4500

As the sun sets on 100 days, I am looking forward to spending some time revamping my performance system, and experimenting a bit more with some new sampling ideas that I’ve come up with over the course of the project. Thanks for listening.

Once more with gusto. An attempt at combining the chaos noise with a beat and bass. A non-food item.

A somewhat dizzying state at the end of long haul. As of last week, I was supposed to be done on Sunday, but here I have taken the whole weekend as a break, and now I am finding myself confronted with a somewhat substantial writer’s block for short, one-day pieces. Full of ideas for larger scale projects, but drawing blanks for how to finish this thing. So today, we spin in a dizzying loop. Perhaps the next two will come out more conclusive.

And on other days, there isn’t do much a melody between the noise as there is a solitary hum, and the occasional intergalactic disturbance.

As our program comes to a close, you may find yourself browsing for other stations, and perhaps discovering some uncanny emotion in the static between bands.

Slightly off-schedule again, and as a result, a morning jam. Experimenting with no-input cables as a means of producing old-vinyl-like sounds, and exercising in sparseness.

A remix of sorts; yesterday’s disquiet track distilled through granulation and repetition. Synthesized by looping the melody through a few different patches, and then processed/performed with Block Party.

Another junto, happily. The prompt: loop a melody, and remove one or more notes each pass through the loop. I came up with a somewhat longer melody, so I decided to cap the loops to 4 passes, to keep the length within reasonable range of the 45 second limit. I added a bit of reversed reverb on top at the end to glue the whole thing together.

Number 92. A continuation of the refinement of block party tones. As with last time, the idea started far from the destination. A memento of the adventure, rather than a documentary of the journey.

10 more days. It’s remarkable how much lighter the source material for this one was than the final output. Blues gone dead. Perhaps a lighter rendition of the guitar parts tomorrow.

thinking of a texture, and a color.. a (possibly now tired) blending of the traditional (fingerpicking) and the modern (granulated loops) the past week or so, I’ve been focusing on practicing with the block party rig, and trying to get more adept at the kinds of pieces I can put together by dubbing multiple mixing performances as takes. it slowly feels like things are coming together with it, though the timing and latency still leaves rather a lot to be desired

Taking inspiration from Derek Bailey, and a walk through a pleasant neighborhood

Sometimes noise is an excuse, more than a deliberation. Sometimes it is both.

A track for the Junto. I’ve been meaning to do at least one of these since starting the 4500. I had some deeper ideas for how to manipulate some of the granular stuff into beats, but I both ran out of time, and found the layered modified tones to be their own right. The source sound is a plucked octave at c# through my usual guitar rig. Various layered effects in Logic

Possibility weaving, in and out, up and down, over and under

Removing some complexity this time. A static drone with “traditional” guitar accompaniment, though still rather noisy

a disjointed stroll in the winter park.

Fell off the wagon again yesterday. Life tasks are taking time and space, and the music making is more stressful than relaxing these past weeks. The home stretch is here, but it’s the hardest. 17 more days after this.

Frozen in a block of ice, waiting for you to return.

An experiment inspired by the previous day, turning some knobs in Block Party that I'd never turned before.

Composed/remixed of field recorded bits of CTM installations, Skalar and Uncanny Valleys of a Possible Future.

A quieter, calmer side of things; in reflection of seasonal deception, wherein January momentarily pretends that it’s March.

a spicy jam I made on the train.

Today was one of those days where I really just didn’t feel like doing it. I’m still waiting on stable internet at home, so I was backlogged in posting tracks from the previous two days (they were finished on schedule, but not posted). After all that, and a late evening at work, I had to force myself to get up and actually make something. I’m glad I did, but even with the light at the end of the tunnel, some days are still tricky.

An optimistic foil to yesterday’s. This one actually felt like it could use some cohesive rhythm, but I still haven’t quite figured out the tech of incorporating rigid rhythmic elements into the rig. It’s a pretty blatant violation of the timing rule, but it felt like the right length for the work.

All puss and no party like a pimply face

I’m stabilizing a bit after moving at the beginning of the month. Having the Block Party rig set up more permanently leads me to granulating more, and playing more with guitar. This one came out a good bit longer than 45 seconds, but it has a somewhat concise trajectory for a noise drone piece.

