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Chaircrusher - Gumby Slowly Melting Into Pokey

from winter solstice drone by Artists from the VCV Rack Official Users Group

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Artistic:

In music I've always been inspired by the quote from Heraclitus, rendered in modern times as "You can't step in the same river twice." What he said more properly is "πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει": "Everything changes and nothing stands still." Or as Google Translate would have it "Always lives and remains."

The score for this is 2 sustained notes. I made a system for playing those two notes that is complex and subtle. It is static only in pitch. The timbre and phase relationships shift against each other restlessly, and echoes of the continuous drones cancel and reinforce them.

I have field recordings of the water rushing through a dam's outlet into a river, where the rushing water makes a sound almost like white noise. Small ebbs and flows and variations occur as the water splashes and churns that make it engrossing to listen to. What I was hoping to do in this piece was convey the simultaneous change and stillness of that river in these two notes.

Technical:
I have a bag of tricks I use a lot when I work on ambient pieces, and I used them all on this piece.

The basic setup is 6 oscillators -- 4 Blamsoft XFX Wave, and 2 Animated Circuits COSMOSC. I chose those because you can modulate them with methods other than the ones the classic analog oscillators support. Each of the oscillators has subtle modulation of pitch and waveform by slow LFOS.

The two COSMOSC oscillators are also fed into long delays, and both the dry oscillators and the delays are panned back and forth with a slow LFO.

These are then sent to two ValleyAudio Plateau reverbs in series. The Plateaus are also modulated by slow LFOs on several parameters.

credits

from winter solstice drone, released December 21, 2018

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ablaut Suzhou, China

dutchman making ambient music in china

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