#chimera_52

[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]

#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]

#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]

#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]

#32 SoundBow Improvisation

This week I left my laptop at the security check in at Austin airport whilst heading back to Australia. Luckily the trip went through San Francisco and LA, and double luckily I noticed I had left it behind when I was in San Fran and managed to convince a friend to bring it to LA for me as they were on the same flight back to Oz. So I had to find a way to make some music this week and I chose to have a look for an interesting iPhone app…

 G’day from Austin, Texas! Yes when I travel to the USA I can’t help but ham up the Aussie accent a little. Well, a lot really. Everyone get’s a kick out of it and to tell you the truth, when I speak with my normal inflections no-one seems to be able to understand me. Especially my name, I must have some strange way of pronouncing it because it’s always a small saga to get people to understand it. And then of course I am very conscious of it every time I introduce myself so I overcompensate with a ridiculously over-pronounced version.

 I had the pleasure of traveling to Texas for the inaugural South By South West (SXSW) music showcase festival. It was an eclectic experience of epic schlepping, multiple shows in difficult circumstances, tech showcases, art installations, conferences and networking. I was over supporting my friend Sui Zhen and really only partook in the schlepping, playing and viewing of art and tech stuff. I resolved upon leaving to sit back and watch how everyone else approached the fest, as I’d like to go back on my own terms at some point.

 The Austin Convention Centre played host to an enormous technology showcase that I was lucky to have time to explore. I was particularly interested in checking out any VR and AR stuff I could get my hands on alongside any other emerging and interesting technologies. The highlight for me was the NASA stand but I must admit I found the rest of the display’s a little underwhelming and pointless.

 VR and AR are the new sexy in tech it seems. Much like the 90’s when it seemed that VR would be in every home and have a massive impact on our lives we seem to be back in this place again with affordable commercial units available and every developer and his dog trying to pedal games and ways of using it. But for me it still doesn’t seem to have found its feet, or at least nothing I experienced in this session was very mind-blowing. The games were all clunky and limited. The only things I found really impressive were AR and VR environments created from actual places – in particular the Mars Rover footage (yep, you got to stand on Mas and have a look around) and the Australian environments (kind of like being a bird flying around looking at stuff). Speaking of birds there was one stand I didn’t get to try that suspended you in the air like a bird, you flap your arms and fly around a VR environment while a fan blow on your face to simulate air. This would have been cool I think.

 I found most of the tech kind of pointless or un-practical. For example there was this pair of shoes that you could put on that would then analyse your gate and walking style. The shoes had these little vibrating points that would buzz on the sole of your feet to apparently correct you gate. It was a very weird experience and I think it would actually drive me crazy over an extended period of walking,

 All of it made me think about our attitudes today toward innovation and then the commercialisation of these ideas. For me it is always important explore new ideas thoroughly. But if seemed to me that most of the things on display were all trying to be exciting and big and sexy ideas but not really hitting the mark because they were to concerned with being all those things rather than actually being innovative. Anyways, I am so unqualified to talk about this but it got me thinking.

 So after leaving my laptop and having nothing to compose with I scoured the net in search of experimental music apps and stumble across SoundBow. SoundBow is a drawing based music app that turns your phone into a tactile instrument. You really need to watch it in action to understand it properly, but I had a blast with it. The piece you hear for this week was an improvisation begun by recording my voice in to the app at LA airport and then experimenting for three minutes. Very simple. For next week's work I plan to use the app in conjunction with some grooves and see what I can come up with. Thanks for reading!!

[citizencayn]

#30 Pocket Fritz 4

I’ve become quite addicted to playing online chess. I’m not playing it particularly well mind you, but I find myself getting jacked up on a couple of long blacks and playing six games at once with random people from around the world. The app is from chess.com and well worth a look even if you’ve never played. It has great tutorials and if you want to play a person can link you up with others at your skill level. Hit me up for a game at citizencayn!

With chess on the mind I got thinking about human computer chess matches. The most famous story is of Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov in the late 90’s, but I was more interested in recent games, especially but software running on mobile devices or consumer technology as opposed to hardware purpose built for the game.

Pocket Fritz 4 is a chess playing program designed to run on handheld PC’s. In 2009 Pocket Fritz won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires running on a 528 MHz HTC Touch HD mobile phone. Pretty cool huh? It reached grandmaster level. I hunted around for the moves that were made during one of the games and managed to find Pocket Fritz 4 VS Rodriguez Vila, A. My idea was that maybe I could use the chess moves to make notes somehow.

 When I had a look it turned out to be pretty easy. The moves have names like “d.4 c5, d5 e5” and so on. I decided to use the letter names as note names and the numeric as an octave indication. I ignored the extra letters that are used to indicate which chess piece is being moved. I also had to deal with H which is obviously not a musical note so I decided to use G# in it’s place.

 I copied the first 44 moves of a 92-move game into my piano roll in Logic and the got thoroughly bored doing it. Listening back it was ok but not really lighting any inspiration fires for me so I decided to work on some rhythm things for a while. I made a groove in 5/4 on the 808. I then jammed around with the first twelve or so notes of the game with a Harp sound until I had a riff I enjoyed.

 Returning to this a few days later I ran the Harp riff through a bunch of different max4live paches in Ableton, with the intention of making really weird version of the riff. Things like Doppler shift effects, filtered delays and auto panning. I then cut these back into the original logic session, blending them together. At this point I added a Juno bass line made from the first few chess moves of the game.

 The clarinet came on the last day, along with the guitar, shaker and guiro. I was intending to add vocals but decided against it. The chess move stuff kind of went out the window after the Clarinet line that has all the delay on it. From that point on I was just jamming and enjoying the tune.

 I’m off on holiday for two weeks, so the next two works will be out upon my return. I’ll still be writing but most likely won’t have time to blog. Stay well and thanks for listening.  

[citizencayn]

#27 Mighty Puke

It was an excellent week in the country, Birregurra to be precise. On a writing retreat with good mates Mighty Duke and The Lords. Had absolutely no time for composing for myself, so I whipped up this little number by sampling bits and pieces of the recording session. Not my best work, but fun.

So my mac charger is dead, and my computer is about to die, AND it’s my birthday so this is all I’m writing this week. Have a great one, xx