citizen cayn

[citizencayn]

#50, #51 and #52 The End For Now

This experience has been polarising in many ways, like all good experiences I suppose. The effects on my practice and me as a maker have been extremely positive. I have defined a sound, improved my composition skills, I can write no matter mood or circumstance, see ideas through without thinking too much, meet deadlines, and my tech skills on Logic X/Ableton Live and general sound engineering abilities have seen a pronounced improvement. On the flip side, I put a lot of pressure on myself emotionally that I didn’t notice until the end of the project. Chimera_52 has been a constant in my life while a million other events occurred, and this consistency allowed it to fade into the background of my weekly tasks so that I essentially forgot that I was engaged in a massive undertaking. I began to come apart emotionally and berate myself for not being able to keep up with my commitments. And this thing hung in the background, and I berated myself even more when a week passed and the piece of music I produced didn’t meet some undefined internal standard I had set for myself.  

 A million other things is: five international tours, teaching privately, teaching two days a week at KDC, teaching at the VCA, rehearsing multiple evenings a week, just being in three bands, around 50 shows, working with playable streets across two installations and a series of virtual workshops, maintaining my relationship and friendships, my physical and mental health. But I wouldn’t trade all of that for anything. I may not do it again the same way, but I wouldn’t give it up.

 So what next? I hope to find something to do with this massive collection of music I have. Most likely whittle out the ones that have a sound, or can be tweaked to fit in to a certain vibe. Create a live show, an album, put it out and see what happens. I am looking forward to the prospect of sitting with a piece of music for longer than a week, to go really deep with something and create subtle tweaks, and finally finish. I have already begun this process with #31 Tools, which I’ve reworked into a full-length dance track with the help of Rowan Mason AKA Sanpo Disco. Hopefully it will be seeing the light of day in the coming months.

 I will keep up the blog. I’ve been delighted to discover this medium, and even if few people read it I find the process cathartic and enlightening. Time permitting, I would like to keep up the Chimera’s also, but I will most likely do this during writing periods. I would like to experiment with a fortnight format, and do a series that is released properly. But this is all after I deal with this lot of material!

 I want to thank my wife Anna, who has proof read every single blog post and listened to every single track. She has dealt with me at all ends of the spectrum during this process and always supported me and given excellent advice. Unfortunately, it’s not completely over as I have a year of dissertation writing coming up, so, sorry bella. I’d also like to acknowledge those few friends and soundcloud followers that kept up with the project and gave me encouragement along the way. Your comments were often very influential on my musical decisions and general emotional overtone. So for now, goodbye and thanks for engaging.

[citizencayn]

#49 Entangled

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 Entangled began with a very simple idea. Well actually, an extremely complex idea that led to the word entangled which is in itself a simple theme. I was intrigued by an article about a new distance record set for the teleportation of an object. Pretty sci-fi at first glance, but by object they actually mean a single particle and by teleport they mean quantum teleportation which is the transference of the complete properties of one particle to another. In this case 300 miles away. Still pretty damn sci-fi when you look into it. This sort of stuff has implications for a sorts of things including

Cause to become twisted together with or caught in

 From here I started toying with the idea of entanglement, in my layperson manner. Aesthetically I was attracted the idea of two separate things that synchronise for a time and then separate again. Kind of like a dance I suppose. I imagined two different themes for a piece of music. One at the end of a work and one at the beginning, locking together in the middle for a time, harmonising or integrating and then breaking apart.

 I turned to the cryptogram again, and by comparing the letters of the alphabet to a chromatic scale produced the notes C#, A#, E, A, A#, D#, G#, C# and C from the word ENTANGLED. I experimented with a bunch of ways of arranging these notes as chords and intervals and finally settled on the guitar theme you hear in the middle of this work. I recorded the theme and edited the rest of the track on a flight to Hobart for a holiday with my wife.

 I have to make a slight detour here to mention that we spent an amazing day in MONA while at Hobart. It was particularly poignant as I am nearing the end of this project and one of the inspirations for Chimera_52 occurred on a previous visit to MONA. To see Sidney Nolan’s cumulative artwork SNAKE again was special and I know that there is still more work that I will produce that connects back to that artwork.

 Back to the piece, the first and third sections of the work are the interlocked lines from the middle section of the work run through my favourite Ableton plug in Granulator II. I performed an improvisation with each part expanding and contracting the sample size and effecting a few other elements. Only three more pieces of music to go! Thanks for reading.

