crow caw music works

News 2010 May 4

Drones and noise

I’ve gone back to experimenting with the noise/ambient style a la William Basinski. On the surface, one thinks, “I could do that, it’s just a bunch of long noise samples jammed together.” Mais non, mon petite. The more I listen to the masters of this genre, the more I appreciate what it took to create the pieces. It’s really hard to quantify the difference between someone just throwing a bunch of samples together and a piece that holds your attention and seems to evoke or imply a feeling, alien place or just peace. And maybe a lot depends on the listener: his or her background, state of mind, tolerance for sound scuplture pieces as opposed to “music”, etc.

Well, there’s no help for it, but that one needs to try it anyway. You can hear some of my experiments on the Secrets of Metals page. And there are a bunch of pieces newer than that as well you might find scattered about this website.

thonk+0_2

In going through years of archives, I unearthed some tapes and CD-Rs of outputs from various runs of the bizarre granular synthesis program thonk+0_2. This was a Macintosh-only application which you fed an audio file of your choice to and it produced (after many hours of processing) a sample derived from hundreds of passes of granular synthesis over the input.

(From http://www.audioease.com/Pages/Free/FreeMain.html:

thonk is an extremely simple to use Freeware Macintosh application, that uses Granular Synthesis to produce very diverse sounds based upon a sound file provided by the user, where you have NO CONTROL WHATSOEVER over the process.)

Well, not really, but that’s another story. By the way, maybe you can find it, but when I click on “Free Download!” it takes me to a page on audioease.com that does not have any mention of thonk.

In any case: I’m going to soon put a link to a player on soundcloud you can hear my experiment.

It’s been a while since we’ve added anything new to listen to, so here’s a track from the little-known “Circle of Art” CD.

There are a number of websites around with tracks from “official” tim p scott releases, old experiments, contest entries and remixes. Eventually most of them will be listed in the “Where?” pages. For the time being, here’s a relatively recent track I’ve been working on:

A sort of cool thing about that piece is that it has a neat lo-fi vibe when listened to through uber-crappy laptop speakers…

(Some notes about the embedded players)

Basically, this site mainly uses the WordPress standard mini-mp3 player supplied by wordpress.com. It’s been styled somewhat and put into an HTML table with a ”style=margin-left:10px;float:right” setting. If you want other formats, downloads, etc., you have to go to other places. The player is pretty minimal in that it doesn’t have any fancy graphics. It ought to work on most systems, but I can’t test it on all browsers and operating systems. My apologies if it doesn’t work on yours. (Here’s a track [the only one I have so far) on bandcamp. bandcamp has a lot of buzz in various places and you are encouraged to check it out as it appears to be the Newest Hottest Thing for the indie musician. I'm hoping to get more into that site as it does look very cool).

bandcamp also provides an embeddable player like wordpress does; e.g.:

But as you can see it’s not so fancy when stuck in a wordpress page.
Our intention is to put a few different tracks on this page and change them around now and then just to keep things interesting.

Notes on excerpts

Due to various reasons, the song excerpts you can listen to on CDBaby have now all been shortened to 30 seconds. They used to be 2 minutes. 30 seconds is hardly long enough to allow you to decide whether a song is going to grab you at all. Because of that, I’m going to create my own library of excerpts (which will probably be 90 or 120 seconds long) and make them available for streaming. Watch this space where I’ll announce where these will end up being…

And if you can’t find anything at all interesting of mine to listen to…

Check out our “Free and cheap content” page and you might discover some other music that you like.

Page#40 / last edited 20100504