There are all kinds of ways one could go with the concept of zero in music, especially electronic music. Rather than prescribing something for this project, I just decided to follow my instincts as I went.
All the track titles are words for “zero” in various languages. Most modern languages use an obvious variant of “zero” or “null”, so I turned to the ancient world and to Africa and Asia for variety.
The album art was a public-domain photo of the number 0 on a big LED clock, with a lot of manipulation in PaintShop Pro 2020. There was a lot of use of Radial Blur and the Polar Coordinate tool to bend it into strange filaments/tendrils/loops. Absolutely no AI.
Rather than just a list of specific gear used in every sound in the recording, I wanted to hit the highlights and comment on techniques and key specifics. There’s a lot of secret sauce, additional effects, subtle modulation, and in some cases background voices.
Safar
The main voice’s unusual rhythm was created by (1) routing one of the X outputs of Mutable Instruments Marbles through Make Noise GTE and Takaab Nearness to rearrange the levels, then feeding it back to modulate Marbles’ own tempo, and (2) Noise Engineering Imitor multitap delay with time warp and some taps disabled. There are multiple layers of digital and analog distortion and shorter delays working here.
The buzzing, grinding drone is Xaoc Odessa through some heavy distortion. Odessa really loves distortion — whether just a touch to beef up its thinner “digital” character, to overdrive a few partials for power chords, or to bend it out of the harmonic series and introduce a lot of intermodulation.
The “solo” voice that comes in later is Make Noise Mimeophon self-oscillating, which it does very delay, granulized and played on Make Noise 0-Ctrl with unquantized tuning.
Nialas
Fancy Synthesis K-Accumulator is heavily featured here, going through some long diffused delay/reverb. There’s a slow external sequence, but K-A is otherwise doing its own modulation — its UFG (Universal Function Generator) and delta-sigma pattern generator modulating each other and several timbre parameters.
That extended reverb caused some conflicting bass frequencies which led to noisy rumble. It’s still evident in the final version — you know I don’t generally want my recordings to be “clean” anyway; dirt is character. But the amount and character of that rumble was tamed a bit by isolating that band and running it through a tremolo set to the main frequency that I wanted to keep.
While K-A does the heavy lifting, the bass is a separate voice (Noise Engineering Toros Iteritas Alia through Make Noise Spectraphon in SAM mode). The Partials parameter on Spectraphon acted like a lowpass gate.
The haunting secondary melody comes from K-A’s modulation oscillator through the other side of Spectraphon — but the real magic is from Aberrant DSP Lair, creating those tuned resonances that ring out.
Midén
The main voice is Dawesome Myth, played on a Linnstrument 128. (I like to set up polyphonic voices to use only pressure, not an envelope, to control volume and brightness.) Extra texture comes from running it through Unfiltered Audio SpecOps and a rapidly modulated delay.
There are three different “noise” voices going on behind it, with the more textured and prominent of them being the Surge XT Alias VCO in VCV Rack, going through Lese Codec to break it up with simulated packet loss.
The bass drone is Mutable Instruments Rings, with long sustain and a dark tone, being strummed very rapidly and heavily processed by Valhalla FutureVerb.
Shunya
The opening voice is Arturia Minifreak V, heavily processed with CRQL Aninia which is an especially aggressive spectral compressor, and Adaptr Utopia which is a spectral reverb. The sequence is from Mario Nieto’s Harmony Bloom, a very flexible arpeggiator based on a rotating spiral.
K-Accumulator does most of the background work — it provides the buzzing, pulsing, “wow”-ing, rattling drone behind it. It’s capable of a very wide variety of sounds just by sending it different modulation sources.
Arturia Synclavier V is playing a chord drone, occasionally emerging into glassy shimmers, but mostly kept soft. I don’t really use this synth for samples, but really like it for layered FM/additive patches and the “chorus” feature which lets you dial in unison with arbitrary intervals.
