ambient

Baryphonic

Sometimes writing a song like 509 can cause incredible pressure or an unrealistic expectation that because I did that yesterday, I should be able to do it again today. Happily, I actually found it to be a relief. There are only two days left in the month, I’ve written a couple of really solid songs, so I can actually relax a bit and feel like I had more of a “quality over quanitity” kind of experience this time around. That’s not to say that I didn’t feel pressure when sitting down to start writing, only that it was more the … Continue reading

Dogmatic Impressionism

As is often the case, this piece started off with that very first bell sound and I started building to it. As with the Output plugins mentioned yesterday, the Cycles library from Slate + Ash has become a dark-horse favorite for me – a pleasant surprise because my initial reaction to it was more in the disappointed realm. In part, it’s because the library is computationally intense. There’s a lot of granular manipulation going on, tons of controls… it’s challenging to a computer made in the last year, to say nothing of what it does to my poor 2012 Mac … Continue reading

Hadal Zone

Sitting down to write, I don’t think I was intending on a return to the deep space music / dark ambient genre, but here we are. I tried a slightly different approach this time, going with a slower tempo and then using a super sparse drum pattern, but running it through several effects. The opening note and kick drum sound remind me a lot of a song I wrote back in the 80s, but it’s only that opening moment. After adding the bass drone and letting it loop around for a bit, I started thinking of footage you see from … Continue reading

Slow Melt

Since I clearly have not had enough minimalist ambientish tracks this month, here’s another. Actually, this track sounds very much like it could have come directly from my 2017 Song-A-Day participation. That’s not a bad thing – I had been planning to create a “space music” album out of several tracks from that year before losing the original projects to that hard drive crash in 2018. This would have fit in perfectly with pieces like Steady Stateless, Wetware Diagnostic, and Somatic Cube,  so if you like this one, you should go listen to those as well. Perhaps the similarity isn’t … Continue reading

Kef

As you listen to this track, you’re hearing what giving up sounds like. Not in a bad way, I suppose, but I’ve decided that I’m just stressing myself out trying to force “songs” this month. Both A Tiny Thing and Pigeonhole were surprise appearances, more so than my normal level of surprise when an idea for a song shows up. But there was no lightning strike today, so I was in the studio for about an hour trying out different sounds and textures and ideas, when finally I just decided to start recording what I was doing. Kef is a … Continue reading