[citizencayn]

#48 Conductive Improvisation

This week I’ve been experimenting with a bare conductive touch board. Sounds a little off, but it’s actually very fun. The touch board is a modular circuit board that can be connected to various conductive things including conductive paint, metal, organics and even people to trigger sounds of your choosing. You can load the board with code that lets you trigger audio files, or code that makes the board send-off midi messages. So for example you could wire up a plant, as I have done with my friend Glen at Playable Streets in the past, to trigger and audio sound when touched. Or you can make a midi trigger instrument, which is kind of what I had a go at.

 I’ve wanted to try and hook one of the boards up to my Saxophone for a while now. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I placed triggers in spots where my finger where already pressing keys down, so that when I play certain notes as well as the note sounding a midi message or audio file would be fired off at the same time. I gave it a go but was very disappointed to discover that the saxophone is TOO conductive. It’s such a large piece of metal that it just constantly sets off the triggers. Why not just place the triggers on other material and the on the Sax? I think this will be an experiment for the future, as what I am really interested in with this idea is the rhythms that are already being produced by keys being depressed while playing something on the saxophone, as opposed to have triggers that are separate to these keys. Modding the Sax in this way is definitely on the cards though, and perhaps a later Chimera experiment.

 With the Sax not working I turned to the Clarinet. The Clarinet is mostly made of wood with the keys being metallic. After a little experimentation, I managed to wire up the bottom keys and the middle keys, marked in red in the below diagram.

I connected the instrument to Logic X and experimented with various Alchemy synth sounds being triggered. There is a lot to play with, including the possibility of triggering more rhythmic samples or entire beats or chunks of melody. I settled fairly quickly on a drone type sound, and used only the tonic and fifth triggers. I performed two improvisations using a Lydian mode vibe, with the occasional accidental for a bit of flavour. With more time, I would like to expand the tonal palate of the triggers, and play more with the possibility of rhythmic interaction between the triggered sounds and acoustic sounds. Thanks for reading!

[citizencayn]

#47 Darknet

I’m buried under a mountain of writing at the moment, so instead of writing to much more I thought I would just share pieces of it here. You’ll have to excuse the tone, it’s a little on the academic side, but these are the hoops we jump through. Before I jump on though, this week’s work is inspired by Darknets…netwroks that can only be accessed with specific software or protocols. Darknets make up the Dark Web, where you can go to get all sorts of naught things.

 I turned the word Darknet into a cryptogram and pulled out the corresponding musical notes. I then messed with these until I had a progression I liked, which turned out to be the reverse or the word plus a bar or so. I improvised a wonky groove and added it some repetitive monotone vocals that were somehow inspired by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard whom I just saw at Primavera Sound in Barcelona. Not quite sure how it is, but it is in my mind. Enjoy.

 Here’s a little bit about Holly Herdon, who’s ethos influenced this project greatly:

 Holly Herndon is a composer, electronic music performer and PhD candidate at Stanford University. My first interactions with her music occurred during my honours year upon the release of her second album Platform. I was engaged by her explicit combination of experimental, techno and pop music techniques and further intrigued by the depth of process behind each work on the album. This paralleled my own practice and my appreciation of her work suggested areas for further experimentation in Chimera_52.

 In her creative process, Herndon has remarked that, “There is always some kind of conceptual framework.” The interaction between conceptualisation, musical inspirations and ways of making inform her work in varied ways, as “some tracks start with concept, others start with a musical idea – or an atmosphere or emotional pull. But there is always some underlying concept”.[1] Herndon’s ideas resonate with my practice and the experimentation with conceptualisation I began in my honours research. Moving forward, I wished to explore the interactions of these elements and how they influenced my practice by making conceptualisation a part of every piece.  

 Herndon’s music makes extensive use of found sounds, it “samples her Skype activity, YouTube clicks, and fridge door slamming; it also flaunts original coding in the visual programming language Max/MSP. Her music takes cues from the compositional theories of German electronic music pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as her instrument, the computer, and its ability to annotate modern life.” Expanding on Herndon’s integration of experimental music within techno and club music, I experimented with integrating pop, folk, jazz, electronic, experimental and classical composition techniques in my practice. Furthermore, the use of found sounds, self-sampling and environment sampling were explored, inspired by Herndon’s work.

[1] "10 Radical Ideas That Inspired Holly Herndon’s Platform," Ruth Saxelby, The FADER, June 06. 2017, http://www.thefader.com/2015/05/21/radical-ideas-that-inspired-holly-herndon-platform.