Public-domain vocal samples from the NASA archives and archive.org audiobooks are run through some spectral processing and Codec to glitch them up. I like how Codec’s “packet repeat” option gives almost an impression of a red-winged blackbird at times (one of my favorite bird calls).
Unothi
The main voice is ALM Akemie’s Castle, delayed and filtered and heavily reverbed, with filter frequency and FM depth modulated at audio rate.
The secondary drone is an odd combination of distortion, some serious bandpass filtering and granular pitch shifting — the source was Arturia Solina V but it honestly could have been anything. One of those patches where simple screwing around leads to something cool, and you have to know when to stop messing with it before the moment is lost.
The chiptune-like sequence is a fun patch. Make Noise Function acts as a clock for 0-Ctrl, which provides a pitch sequence to Joranalogue Walk 4. One of Walk’s outputs feeds GTE, which has its Space modulated by Function, and one of the GTE outputs clocks another channel of Walk. So we hear one relatively stable channel and one that can’t quite decide which subharmonic to settle on.
Nefer
“Nefer” is the ancient Egyptian word for both “beautiful” and “zero.” They didn’t use zero as a placeholder digit, but in accounting and to represent ground level in architectural diagrams. So with this one I wanted the concept of returning to a balanced, level state.
After the noise intro, the main voice was a recorded looping sequence, which I retuned manually in Sound Forge to be a constant pitch, then offset the L and R channels in time and fixed the phase correlation with RJ Studios Sideminder ZL. Then, I applied the upward and downward pitch bends, and shifted the channels and corrected the phase correlation again. This gave it its shifting, airy sound.
(Stereo phase correlation is important for mono listening or for pressing vinyl, neither of which especially concern me. But even when listening in stereo, out-of-sync channels can sound weirdly pinched or “inside-out” or even cause vertigo in headphone listeners… so I always pay attention to this detail, especially because I use a lot of techniques and effects that can cause problems.)
K-Accumulator sequences its own main pitch, while its modulation oscillator is sequenced by 0-Ctrl. Since the pitch inputs have their own attenuverters and are quantized harmonically, they can be turned down to shrink the range and return to nefer. The FM index of course can also be turned down to reduce the influence of the second sequence.
Behind that, Odessa drones while FMd by a sine wave (…through-nefer FM, of course.)
Ling
The rhythm and sound both emerged from Walk 4 with distortion and EQ in a feedback loop. Minor changes in settings created very different rhythms or chaos.
To enhance the bigger thumps, a transient detector picks them out and feeds an impulse to Valhalla Supermassive. A small amount of Sound Forge’s noise reduction tool, sampling its profile from the space between those thumps, was applied to increase dynamic range.
Eber
The opening drone is the Ouros oscillator in VCV Rack, with phase modulation from a sine wave. A few LFOs slowly modulate its parameters, and it breaks up a bit when its feedback crosses a particular threshold, depending on the other settings. I used Minimal Audio Ripple Phaser in lowpass mode, controlled by an expression pedal, instead of controlling the mixer level.
The melody is Whimsical Raps Just Friends droning at six frequency multiples, selected by Whimsical Raps Silhouette. Its output is sent in parallel through a clean reverb and the much dirtier Make Noise Strega.
The counterpoint is K-A trying to sync to Silhouette’s Light output, through the Make Noise QPAS filter with its frequency sequenced.
Tshijengu
The main voice is Arturia Jup-8 V, heavily chorused by a pair of Pedal Partners Mesmeriser in mid/side stereo. It’s played on the Linnstrument.
Odessa drones with only a few partials active, and heavy Tension to bend it toward something chord-like. Of course there’s distortion. The comb filter and partial count are modulated (Odessa almost demands modulation, it can actually sound fairly irritating and unrelenting when it sits too still) and I turn the Harmonic Factor knob at times to multiply the frequency of some of the partials, changing the chord.
Toward the end, I’ve got IME Kermit feeding Walk 4, with detuned PSP Pianoverb and CRQL Anina turning it mostly into airy noise.