I rarely put up a work in progress but I thought this time I would as it marks a slight shift in direction and emphasis.
No guarantees! It may be re-composed, re transcribed, re orchestrated, put on a shelf, ignored, disowned, rediscovered and even left untouched until the night it is due to be rehearsed or performed, but this is Hrafnfaxi. The introduction to a much much bigger work tentatively called é-õs.
Now, é-õs is an derivation of an ancient word for horse. From the Proto-Germanic ehwaz, Proto-Indo-European h₁éḱwos. Cognate with Old Saxon ehus, Old High German eha, Old Norse jór. Latin Equus, Old Armenian էշ (ēš, “donkey”), Proto-Baltic *ečwā- (Lithuanian ašvà), Old Irish ech (Modern Irish each) — thank you Wikipedia! The many faces of an ancient god once worshipped as a deity (and still is in some places).
Hrafnfaxi is old norse, it means “raven mane”.
Again, for this I am doing less of my live collaging and performance-based musique concrète and more yer “All The Dogs”-style moody scene-scaping but the themes for é-õs part 2 and 3 (to come) are sketched out here, and the elements of my usual practice of live sample triggering (this time on a MIDI foot pedal) are here. Quite open to change it at the moment but it sets the stage, in broad strokes painting the dark horse of the piece.
To reiterate my usual practice: no synthesis! No overdubs either. This is performed clean on Chapman Stick. Live triggered are samples of human voice field recordings*, flutes and clack-sticks via footpedal. The processing of the Chapman Stick is made with a demo version of the excellent Shimmer plug-in from Valhalla DSP (www.valhalladsp.com) that I am buying as soon as I can afford ot get under my overdraft! Plus a little stitch-together of my secret sauce: chain of effects — things from my toolbox and blended to sit under the stick itself. All processing is done in real-time on the iMac (which also recorded the performance so you get a decent quality soundtrack). I am looking into Eventide Harmonizers later on but for now this is a good place to be: expectant, broody. What started as an idea from Robert Fripp’s Soundscaping but performed on Stick (not his instrument) was reworked until it nods more at B J Cole or Eno: Apollo Soundtracks, but it sounds right. It sets the scene.
And for all your audio only needs:
A couple of bum notes but plenty of time to put some work into that.
*and credit where it is due: The opening sample is “When Raven Claws the Sky” by Incarnadine and is used under a creative commons sampling+1.0 licence. http://www.freesound.org/people/Incarnadine/