[citizencayn]

#46 Pugs In Hats

After listening to this podcast I have been thinking a lot about the “suggestion” paths we get led on by search engines and machine AI in general. YouTube is a great example, you can begin with a quite innocent search topic but if you keep following YouTube’s suggested “next watch” you often get led to very extreme examples of what you began with. This is because the algorithm, the AI, is trying to keep you interested. And humans are interested by extremes, outlying information on all topics. You may begin with “amazingly high taekwondo kicks” but it’s highly possible you will end up at “Taekwondo Master tries to kick apple off head and fails” …and you will probably watch it.

 This is not always an insidious mechanism, but it is one that functions across all social media and many websites. They are designed to capture your attention and keep it. Keep it for that one click extra, or that next scroll down. And it’s not humans doing this, it’s algorithms working autonomously. Algorithms that can detect your mood and try and influence you accordingly.

 In a world where we already invest so much in our virtual selves I feel we need to be aware of these things. Through a stupid argument with a friend recently I realised that I have begun to invest to much of my self-worth in online goings on. And I had no idea I cared so much. I think these virtual elements are becoming extensions of our cognition and that we need to periodically check in with ourselves to evaluate where our priorities lie. But at the same time, I think that these environments have begun to mean SOMETHING as expansions of our animal surroundings, virtually. It’s just a shame that they are controlled environments with dubious intentions now, and not the free virtual playground intended. I’m sounding a little dramatic but regardless the entire idea is fascinating and I explored it this week with a song about “search rabbit holes”.  

 I’ve only got six more of these to go and I can’t quite believe it. Hopefully I don’t fall off the edge as I am trying to finish my dissertation at the same time, but a mad dash to the finish seems appropriate for this project. Thanks for reading, as always, and wish me luck.  

[citizencayn]

#45 Disaster Alley

I sent my phone of to get repaired this week, so was phone free for 7 days. As someone who has jumped on the “I should use my phone less for my mental health” bandwagon (and someone who is guilty of using it way too much) I thought this would be an interesting experiment. This week’s work is suitably strange and disconnected.

 I watched a TED talk by artist and writer Austin Kleon earlier this week and was impressed with his newspaper blackout technique. Every day for years Kleon would take the day’s newspaper and blackout most of it, kind of like a classified CIA document, leaving only a few chosen words. These words form a poem. The idea of taking something large and noisy and sifting through the clutter to find something minimal and poetic really appeals to me, so I gave it a go.

 Before I get to that though, I should point out that in Kleon’s TED talk he bangs on about a favourite subject mentioned here many times – the idea of stealing in art. He draws a line backwards in time from himself to many other artists that have pursued similar projects, some of who he new nothing about. He mentions William Burroughs and his cut up technique, which I have mentioned before in this series of blogs. I still stand by my belief that all art is a very small step forward from something done by someone else, and if you spend all your time worried about being too much like something else you are shooting yourself in the foot. In time, you will grow into your own thing, which will most likely have a history you don’t even know about yet.    

 I grabbed an article from The Guardian about climate change and made my own Newspaper Blackout. I’ll be the first to admit it’s not my best poetic work but it was fun to try. I am interested in expanding the idea into a collection of sound, but not sure how I will go about it yet.

Back to the phone thing. It was great to be without it in social situations. I have a habit of checking it for no reason in groups of people and I am trying to work on being more present in general. But I must admit, I felt generally less connected over this week and I think this is a legitimate response. Communication through certain forms of social media, texting and calling form an important part of how I communicate with my friends and loved ones. And I felt a little lost! Does this mean I am a true millennial?...

[citizencayn]

#43 and #44, Transit 3 and Transit 4

On tooooooour! Two weeks in the van with NO ZU family has fried my brain. Many highs and lows, I am waiting for the dust to settle so that my memory quietly blocks out the lows and I look back on the entire experience with fondness. For me, our first and last shows were best. The first was a pre-show for Primavera Sound in Barcelona. Packed to the rafters, we went on stage after Kate Tempest. Her band produced this enormous hop hop/trip hop sound that was very intense. Her rap/poetry was equally intense and everyone was very in to it, which made us a little nervous as our vibe is a little more…silk? Cowboy hat? I suppose more about an ecstatic dance experience which seemed pretty contrary to what the crowd was digging. But then we went on and they went nuts and it was great! Our last show was a club show in Berlin at my friend Josh’s venue Urban Spree. I think nearly every member of the band had 4 or 5 old friends pop out of the Berlin woodwork and it was a stella night and show. Especially after a 10-hour drive from Lucerne!

