of alchemy and analog synthesists

Ahh, for those good old days when synths were big, bulky and mysterious.

I was born in 1974, but I musically identify most with the stuff that was going on right around that time, say, 1972 through about 1984. The rise of the analog (as opposed to the purely modular) synth through the rise and fall of the analog poly. When digital comes in, I just loose interest. Eno can have his DX7 - he is the only one I can think of who pulls anything interesting out of it. Sure, at the time the digitals came out, I was just getting into synthesis and, as with any industry driven by technology, I was swept up into the turn to digital and that is what compelled me to buy my Wavestation in 1993 with a small inheritance I received. I don't regret it. But I also don't miss it. I am happily learning my Andromeda instead. I am grateful for the return to analogue in this first decade of the twenty first century. It feels a bit like coming home.

As a little kid in the age of new wave I remember listening to music and already being able to single out that strange instrument with a keyboard on it that I knew wasn't a piano - or even like my old great aunt's organ. Finally, I heard the word - synthesizer - and that it was about electricity - and it was instant love.

I remember the way that Gary Numan's "Cars" or Tom Petty's "You Got Lucky" would make me feel. I won't say other-worldly. It definitely had to do with our own world - in fact, very deeply and primally so. I won't say "technological" either. It was more like alchemy, like mad science. I guess that is why Thomas Dolby (steam punk for sure) is a hero to me, while Vince Clarke (who is certainly a great synthesist and programer - no argument here, but he) just doesn't do anything for me.

I've said here before that I don't like synth pop. Yet - and here I am letting the cat out of the bag - I love Duran Duran; and Nick Rhodes is, well, a big synth-hero to me. (Excuse: I was a kid and I did not understand or even know about the weird teenage girl cult-following. That stuff still makes me feel queasy.) What is going on here? I have been grappling with this seeming inconsistency. I think the thing to me is: does the use of the synthesizer make you feel like a robot, a guy with a fetish for the synthetic - or does it make you feel like a sorcerer - like a conjuror. (Sometimes robot is good, so long as you have a sense of humor about it, like Kraftwerk or Devo.)

So this is a post of respect to a few of the synthesists that were certainly involved in pop music (other than everybody's dead-obvious Brian Eno - he isn't a hero, he is a god - for crying outloud; he isn't a synthesist - he is an alchemist of recording technology, and that is enough said for now), but not necessarily in "techno" that is to say, pop enamored with technology. Rather, to me, they used technology alchemically to conjure experiences for their listeners.

I begin with Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran. His first synth: an EDP WASP. Followed by the Crumar Performer string synthesizer (one of the early very limited poly synths). He would later use the Prophet 5 and both the Jupiter 8 and 4. He did pick up a Fairlight CMI, but has continued using analog: he currently uses the Andromeda A6 (yeay!). Okay, so their videos are notoriously more like little surreal movies - which means no synth shots. I picked something from their reunion a couple of years ago so that you could actually see the man at work:

Going back to some straightforward punk new wave, I love listening to Blondie's Jimmy Destri with his old school synthesis backed up with his organ and rhodes piano - hey, he had to get polyphony somehow! Alchemy? I don't know, but it sure is fun, and he is a pioneer:

On the other side of the pond we had Japan, confused by krautrock, too early to be new romantic, to late to be glam. They missed the boat in terms of becoming pop idols. Duran Duran took that for them. But they were probably the better for it. Richard Barbieri has had a great career not worrying about staying popular (like it seems to me that Duran Duran has tried to do to a certain degree). So here is some early Japan. Check out Barbieri's Oberheim and modular (can anybody identify what kind it is at around 2:48?):

Here is somebody's video art to a more recent track by Barbieri showing his developed synthesizer style. Ignore the vid, enjoy the music:

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For the handful of folks out there following my web log: I am sorry I have been away for a while. I have had a month full of life changing events that took all week to deal with, either leading up to or coming down from said events. Family changes, vocational work, ecclesiastical affairs. When things like these come along, my avocation suffers. I look forward to the next two months of summer. I hope to share some productivity. I was very productive at the end of may, but what I produced was children's music for my boy! I shared that, more appropriately, on our family blog. Anyway, thanks for your patience and thanks for following. Peace.

A6 meets monome and prophet

While spending some time managing my learning curve this afternoon I managed to actually squeeze out something productive, musical and fun! "Does A.I. Dream of Monomial Sheep?":

Does A.I. Dream of Monomial Sheep? by Tetramorph

While learning to code in my own patterns in polygomé I got the monophonic bass grove going on the Andromeda (A6). I love the interference pattern created by playing polygomé polyphonically with a monophonic patch. The A6's ribbon controller gives me the lovely filter sweeps.

