epona/equus

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/

Studying Robert Fripp and Steve Reich’s looping methods and translating some of it to my own experiments I’ve been working on an way to break out of my tendency for playing loops in the diatonic 4/4 inside a soundscape (Robert Fripp use of “soundscape” — not the sonic arts’ use). If I play in the Key of C-maj (Ionian) as an example, a phrase can be fed into a pitch shifter to obtain any of the chromatic pitches needed that fit the tuning schema of my instrument — depending on which varispeed I use, the ratios map nicely with chromatic intervals so (say) 3/2 original speed means a pitch shift of a 5th up, an F sharp, 4/3 original speed = a 4th up = B flat etc, which you can then overlay on top of the live-played diatonic tuned instrument. (It’s easier to get if you write it out as notation, but if you can read music its pretty obvious where I am going with this).
Now, the really cool bit is this approach doesn’t just change pitch, but also tempo; so if your loop originally is in two bars (in 5/4 example – that would be 10 4ths), after shifting it up a 4th, it becomes 10/(4/3rds) i.e. its in 15/8, but if you played a quarter note before, it becomes a dotted eight! Whacky time signatures like 15/8 are, if you clap through them quite easy to get:

So keeping it simple: a loop of 2/4 time can have a 3/4 measure dropped in at any point to really make things interesting

Loop 1: 2+2+2+3+2+2+2
Loop 2: 2+2+2+2+2+2+3
Loop 3: 2+3+2+2+2+2+2

…and so on.

One fun thing to do is to try layering a 5th or a 3rd to the previous loop’s fundamental on the 3-bar section. It has a dramatic density-adding quality to the rhythmic and harmonic quality of a soundscape. The whole thing does a skip then a lurch as it resolves off-kilter back in the 2/2 measure.

Need to hear something in 15/8? In Contemporary/modern pieces you’ll find it most famously used on “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield. The 15/8 opening is made of two bars: 7/8 then 8/8 — the 80′s output of “Perpetuum Mobile” by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra is another good example as it is in 15/8, King Crimson are no strangers to 15/8 but layered on 4/4 on Discipline’s “Theela Hun Ginjeet” where the time signature of the band is 4/4, but Robert Fripp’s guitar plays in 7/8 and repeats until it loops back to the 4/4 measure — all pretty easy to grasp and I think its as a consequence of the effect of varispeed loops. This deserves deeper study… He certainly goes way way beyond Reich in this respect although Reich’s historical basis is not only tape loops but also Gamelan (which as it is not even-tempered is not really mapped easily to fourths guitar tuning) — but it becomes easier if I retune the instrument to perfect fifths + reciprocal inversions which the Chapman Stick can be, and in my case, is.

Paint me obvious but I say with a looper and has a eureka moment… a “how cool is this?” discovery… even if its been well-trodden by musicologists and Fripp and Reich fans. Its new to me and it’s a lesson that sunk in.

Getting back to the issues of perfect fourths versus fifths tuning, analysing Fripp (who has tuned his guitar to fifths aka the “New Standard Tuning”. i.e. CGDAEG — that last high G is a third BTW to resolve the interval of low G string to be an octave), he invariably builds up a basic soundscape layer this way. I’m starting with an original two-bar melody fed into the looper, varispeed it up to 4/3, and continue playing your original melody on your diatonic instrument – polyrhythm and chromatic tonality from a diatonic instrument at the same time! I’ll get a loop up on soundcloud in due course.

Building up in a loop is one thing but hacking back a beat at a time in a loop is rarely undertaken except played manually. I’d like to devise a looper that hacks off the last note of each barre after a measure so they go either out of sync or (more accurately) change time signatures: 5/8:5/8 becomes 5/8:4/4 becomes 5/8:9/8 15/16:15/16 then becomes 15/16:14/16 then10/8:20/16, and so on. Mathematically you can go through the progressions and the composition irrevocably and quite literally builds itself.

The Hidden Language of Birds - Live at the Kyrönjoki River, Finland. 2/5/11

Hello and thanks for popping by. This is going to be my new home as I document various sonic arts projects, compositions and my other passions. Equines. Horses ‘n music. Like Beer ‘n chips.

If you don’t know me or my circumstances. I am currently studying my final year in BA in Sonic Arts at University in London after that I look forward to progressing but let’s get this year out of the way before then.

I’m a composer performer. Less interested in recording and more in playing… live… to audiences. I compose for performances utilizing field recordings as a form of environmental storytelling narrative – creating what I call ‘Environmentalogues’a shameless portmanteau word that evokes a very specific, definite and intimate composition using recorded sound represented in such a way as to evoke a narrative that immerses the listener as it takes us on a journey through a dynamically changing sonic environment — a moving audioscape with themes and ideas I return to and re-explore in different ways and contexts. I play live. Some of my compositions extend into sub and near infra regions — deliberately so, thus what you hear though tiny little computer speakers is just an indication of what happens live.

Much of my work is performed using self-built controller hardware as performance tools alongside open-source software; where necessary, patching, utilizing and adapting code. I however do not consider myself to be an “electronic” or “techno” musician. I do play various ‘primitive’ instruments (processed didjeridu and wooden flutes) alongside the more modern double bass which I have been playing since the late seventies and, of course, the Chapman Stick.

I favour working with naturally harvested and ‘found sounds’ using samples as the foundation for my compositions, choosing and layering them for their texture to create very specific audio effects and sonic artefacts;

Finally I am not an electronic musician, but I do work the area of Electroacoustics. I do not use synthesisers or synthetic sounds, although sometimes processed heavily, none of what you hear originates in synthesis.

Sometimes new and unpredictable things happen when you work this way.

So please sit back, enjoy the ride.