 I’ve decided to combine the blog post for these two tracks because I’m late posting one and they are thematically linked. A mini series of works that have run through Chimera_52 has been the Transit pieces, with #19 Transit 1 and #20 Transit 2 being composed on the way to France and on the way home from Italy respectively, and #31 Tools on the way to the USA. Sonically these pieces are linked, they tend to be on the groovy side, mostly electronic and quite fun. These two new works don’t buck much from the trend.

 #43 Transit 3 was started and finished on the flight to Spain and the in the van between France and Switzerland. Although I usually try to avoid 4/4 beats, this one is quite straight. But to combat that I messed a lot with the drum grooves, never quite letting it sit for too long in the same place. The inception of the work was the arpeggiated chord progression and plastic bass line. I literally played the bass line in one take and stuck with it. After that initial session on the plane the rest was just arranging and effecting. I should mention the end, the drum beat displaces by one semiquaver each round in an additive fashion…quite off putting but oddly groovy at the same time (at least to me).

 #44 I began at the end of the 10-hour drive to Lucerne. I had an idea of creating a drum groove in 4/4 with an extra bar of 1/8. It all unfolded pretty quickly, including the bass line. But just as I was getting in to it I got asked to drive! At this point I had nutted out the first bass line and groove. So I passed the computer to my band mate Becky of Sui Zhen fame and asked if she wanted to try some stuff. Becky made the spacey pads, choir stabs and epic synth lead theme that enters at around 1:42. I didn’t have any chance to check it out until I was on my return flight to Australia 4 days later! I had heaps of fun arranging it and adding extra bits and pieces.

 For the next couple of works I’m going to be exploring the idea of reterritorialization through omission…and I’ll let you stew on that. Thanks for reading!

[citizencayn]

#42 F

I think I’m a week late with this post but it has been unavoidable. Right now I’m in a tour van about to cross the border from France in to Switzerland…we’ve been on the road for a week now, it’s been pretty relaxed as far as these things go. By the end we will have only done six shows, but it’s great to be in Europe again and I excited have some down time in Berlin after.

 Three disparate things came together to influence how this piece turned out. One, I’ve been really enjoying the new Twin Peaks. It’s one of my favourite TV shows and it’s so good to have it back and see Lynch given a complete free reign to do his Lynch thing. Somewhere in the media roll out I saw an article saying that the intro theme is actually in the shape of the Twin Peaks logo – two sloping mountains. How cool! I wanted to use the idea, but wasn’t quite sure how to implement it.

 I listened to this Sam Harris podcast featuring Zeynep Tufekci, an academic who’s work focuses on AI-controlled marketing and the potential for Facebook and other social media structure to be used by tyrant states. There were many things in the podcast I found interesting, but the take away was that I wanted the work to have something to do with these themes…in the end I just decided to use the F as a dynamic map or some such in a similar way to the Twin Peaks theme. What this turned in to was making the shape of an F in the Logic X session.

 So beginning with the F again – the third influence was that I have been listening to a lot of Donnacha Dennehey’s music again. He is a composer who uses a lot of spectral elements in his music and I wanted to try my hands with some of these ideas. Every time I’ve tried in the past it’s led me down an unsatisfying hole where I didn’t really know what I was doing, but this time I think I finally managed to pull something off that sounds good.

 I recorded a low F on the piano and did a spectral analysis of it. I chose notes within the C3 to C5 range to experiment with:

The idea behind this is that these “notes” being present in the spectrum opens new possibilities in terms of harmonic content. You take the note and corresponding cents and balance them in an orchestration setting with the db levels. It creates some interesting timbres and harmonies. The piece turned out a bit derivative of the post minimal style but I like what I did and am happy to have gotten out a spectral piece than actually kinda worked.

[citizencayn]

#41 PLAYspace Improvisation

This week I had the pleasure of creating an installation at Abbotsford Convent with my good friend, collaborator and all round mad genius Glen Walton. Glen created an art business called Playable Streets a while back. We build interactive installations that connect people with their surroundings and each other through touch…or in other words, we wire stuff up so that when you touch it, it makes sounds. I have been the composer for a couple of projects and it has been a blast.