A wandering bass cycle fades in over pantomimed foghorns. The ships navigate through the fog. The birds squawk and peck. As the day ends, so another one beings.

Beats waiting in loops hidden in improvised recordings. A return to the Block Party setup leaves me with some features to be desired in the playability of loops department. But, where tools present a wall, a good strategy is often to turn into a different direction.

A digital cape, or a misspoken escape. An attempt to simultaneously maintain routine, and to break out of it.

The dough starts rough, and after a few rolls, falls over itself, as it slowly starts to congeal. This piece is a flakey pie crust, in the school of Rhys Chatham or Glenn Branca. Set in 3 time, its 14 tracks were blind-recorded with the through-line of “record the same thing each time”. Obviously some variations emerged from the performances, and some from improvisation, and willful neglect. The crust gains its life from imperfections.

An exercise in sparse, spacious composition, inspired by listening to the latest episode of the Norelco Mori podcast. Let the space breathe life into dead machines.

Another track that sounds like it could be the soundtrack of an underground Mario level.

Two-thirds through. Today a piece in the fun-a-day style of some friends in San Francisco that sounds like it could have come from a 90s three-piece with a dead member. ZZ Top Rage.

Lindsay got this Christmas nutcracker that we’ve named Fredrick. He’s still hanging out throughout the winter, so I thought I’d put together a theme song for him.

The sound of the void, somewhere in between planets.

I was aiming for something minimal and repetitive today, and I think I hit the mark. This sounds a bit like I’d imagine a film score for the scene when the character is stuck at a red light at 3 in the morning that takes 15 minutes to change.

Influenced equally by the quiet strumming in a slint song, and the heavy slowness of sleep. Made this on the correct day, but didn’t have internet to post it.

Today I gave myself an hour time limit (which I still overshot by 30 mins). The result is a two-part guitar song that I probably otherwise would have added an effects/atmosphere track to as well, but couldn’t swing it with the time constraint. It turned out to be a nice vehicle to experiment with the repetitive motifs in the higher register, and with chord voicing in the lower.

Today I felt compelled to revisit a chord progression that I’ve been playing with for a couple of years now. This recording is an experiment in accompaniment, though I’m not sure yet how successful I consider it. It’s an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach of sorts, with the main progression slowly introduced as a fade in over the first couple iterations. This definitely isn’t the final phase of this chord progression, but I do think it’s the first time I’ve released it anywhere.

I finally have access to a guitar again, so I got down with a darker slow jam, accompanied by granulated highs, and some strums glitched out sigh Shaper.

An experiment in blind recording, inspired by listening to @ioflow talk about his process on the lines sound and process podcast.

I was shooting for something a bit more sparse today. Started with a very slow Rozeta Particle Generator blasting midi into iSEM, accompanied by some granular noise, a bit of bass, and a bit of strings low in the mix. There wasn’t a particular meaning or inspiration. Sometimes noise is just noise.

Keeping it simple with a granular loop. Zone out for the weekend.

but we haven’t got a sponsor... This is a deliberately ballady pop number, inspired by a request from my friend Sean to take a shot at producing a pop track. This is what came out after an hour or so of nosing around GarageBand on my iPad.

Most of these tracks have been made towards the end of the day. Today, I flipped that approach a bit. After waking up early from jetlag, I decided to jump straight into a song, before even really getting up, and before even having coffee. The result is mellow and has a space to it that I’ve been trying to find with some of the noisier pieces. It took about an hour to track, and then another half hour to tweak the mix.

I fell off the bandwagon for a couple of days, partially due to travel (and some serious flight delays), and partly due to heavy partying on New Year’s Eve. The original thought behind this one was to come back in a sort of minimal, kraut-rocky vein, but I think I missed the mark on the latter half of that. I’ll be able to devote a bit more attention and care once the jetlag wears off.

A further distillation of some of the guitar recordings I made yesterday, barrel aged through Borderlands.

We visited a distillery today and had a tasting, with a lesson about old still pots. For this piece, I took a few guitar loops, and kept the distillation process in mind while preparing the loops in iDensity.

Had a chance to borrow my girlfriend’s dad’s guitar for a bit while visiting for the holidays. Put together this little Folk-inspired, off-time tune to kick off the second half of the project.

50 days in. A melodic line from Ribbons, juxtaposed with granulated drums and high register bells in Borderlands