Duskaz Wandilaz - Kepler 90 has been released, and you can find it on all common streaming services. You may also be able to buy a cassette from the transcendental Marmalade Reels. Here it is on Bandcamp:
From Within
From Within is about the conception and birth, within the star Kepler 90, of a race of creatures who later colonise each of the eight planets of the Kepler 90 system in turn, draining them of resources and destroying their native geologies. It is part of a purely fictional mythology based upon a real extrasolar planetary system.
“This track is an experience. The frogs are a good addition, I must say. It is quite relentless and brutal, like a grindstone the size of a lorry, and I felt quite sick half-way through, but it ebbed and flowed nicely.”
- Connor Thirlwell of PitchSlap blog
Listening Instruction
This piece should be experienced in a darkened room, with a clear mind, at moderate to high volume. Please be aware that this piece uses prominent and intense low frequencies. Systems not designed to reproduce such low frequency content may either struggle to deliver the intended physical impact, or they may even be damaged at high volumes. Lacking a good system or the ability to play it loud, From Within works well on headphones.
Background
From Within is a track I composed in early 2019. At the time, I was living in Oxford, but had quit my job in science to find a way to shift my focus towards music. The story of the composition follows alongside part of the story of this search.
It arose from an experiment in which I attempted to write seven simple pieces, each using one mode of the major scale exclusively. For the locrian mode, unsurprisingly, I was not satisfied that any movement away from the root would preserve the locrian ‘feel’ - any movement threatened to collapse the perceived root to a more stable, less diminished key. Meanwhile, I was learning Supercollider, and at a particularly dull jazz session, I had come up with a concept for a mixed electroacoustic track in the locrian mode, featuring an electronic element later to become From Within. Here are part of my notes from that gig:
“Weird and freaks oscs distributed randomly on chord notes between 40-1000Hz. At random times, one such osc slides slowly (30s) to the fundamental, low down and heavy. Some slide glissando, some drip viscously between modal notes, some arpeggiate haltingly. (Db locrian).”
As I coded up the Supercollider part of this experiment, I became engrossed in the purely electronic sounds. Once I had coded a sufficiently flexible instrument, with enough of an interface to ‘play’, I found that the resulting soundscapes stood alone without need of other instruments. The actual ‘performance’ of From Within was a recorded improvisation made on an entirely ordinary afternoon. At the time I did not expect to release it. However, once recording, the vibe was strong, and From Within was born.
Some unknown element was missing. I experimented with mixing in various manipulated field recordings. Finally, my search for a musical path caught up with the composition: I was in the Netherlands for an interview at a Conservatorium to study jazz. The interviewers had seen through my bluff, and realised that I was not a true jazzer. They had pointed me in stranger and more experimental directions at various other departments and universities, and this led me to a very last-minute application to a different course, requiring a portfolio and well suited to electronic music. The evening of the jazz audition, I had captured a very strange field recording of myriad croaking frogs. The next day I twisted and contorted this recording, and wove in into From Within, finally completing the track.
I am not satisfied that From Within is ‘locrian-feeling’ enough to be part of my modal exploration experiment. The original concept involved tonal elements that would have anchored the song to a clear key (“A rumbling yet clean bassline underneath, riffing heavy… Occasional overblown sax/frantic psych-shredding/speed-folk fiddle/panicked clarinet drifts into view.”) however, stripped of these elements, From Within is composed of vertical clusters, amorphous multi-octave half-diminished chords almost entirely stacked from C#, E, G, B, which, to my ear, are not rooted unambiguously enough on the C# to clearly define as in the locrian mode. Nonetheless, the experiment was a success in encouraging me to explore different ways of composing, and of exploring diminished textures.
Composition
Behind From Within are ~300 lines of Supercollider code, one impromptu improvisation with this code, a few minutes of fortuitous field recording, and a little manipulation in Reaper.
The code generates twenty (synth) voices, each with some parameters chosen randomly, to slowly build a stochastic soundscape according to some hard-coded constraints. The combined synths are fed through a convolution reverb. The musician then has the ability to cause a random voice to either slide, or drip, to another pitch; to control the dry/wet mix of the convolved signal; and to fade out one or all of the voices. I was amazed both at the amount of musical expression available despite this minimal interface, and at the way that twenty simple voices could so effectively both fill the frequency spectrum, and saturate my perception of the sounds: in the right circumstances, I find these sounds to be terrifying and overwhelming.
The frequency spectrum of the impulse response used for the convolution reverb is shown in the figure below. Using this IR, high frequencies are rolled off above ~2 kHz, and the already-vague rhythms of the twenty voices are smeared as if in a dead-sounding room. The synths each contain some proportion of square-wave content, giving the dry signal a harsh, grating quality in the treble range. The combined effect of modulating the wet/dry mix is to quite effectively drag the soundscape towards or away from the foreground, and to filter or reintroduce this harshness.
Frequency spectrum of the impulse response used in From Within.
By using twenty separate, incoherent sources of sound panned randomly across the stereo field, I hope to have created a sense of extent akin to that of a live orchestra. With exceptions, a lot of modern music involves just a few distinguishable sound sources. Further, most live music is amplified, and so the sound is perceived to come mostly from a few PA speakers. Hence the complexity of the spatial ‘shape’ of the sound is rather less than for a live, unamplified orchestra, where each instrument contributes a uniquely positioned source. Particularly when experienced through headphones, the combination of stereo field recording, and the complex stereo structure of the synthetic soundscape put the listener within the sounds of From Within.
The spectrograph at the top of this page represents From Within sans the field recording. It was made in Python, using tools from Scipy for the spectrography, and Matplotlib for plotting.
Since, the code has evolved, and I have expanded the interface somewhat, such that voices can be created and modulated using a MIDI keyboard. My goal is to create a Supercollider ‘instrument’ that can be played, and jammed live, just like an acoustic instrument.
They Were of the Sun
This is the story of the colonisation and destruction of each planet of the Kepler 90 system. The ambient electronics comprise seven ‘voices’ each representing a planet of the system (excluding the planet from which the ‘listener’ is virtually located). The movement of each voice corresponds to the movement of each planet, and is based on the observed orbital radii and periods of the Kepler 90 system. Daily and seasonal cycles of each planet are an artistic interpretation, as observations of these parameters have not been made.