 For this installation Glen pitched the idea of playable plants. I learnt a lot from my last work at the In Touch exhibition and I wanted to focus on simpler sounds, fuller sounds that provided instant tactile gratification. I began with a set of piano tones in a pentatonic scale but quickly shifted to the idea of using the harmonic series. A little background –

 The harmonic series is a collection of pure tones contained in every sound you hear. Without getting too deep in to the science of acoustics, all notes contain a series of overtones at exact ratios – an octave, an octave and a fifth, two octaves, an octave and a third and so forth. Take the note C1, the overtones above this would be C2, G2, C3, E3, G3, Bb3 and so on. Here’s where it gets cool – the amplitude or volume of these overtones is what creates timbre or the way that something sounds. Humans do not perceive these tones separately, we hear them as a note that sounds like a piano, or a note that sounds like a saxophone. Pretty cool!

 Clearly, I like to nerd out on this. There a few things that you can draw from these artefacts and one of them is important for this project – these ratios represent a stable harmonic basis for building chords in an orchestration sense. Put another way: if you play all these notes together it ought to sound pretty good, rich and sonorous even. We put this to the test in the PLAYSpace installation. We had 12 notes to play with, so I mapped up to the 11th partial – C1, C2, G2, C3, E3, G3, Bb3, C4, D4, E4, F#4, G4. Some of you may look at those notes and feel that the F# and Bb should sound pretty weird…but they don’t. The resemblance to a Lydian Dominant mode lends the sound all the attributes that come along with this sonority; a sense of wonder and playfulness.

 Thanks a bunch for reading. I am heading on tour again this week so I expect to continue with the Transit series of works I began last year. Wish me luck and please get in touch with any comments or questions!

[citizencayn]

#40 Signal

 Busy busy busy busy…

This week I really wanted to experiment with some atonality, or maybe a better term would be non-tonality. I encountered two problems that fed in to each other – my lack of experience writing in this manner meant that I needed time to experiment to find the sounds I was after, but I didn’t have any time. The result is half baked but I value the experiment.

 I say non-tonal as opposed to atonal because I feel that atonal implies a complete lack of tonal centre, or that each pitch be classed as equal. While there is no clear diatonic explanation of what’s going on in this work I think there is at least some gravity towards certain pitches, meaning that some are perhaps points of rest harmonically and others are points of tension, indicating a kind of harmonic structure.

 The experiment was inspired by Ligeti’s “signal chords”, which feature in many of his works but perhaps most prominently Lux Aterna (also one of my fav pieces of music). A Ligeti signal chord is a stack of a major second and a minor third. The sound is pretty open…I experimented with a palindromic line in the harp, which then turns into a sort of canon a semitone out. The goal was to obscure any sense of tonic. Re-amping through the guitar pedals added some extra colour to the sound. The piano line was an improvised line based on the original riff, also with pedal effects.

 Interestingly, I began this work with one of my form maps, or abstraction maps and ended up discarding it. I’m kind of over that process I think. At least for now. I’m feeling the urge to keep pushing into more experimental areas for the end of this project. I am very conscious of the quality dropping as I become busier and the focus turns more to writing the dissertation, which is causing me some stress. But all I can do is push on! Thanks for reading.  

[citizencayn]

#39 iPSC

Origins

One of my composition teachers told me once: the larger a piece of music is and the more instrumental forces involved, the smaller the original idea needs to be. I have found this to be very true across a lot of disciplines and am no longer surprised to find the technique present in some of my favourite pieces of music. Like Ligetti’s Lux Aterna – the number three permeates the work in different ways from his use of trichords (Ligetti signal chords), the form of the work, the concept of the holy trinity…As this project becomes larger with time I think it’s important for me to reflect on the original idea that spawned it.

  The title Chimera_52 originated from the science fiction novel Revelation Space by Alistair Reynolds. The novel is part of a sub-genre of science fiction called space opera. The main story-arc is irrelevant but Reynolds details the “emergence of “chimeric” factions: heavily bio-engineered and cyborgized human splinter groups” within the Revelation Space universe. The largest group were known as Ultras, short for Ultranaut and served aboard interstellar spaceships as workers making many modifications to their bodies to adapt to the conditions of interstellar travel and for aesthetic concerns.

 I originally read the novel long before this project began and the word chimeric intrigued me. There is no glossary in the book and Reynolds is vague in all things, slowly releasing information about his world as the story line progresses. I searched the word on the fan wiki website and found no direct explanation, only it’s use in conjunction with words such as “heavily augmented”. A broader Internet search revealed its root in the word chimera, which I have defined below:

 Noun

chimera (plural chimeras)

(Greek mythology) Alternative letter-case form     of Chimera (a flame-spewing monster often     represented as having two heads, one of a goat and     the other of a lion; the body of a goat; and a serpent as     a tail).

