Chance music experiments, conceived, composed, recorded, and produced between August and December of 2020.


About the process:

"Student":
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"Student" was originally inspired by, and was, in fact, built on top of another track, "Time Piece."

As it turned out, the unostentatious sonics of "Time Piece" did not benefit at all from the additional layer, but it did serve as an excellent armature over which to construct this sparse sound collage, which, as a discrete entity, exhibits a delicate, kind of off-kilter beauty in its percussive rumblings and loops, like the ruminations of a forming mind.

The sounds themselves were created by programming a phalanx of tightly automated noise-generating LFOs to manipulate intertwining layers of percussive sounds and contact-recorded guitar (see: "Bellwether Gothic"). The looped voice in the second half comes from a very old audio cassette of myself, aged 4.

"Bellwether Gothic":
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"Bellwether Gothic" was sonically inspired by the twelve-tone technique of old, though the initial concept for the piece sort of self-generated during the process of planning other tracks.

The broad structure was somewhat predetermined, in that I wanted to create a sort of musical equivalent to the 20th century abstract expressionist style of painting. Broadly, I imagined a bell-like opening, a series of curving triads (like bold, coarse brush strokes), and a fanfare.

To achieve this, I took a sort of subtractive approach: 88 triads chance-selected from the thousands possible are played consecutively, pitch-bent up or down in randomly selected, limited intervals. Of those 88, half are randomly selected to repeat in the next sequence of 44, then half of those are selected again, etc., the subtraction repeated until the remaining notes all bend into one "odd-triad-out."

The entire sequence is then cut in half, with the two sections stacked, or superimposed, creating webs of harmonic colors and dissonant/consonant tensions. The curved triads slowly sink into a coda, which employs the remaining triad to anchor a dark sort of fanfare.

The murky, piano-like chimes that emerge in the coda were created in a separate process, using the sound of 21 guitars, tuned to 21 open chords—7 "famous" chords from Western music history, split across 3 guitars each: Strat, SG, Telecaster—contact-mic'd and struck with a felt-covered hammer. All 21 guitars sound at once at the beginning of the track.

"The World Is A Mad Bomber":
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“The World Is A Mad Bomber” is essentially a proof-of-concept piece created using the letters contained in the title (a meaningless non-sequitur that randomly popped into my head one afternoon), translated via a simple chart into musical notes.

Using 3 randomized sequences of said notes, they are repeated in 7 rhythm patterns across 3 instrument groups, plus percussion (one percussion group per rhythm pattern). Then they are all "stacked" to play simultaneously. These stacks are then sliced into individual bars, from which one third were randomly selected, randomly ordered, then randomly repeated and sequenced.

Finally, a slight shuffling of the macrostructure was done to create a more pleasing musical shape, though the overall sound-world of the piece remains unchanged.

"Time Piece":
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From the start, "Time Piece" was the track I was most certain about how I wanted it to sound, yet it turned out to be the most purely aleatoric of the lot.

I'd recently digitized a home movie from 1985, with one segment in which I play a handful of tunes on my first ever toy electronic keyboard. Seeing that video for the first time as an adult was like being connected to my younger self by some strange psychic thread, unspooled through the dull shimmer of VHS technology.

In conceiving "Time Piece," the superficial intent was to create a minimalist, slow-burn, textural piece, built around the gigantized sounds of that old toy keyboard. The keyboard was a Realistic Concertmate-300; the original did not survive my destructive childhood, so I purchased one on Ebay, as one does.

To find the chordal foundation, a 5-letter word was randomly selected and translated to the notes DEDGA, which I noted immediately could also be voiced as DEADG (Dead G, as in George). Four additional, randomly generated voicings were created (GDAED, ADGED, DDGAE, EAGDD), with chance procedures applied to multiple aspects of how each note acts within a group (duration, octave, pitch bend, bend duration, envelope shape, etc.), and how each group interacts with the other (yea or nay to transposition in thirds and fifths, when and how each group intertwines with the end of the previous section, etc.), all in 6 interacting sets.

A convoluted process, to be sure, but through the meticulous dialing in of these profligate parameters, a certain magic occurs, as it all unfolds in gargantuan sonic streams, specters of a digitally resurrected childhood toy.

handsholdingthevoid.com
george@handsholdingthevoid.com