Then I set up Ultrabeat in Logic and got that going with boiingg. Fun! Polyrhythms for those with no percussion training whatsoever! After I had recorded both of these tracks (A6 bass, boiingg drums) I realized that (á la map~map) they sounded pretty good played simultaneously, so I just left them at that.

Then I played with some bell sounds on my Prophet (p600). Panned them hard left. Then I dug up an old lead sound I programmed on my p600 about 16 years ago that served me well then, and it serves me well now, towards the end of the track, panned hard right.

Okay, so, anyone with tips out there on how to make electronic dance music more interesting? I don't know what to do when the old fashioned verse / chorus structure isn't there. And also on my mixing, arranging and "mastering" (placed, quite deliberately, in scare quotes). Did I over-compress it? Over-anything else? Etc.?

I would welcome any constructive criticism (especially from those of you out there on Soundcloud). Thanks for following, and thanks for the support. Peace

some monome semiotics

islandis recently shared a paper on the monome phenomenon that he wrote for a semiotics class he is taking at Duke:

http://islandis.livejournal.com/17680.html

It has garnered a little (but not enough, in my opinion) conversation on the monome forum.

The monome device is an odd kind of sign system. Even a honeycomb pattern would give more of a musical sense of scale-pattern. A grid is so deliberately open ended. In classical semiotic terms, is it the symbol, the reference or the referent? When you decouple that grid, which is which? Are the buttons the references, the LEDs the symbols and the application output the symbol? How do they all overlap?

Hmm. Nothing quite like monome meditative joy. Thanks for following.  Peace.

progress plot

Life has a way of getting in the way of living sometimes. Having time for my avocation is certainly something I want to prioritize - if for nothing else than my own sanity. There is, however, something to the word "avocation" that indicates that it must hold only a relative place of importance in one's scheme of things.

Good things have been happening vocationally recently. Lots of good creativity. That is, of course, the point of a sabbatical. And I am happy about it. And big things have been happening in my life as well. Lots of family joys and sorrows all at once.

That being said, avocational productivity is down these days while learning, thankfully, plods on. The Andromeda is massive. I will try to just get a sine wave out of the thing and, as warned, I have to sort through menus and manuals to figure out why I hear overtones! The filter is still whining - why? Haven't I turned down all the resonance? Okay - Where is the modulation routing to the resonance? Etc, etc. Oh, well. I still love it!

The Andromeda and the Prophet sound great together. I will have to record a sample and share soon. Something about analog with analog. You just can't beat it. I even love it when they are slightly out of tune with one another. I am also loving the Prophet ever more as I have an analog beast to compare it to. The P600 is lovely in her simplicity.

I think I will commit to a week of production before the summer is out. I want to do the whole "make an album in a day" thing, but, instead, turn it into a week. I'm going to go for about six songs. Pop music is what I am hearing in my head these days. Really cheesy, dance-y, disco-y kind of stuff. So, a pop song a day? It should be fun. I have a tentative name for the album: "cliché." That should free me from lofty expectations. Until then, thanks for the encouragement.

manifesting the architectonic

I while ago Stretta put up this great talk given by a music professor, Karl Paulnack at the Boston Conservatory. I highly recommend it. In it, among other wonderful things, he says this:

. . . the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.

Now I love this statement and find it so true. But I worry about the the way that a distinction between "inner" and "outer," could imply a kind of interiority or subjectivism that would have been foreign to the ancient mind. Paulnack never mentions it, and I am sure that he would not intend it, but such an interior "self," is much more a product of post-Cartesian Romanticism with a dash of Psychoanalysis than it is of the Greeks who understood the relationship of music to astronomy. I love the way Paulnack captures so well our experience of music. I also want to emphasize the way that music overcomes barriers between people - especially those false ones created by ideologies of interiority and subjectivity.

So, yes to "pieces inside our hearts," when "heart" is construed as synecdoche for the psychosomatic unity of the human body and soul. But not so much if "heart" here is misread as something "touchy feely" - you know what I mean.

The key distinction is not so much between the "inner" and the "outer," when such a distinction is conceived in terms of a romantic interior life of a "true self." In order to avoid that connotation I would rather talk in terms of the more simple distinction between "visible" and "invisible," or between the "physical" and the "psychic," "noetic," or notional. But "notional," not in the sense of "that's just a notion," but in the thicker sense of something just as real, if not more real than the physical, that is the name for what is not physical about creation. So I guess I mean here the Christian theological distinction between the heavens and earth, taken in their theologically richest sense.

Astronomy is not an "external" to a music that is "internal." Astronomy just is the music of the visible heavens - the music of the spheres. Music is not so much the astronomy of things interior - and therefore merely subjective and private - within our souls. Music is rather the universal, "astronomically big," astronomy of the hidden, invisible and greater part of created reality: the invisible (but more real) heavens. Music puts us directly in touch with the architectonic structures of the cosmos that the visible heavens merely physically manifest.