(mythology) Any fantastic creature with     parts from different animals.

Anything composed of     very disparate parts.

  The third entry intrigued me but it was not until I began this masters project that I would find a use for it.

 My practice has always drawn inspiration and influence from a broad range of sources. I am excited by many different styles of music. I have always been fascinated with combining disparate elements in my music – 12 tone themes over bigband jazz grooves or unsymmetrical time signatures in dance music for example. I am challenged by the idea and energized by the results of such experiments. At the very beginning of the entire masters process I determined to explore a project that allowed my practice to continue to develop in line with my personal aesthetic. Upon deep reflection it was apparent that these juxtapositions were integral to my practice and their origins and how they interacted within my work merited further exploration. It was at this point that I returned to the word and the concept: chimera.

 Now

 If you’re wondering why the tone changed a little in the above paragraphs, it’s because it comes from some of my formal writing for Uni. It’s important for me to reflect on these ideas more and more as I begin to try and frame my research findings in an academic paper. It’s also important from an artistic setting. As I said, the work is becoming unwieldy and I am struggling to keep up creatively as my priorities are shifting. But reflecting on why I began and what I am exploring helps ground me in times of doubt.

 This week begins with the concept of Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells, which are stem cells that can be generated from adult cells. Obviously this is a huge step forward for stem cell research as it negates the issue of embryo’s being destroyed in the process. It also opens the possibility of personalized stem cells. This composition features all the usual tricks, chords created from the letters iPSC, from derived from this and so on. There has been road works outside my house all week so the recording has been very stunted and I chose to work more with samples and synths. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading.    

[citizencayn]

#38 15 Minute Composition 1

Just a short post. This week I tested how much I could get done in 15 minutes. I selected a sample of a Lyre Bird, set a timer and went at it. You can listen to the results below.  It is really hard to get very much done, and in this case I think that mastery of the tools is essential otherwise you waist time. I didn’t pick instruments before hand but I did pick a sample to work with and I had some idea of what I wanted to do. I think if I had gone in completely blind I would have had much more trouble. I would like to develop the idea further. 

[citizencayn]

#37 Tired

The muse should always be discreet

 My friend lent me a PS4 for a few weeks while he went on his honeymoon. I’m borrowing it for market research of course…well that’s what I tell myself. It’s a great console, games have really come a long way since I played them regularly on my Super Nintendo. The ergonomics of the controller are very cool too, the different vibrations that occur in tandem with gameplay happenings are a great touch. My favourite game that I played was called The Last Of Us, a zombie apocalypse first person shooter with and incredible story and amazing voice acting. Totally sucked in.

 During another game this week, a Debussy piece called Nocturnes for Orchestra: I. Nuages came on. I had never really listened to it before and was immediately into it. The harmonies and orchestration are beautiful, on the edge of ‘functional’. In fact, after the premiere the piece received little praise from critics and is considered very difficult to analyse harmonically.

 The slow, solemn motion of the clouds

 Nuages is a cloudscape. To my ear, Debussy captures the gentle undulations of dusk sky, the work swirls softly and unexpectedly in formal and harmonic directions. Inspired by this I set out to make a form map of the piece to see if I could abstract some of the ideas into my own work. I should note here that I began this on Friday…I was feeling warn down and not up to composing for most of the week. All of what I composed was done in two or three hours on Friday morning. I think this is reflected in the work itself.

 I wrote my A Theme, the opening, by experimenting with the sixth mode of limited transposition. I jammed around and harmonised until I found something I liked. The process continued like this, essentially I was colouring in my map from the Debussy piece. I intended to ad synths and other things to this piece to really change the sound palate and hopefully make it less recognisably referencing Nuages, but I ran out of time. So what you hear is unfinished, and a little too close to the piece it’s modelled off. But hey you can’t win them all…thanks for reading.  

[citizencayn]

#36 Date Night

This week was a very intuitive composing week, not much conceptualising or thinking. I had the luxury of some holidays from teaching which means a couple of more day’s spare time. But instead of going nuts and trying to do something epic I settled back and let it happen.

 Surprisingly I managed to compose a little bit every day which hasn’t happened for ages with this project. It was productive, but looking back at my journal the most work really happened in the first and last sessions. For the first session, I jammed around on the guitar for an hour or two. I have this great beat-up nylon string acoustic that I got god knows where. It’s my favourite guitar for writing as it is super gentle to play.

