

Just a simple, spooky dark ambient drone. OooOOoOOoOoo.

Voice 1: Kermit ch2 (amplitude modulated by ch1) feeding Rings in inharmonic strings w/reverb mode; FM from Tides Uni output.
Voice 2: Tides with slope modulated by same Kermit ch2 signal; Bi output to ValhallaUberMod VST.

04 > Root (Aug 11, 2026)

“Sap” of course leads to thoughts of trees. I wanted something big and slow here, and perhaps a sound like irregularly moving fluids. I intentionally hadn’t read over my old notes yet, and decided on an FM growl for my “big slow thing” because I’m a little obsessed with FM; it is later supported by good ol’ analog Minibrute 2S and a lot of delay feedback. The noises are from Ataraxic Iteritas with a considerable amount of modulation.

05 < Sarah: a Dialogue (Jan 7, 2017)

A demented “conversation” sampled from the viral seebotschat Twitch stream of two Google Home units, nicknamed Vladimir and Estragon, reading the lines of two interacting AI chatbots. I did cut and paste the lines a bit.

[The so-called “AI” was Cleverbot, which predated LLMs and their energy-sucking data centers by several years. It was trained on conversations with people who knew they were talking to a chatbot, rather than text used without permission.]

Playback is fed to the modular synth and multed to 4 different inputs; I won’t get specific about the patch but it involves Rings as a lo-fi delay and the vocoder in Warps.

VST plugins included Echobode, Sonitex STX-1260, Valhalla Ubermod and Unfiltered Audio Fault.

06 > Ignore All Previous Instructions (Aug 29, 2026)

I wanted something that echoed some aspects of the soundscape, and a bit of the gradual flow of “speech” and pauses without actually being speech. It came together from a set of disparate parts that all decided to cooperate nicely, or so it feels. I know there’s human agency involved, but if you’ve practiced enough, jamming stuff together and following your gut often works.

07 < We Considered Ourselves to Be a Powerful Culture (Oct 13, 2017)

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[That’s the main comment, just “.” A MetaFilter tradition, in remembrance of someone who passed.]

Voice 1: E352 in Morph+Fold mode, with output 1 modulating output 2’s fold amount, Hertz Donut (from voice 2) modulating output 1’s fold amount, and Kermit LFO modulating the morph. Through Dynamix as a compressor, then ValhallaVintageVerb.

Voice 2: Hertz Donut, with the primary osc set to LFO rates, the secondary to low audio. The XOR output FMs the primary osc, and the mod bus is set to discontinuity (orange mode). Triangle output is monitored. EchoMelt VST.

Voice 3: Tides into Rings, set to sympathetic strings mode at a low frequency. 2HP LFO stepped triangle into Position, and constant rapid strumming from Hertz Donut’s modulation osc. My Rings has a loose FM jack so I intentionally wiggled the cable into it for some pitch jumps. ValhallaRoom VST.

08 > Pardon Our Dust (Aug 30, 2026)

Of course the preceding title comes from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_nuclear_waste_warning_messages. So I wanted something reminiscent of a Geiger counter without getting too close to it, and just a lot of noise and mess and ruin. Among other things there’s noise generated by Strega’s lo-fi delay turned super slow, clicks triggering feedback, my trusty Ataraxic Iteritas, distorted sweeps from K-Accumulator, a handful of samples from Detunized’s HumBuzz Universal collection layered in.

09 > Verdant Revenant (Aug 9, 2026)

Wait, what? This one is a response to a song I wrote in 1980, which won a composition contest… in my 3rd grade music class. I brought home a glockenspiel, worked out an eerie tune (myself) and wrote lyrics to fit it (with some parental help). I shall not share the song here, but I remember it well.

I took just the start of its melody, borrowed inspiration from another portion to serve as a counterpoint, slowed everything down to ambient-appropriate tempo and here we are. Young me would have lost their freakin’ mind at this, although I kept the timbres deceptively simple here.

(I had Odessa’s main frequency constant for the main line, while its Warp was sequenced.)