So often, after Romanticism, creativity is construed in very private terms. This puts a lot of pressure on the artist to "prove" him or herself. The ancients of course, knew that this great flow of stuff didn't come from some place interior within ourselves. (Check out this other post on Stretta's blog where he embeds a video of the author Elizabeth Gilbert giving her own account of the ancient sense of genius and the creative "daemon.") Creativity, rather, is the manifestation of how we as human beings can sometimes get swept up into these architectonic and cosmic realities - realities far bigger than us - and come out on the other side and say: look, I made this. Or, rather: look what came into being through the way that I participated in things greater than I.

I think that is why I love the monome device as a tool for creating music: the decoupled grid seems to me to be this electronically beautiful mimesis of how in music in general greater patterns manifest within small constraints. The LED patterns keep going, even after you loose touch. Good music always has these moments wherein you get this little glimpse of the vastness that is being made manifest - all of which cannot be immediately made present at once - the grid would burst, our hearts too.

Making the distinction primarily between the visible and the invisible, rather than the physical and the so-called interior also takes the pressure off of the individual artist to produce (good stuff), and allows for the mystical to come back into the experience of creativity - and especially (at least speaking for myself) of creating music.

Near the end of his article he says the following to his new music students:

You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. I’m not an entertainer; I’m a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You’re here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Man, I find that so amazingly well written, and inspiring. When we think of the role of creating music in terms of a distinction between the visible and the invisible parts of creation, rather than between an outwardly (and shared) physical world and a private interior life, I find it to be even more profound. In music, we cross the barriers between ourselves. The real ones, like my body isn't your body. That doesn't change but if anyone has ever been a part of a successful music ensemble you have known of moments when your body and other people's bodies were "one" in every sense that matters. But, thankfully, music also tears down the false barriers that we create to protect or to congratulate ourselves.

You know, like "I am so creative and unique" together with its ever implicit "so maybe you aren't." Or the self-deprecating inverse: "O, man, he is so creative and unique" with the ever following, "I only wish I could do that - be that cool - etc."

Or how about that whole romantic "nobody can really understand me" thing. No, no one will ever really understand you. And so what? Why should they? No one can even really understand themselves. But when we share music, we all share, together, in the great big Reality that none of us ever understands - but that we grasp at - and never alone, but with one another, with the music we give as gifts to one another.

So here is a big "thank you" to all of you out there that I have met in the "blogosphere" that have helped me see glimpses of the great-big-Real because of the music you have so freely and generously shared. I am so grateful to have my own "appropriate-to-who-I-am" sized role as well.

Thanks for following and thanks for the support. Peace

intergalactic arrival

Knobs, knobs, knobs. Joy, joy, joy. Knobs, knobs, knobs.

I got a phone call on Easter Monday. The guy at the music store said that the Easter Bunny brought me a surprise earlier than expected. Cool. An alien arrival from Andromeda (perhaps a strain?).

So I've had a week full of personal and professional busyness with little time to get to know this alien thing. I am happy to have found that I actually have enough experience with subtractive synthesis that I am not entirely lost. And I've done enough digital that I am not entirely inept with regards to all the inevitable menu searching that I still must use (ugh!) to program this alien. (And seeing as how I am not Brian Eno) I did take the time to read the (rather confusingly written) manual cover to cover. Still, how the heck do I just get some LFO to the filter cut-off?! . . . But it is fantastic!

So I'm not used to having two (real, analog) filters. Here is a (bit too long) little sample of me noodling with both filters' cut-off, resonance and the envelope modifying their cut-off.

Filter 1 is inverse BP, filter 2 is in parallel with filter 1, about evenly mixed. I know it is a little bit cheesy sci-fi of me, but I love that kind of Frankenstein synthesizer stuff! Add some world beat rhythm bed, a nice frenetic guitar line, some tricked out recording of somebody preaching madly (and about ten times as much talent/skill) and I'm heading for a track in the Eno/Byrne style!

Next: what is better than an Alesis Andromeda A6? An Alesis Andromeda A6 triggered by some cool monome application. I'll have to think about that one. Peace

Paschal Joy

Happy Easter!

I find Daedelus' video, "LA Nocturn," to be about new life and a new way of seeing things. So what better monome way to send wishes for a joyful celebration of the Resurrection of Our Lord?

Daedelus is one of the pillars of the monome community. In fact, I think he was the first person to purchase a monome device from its creator (tehn), making him, therefore, the second user of the monome device in the world. He has become, really, a monome "virtuoso." He is well known for his "arm flinging" technique which makes sense (the application he uses triggers upon release, rather than pressing of the buttons; his "flinging"  ensures proper timing) and is also just cool to watch. It shows his excitement and gets you into the music as well. But he also has great videos, so check those out too.

Easter peace