 When I am writing on the guitar with the intention to add vocals I often improvise chord progressions and vocal melodies at the same time. This means that I sing these ridiculous garbled phrases of gibberish. It’s really funny to listen back to, I have no idea of what I am saying because I am absorbed in writing the music. Often entire sentences come out and I listen back and cringe. But it’s the only way to get all the music out before it runs away. I can always come back to the lyrics later. Having talked to some of my songwriter friends about this it seems it is a common method for writing.

 The next two sessions I made small edits to the main chorus and verse ideas that I had written. This entailed making what would become the horn/synth theme a little more rhythmically active by dropping a beat from the second entry. I also recorded a guitar line on the third day, but this ended up on the cutting room floor.

 Thematically I was a little stuck. I was really inspired by Darren Hanlon’s performance of his song Halley’s Comet at our friends Glen and Jamie’s wedding. The song is about a family all getting out of bed to see Halley’s Comet…I really loved the idea of this astrological event becoming a family moment, sort of bringing them together and the rest of the neighbourhood as well. So, I had a little search on the net for rare astrological events and came across this alignment of the planets in 2040. The idea of writing this song about my future self on that night was interesting to me! So I wrote these lyrics very quickly:

 On a night in

2040

A rare alignment

First comes Mercury

Then Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon

 I’ll be in my

Early 50’s

Have some kiddies

We’ll head down to the beach

And chase the light across the dunes

 I wonder where we will be?

 On a night in

2040

It’s 20 dollars

For a space trip

Date night spent in orbit round the Earth

 You’ll be sneezing

Star Treks obsolete

Solar Power

Come down on a beam

And there’s a circle, Jupiter

 I wonder where we will be?

 Apparently, the pollen count will be double today’s level, thus the sneezing remark. Also the great red spot on Jupiter will have become circular, but I couldn’t get that line right so we are left with whatever the hell that one means. Lastly on Friday I exchanged the guitar line for an arpeggiated synth, I like the way it sits much more.

 On the last day, I smashed everything out. I have much more time to commit and it really shows I think, it’s so important to have that dedicated 3 to 5 hours of creative time to really go deep on some ideas. Thanks for reading!

[citizencayn]

#35 Human-Pig Embryo

I have a bit of a new outlook at the moment with these tracks. I had been experiencing a lot of guilt and stress when I didn’t feel like I had enough time to commit to making music each week. After a bit of soul searching and some conversations with my supervisors I decided to try and cut myself some slack, so this week I knew I would be busy  and I decided that I would dedicate Friday morning to doing as much as I could and then leaving it. SO this is what happened…

 “The creation of this so-called chimera – named after the cross-species beast of Greek mythology”

I have a collection of possible themes for Chimera tracks in my Evernote. I had a scroll through and found this article I had saved about the first ever Human –Pig emryo ever created. The technical term for this is a Chimera. I chose the name for this project initially based on a group of people described in one of my favourite Sci-Fi novels – Revelation Space. The subset were Chimerics - heavily bio-engineered and cyborgized human splinter groups. This led me to research the word Chimera and the idea of something that is a combination of many different things spoke to me, so I named the project after it.

 I walked to the shops to buy some coffee beans and put my iPod on shuffle. The first track to grab my interest was Arkestry by Flying Lotus. I decided to make a texture map from the broad strokes of the track (pictured below). On the return trip one of my favourite songs from the Twin Peaks sound track came on – I’m Hurt Bad by Angelo Badalamenti. I’ve always loved the driving 12/8 drum beat and resolved to experiment with the feel in this work.

“The idea of having an animal being born composing of human cells creates some feelings that need to be addressed.”

 After creating my map I began by making the drum groove. I chose 9/8 to change the feel a little. It just so happened that a friend had left a Juno – 60 synth at my house. I decided to use it to create as much of the melodic material as possible and composed pad feel derived from a C Lydian Dominant mode. The bass line highlights the move between the diminished harmony and major harmony.

 For the textural elements I opened an ableton live session and found a bunch of clips I liked the sound of. I used a bunch of different effects and max4live patched to create a bizarre soundscape. I then bounced this over to the logic session and added it in as per my map. The final touch was the pig sample, so cute and maybe a little disturbing considering the content. Thanks as always for listening and get in touch with any thoughts or questions.

[citizencayn]

#34 Planet 9

Being someone who thrives on activity and achievement I am discovering over time that it is essential for me to book in “nothing” time. Some of you out there with similar dispositions might be thinking why bother? I know that there have been times when I have railed against the fact that I need to sleep for 8 hours (when I am exercising a lot) as I perceived sleep as wasted hours when I could be working on music or some other goal I was after. But now I am beginning to see that this sort of down time is one of the most important aspects of creativity and producing creative work. Sleep, meandering walks, dozing on the chair – all of this allows time for “deep thinking” to occur, unconscious processes that in my experience tend to lead to revelatory moments and interesting ideas.  

 Listening to this podcast featuring Ricardo Semler, I was inspired by how he structures his work-week. Semler is a Brazilian businessman famous for his unique style of democratic corporate structuring. He did things like tell his workers that they can come and go as they please as long as they meet their sales targets. Ricardo takes one weekday per week where he has nothing scheduled. On this day he does as he pleases, perhaps he stays in bed reading all morning, or he moves to a sunny couch and doses for a few hours letting his mind wander here and there. His reasoning is that he needs this time to absorb and process various events in his life an get some deep thinking done. I love this idea and need more of it in my life!

 On Monday morning I decided to give this a go. I had been reading this article about Planet 9 and how the search has been extended to the public in the hopes that someone will spot it. I pulled up a couch in the sun and let my mind wander on the topic and wrote down whatever came to me. Still a bit goal driven but definitely on the correct track. I ended up with this:

 I discovered planet 9 

I called it Vonnegut

Millions of eyes combed the sky 

While it giggled in the darkness

 These eyes gazed so earnest and bright

They pushed back the light of the stars

But none could see nimble Vonnegut

Large and content in the dark

 All of the Earth came together 

To build a giant eye

With a pupil so large and sensitive to light

It would see to the dawn of time

 With an iris that flicked from brown through green

And lashes from Sydney to Perth

When it finally saw it shed one tear 

So large it flooded the earth

 The rest of the week I was so busy with work and uni I had no time to work on the piece. When I did come to it I had about an hour to finish it. I worked quickly to create a drum track in 7/8 and a minimal bass line in the style of My Disco or The Bad Seeds. The result is a slightly weird but interesting spoken word piece. Hope you enjoy and thanks as always for reading.

[citizencayn]

#33 SoundBow and Groove

One of the cool things about doing this weekly composition for so long is that I have ended up forgetting things about why I started it and what I set out to do. It occurred to me today that I tend to enjoy the final product of these experiments the most when they are a combination of ideas from disparate sources. The more elements that go in to the blend, the deeper and fuller the piece feels. This all hinges on whether I can cram the ideas together in a seamless manner. And then I remembered that this is why I called the project Chimera in the first place, because I’m curious about what happens when odd musical ideas are smashed together.

Chimera Definition

1a:  a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail

b:  an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts

This week I set out to combine an improvisation on the SoundBow app I mentioned last week with some sort of groove and melodic element. Firstly I worked on the grove element. I was stranded at Sydney airport on Wednesday after returning from LA, tooling about on Facebook. A trailer for a Tyler the Creator documentary grabbed my attention and I was really in the song that played over the last half of the clip. I googled the lyrics “So in love, I give it all away” and was surprised to find out it was a Beyoncé song called Party from 2011…anyway, fricken loved the groove and set about mimicking my favourite elements – the Voyager synth bass line and on-the-beat shaker line. To give it a “me” twist I changed the time signature to 5/4. I developed an A and B section, with the B section being more melodic and containing an arpeggiated Juno riff. 

2:  an illusion or fabrication of the mind; especially:  an unrealizable dream

“a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer” — John Donne

“His utopia was a chimera.”

My next experiments came on Friday afternoon whilst hanging about at VCA. Sitting in the (very quiet) library I recorded a whistle and a hum into the SoundBow and performed a couple of improvisations. This was very intuitive and straightforward, I didn’t think very much. It took me a couple of goes to get a hum that was loud enough and I may have pissed off some studiers next to me.

3:  an individual, organ, or part consisting of tissues of diverse genetic constitution. A hybrid created through fusion of a sperm and an egg from different species is a chimera.

I put both elements together on Sunday. I doubled the synth melody in the B section with Saxophone, which added some life to the part.  It wasn’t a case of just whacking the impro over the groove from here on; I had to mess around with how to fit everything together a lot. In the end, the first minute or so of the piece is the impro over the groove, then once the Saxophones enter it is mostly groove with parts of the impro slotted in (hopefully) tastefully. I effected the impro in Ableton Live with my favourite max patch the buffer shuffler. I hope you enjoy the piece and thanks for reading!