Digital EP: Transmissions Part I

While I was working on Radioatomic, I had a few offshoot ideas that further explored the radio theme, to the point of incorporating snippets of distorted radio transmissions into them. This was the loose concept behind 'Transmissions.' The project has since morphed into a home for 'orphaned' experiments that came about from tinkering in the studio. I foresee a series of EP's of this nature, with a full album as soon as there's enough material. For now, you can grab Transmissions Part I here, or stream from the player below:

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1. Microbes - Testing some new equipment gave rise to this Frankenstein's Monster of a track. I never quite knew where I was going with it from one minute to the next. While searching for a title, I found an old educational film about bacteria; a monologue from which tied everything together.

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Equipment: Korg SQ-1 sequencer and MS-20 Mini (wobbly 'bassline,' panned left, and pink noise 'footsteps', panned center), iVCS3 soft synth (bubbly swamp noises, panned center) Korg Monotribe (space drum-thing sequence, panned right), Curtis for iPad granular synthesizer (pterodactyl sounds), GMedia M-Tron (choir), various field recordings.

2. Echo of the Telegraph - The Korg MS-20 synthesizer is equipped with CV (Control Voltage), and can be patched in such a way that it effectively plays itself. The usefulness of this is very limited, of course, but it leaves your hands free to shape the sound while it's blooping merrily away. One such improvisation forms the backbone of this track. To that I added TAL U-No-LX (melody), Crumar Performer (strings), cymbal, and synthesized percussion.

3. Trans Earache Express - Of the many recordings of trains I've made, I had one striking passage I wanted to build a song around. I called upon the Korg Monotribe to provide bass accompaniment (recorded live), and added a little percussion.

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4. Ghost Box - In 2013 I worked on a soundtrack that could be described as steampunk-meets-chorale. I think it's one of the best things I've done, so I hope I'll be able to release it someday. This song shares some of the sonic characteristics and overall mood, with the exception of vocals and snippets of radio recordings. A 'ghost box,' in case you're wondering, is a radio wired to constantly cycle through frequencies in the hope that spirits will vocalise through it.

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5. Lost Transmission - Written around the same time as Ghost Box. I took a lengthy recording of a transistor radio tuned so that the signal stuttered, and played it back at half-speed through a digital emulation of tape delay. I then came up with something complimentary on the Roland HS-60.

New Track - Trans Earache Express

I spent a couple of days this week editing the backlog of train recordings I captured over the course of the year. This inspired me to do something creative with them, so I called upon the Korg Monotribe to create a sequence (recorded live) to accompany a particularly striking recording made from beside the train tracks in August. Everything came together quickly over two recording sessions, and here is the result: Trans Earache Express (a nod to Kraftwerk, in case you're wondering!).

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Other instruments used on this track include Korg MS-20 Mini, Roland HS-60, Freebird VST, and Shortcircuit sampler.

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Video: Microbes

An experiment to test some new hardware and software has yielded this cheerful little ditty about bacteria. I plan on releasing it as part of a three-track e.p. in the near future. I'd like to point out that it will not be on the forthcoming The Manitou album - that is an entirely different affair and will be far more accessible!

Featured gizmos include the Korg SQ-1 sequencer controlling the MS-20 (wobbly 'bassline,' panned left, and pink noise 'footsteps', panned center), the iVCS3 soft synth (bubbly swamp noises, panned center) Korg Monotribe (space drum-thing sequence, panned right), and Curtis for iPad granular synthesizer (Pterodactyl sounds). Some samples from an old educational film and a varied selection of my personal field recordings round it out. If you listen carefully you can hear one of the pebble-drop sounds I recorded at the City Pit, as described in this post.

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Digital Single: A Robot In Every Home

The final free single from the Radioatomic project looks at the bright future promised by the advent of atomic energy that didn't quite live up to expectations. Sure, there were advances in many industries, but where are our personal jet packs, flying cars, and robot butlers? This was my inspiration for A Robot In Every Home.

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A Robot In Every Home [single edit] is drastically pruned down from the eight minute album version to serve up the essence of the track. It retains most of the intro, consisting of French horns, found sound, and a snippet of processed audio from a fun little film called 'Leave It To Roll-oh.' I was thinking of old RKO Radio Pictures black & white b-films, complete with a menacing mechanical man. Next come some synthesizer parts, the bulk of which were created with the Novation K-Station this time around. HS-60 is also present, and Gmedia M-Tron choir. The Korg Monotribe was used on the bridge, but that particular part was cut from this version.

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Like Radium Smile before it, this song started with the lyrics. Then came the melody as heard on the intro: something to set the tone for the Radioatomic album's 'big finale'. I spent some time last year sampling an electronic game called Parker Brothers' Merlin (see this post) and this seemed a perfect place to use the sounds. As well as the usual DR-550 tom-toms and synthesized percussion, there's the odd found sound in the mix, including a hand-clap with tight reverb recorded in the corner of a concrete foundation, and a pebble being dropped (into a drain pipe, if memory serves).

A Robot In Every Home [electro edit] rather than include the album version on the single I created this alternate mix, which omits the French horns and some of the samples. It has the same shortened bridge as the single edit.

There's currently no video for this track, but it's forthcoming. (updated 12/11/14). This release is twinned with the full Radioatomic album. Stay tuned to the next post for details!

Digital Single: Half Life

After a bit of a delay, here is the fifth free single leading up to the Radioatomic album: Half Life. It features a 'proper song' and a couple of experiments I like to call sonic atmospheres.

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Half Life is perhaps my favourite song that I've written for the album. It was written in March of 2013 but not finished until this April. It started out with a basic loop made from a clock sample and a bass note from the Korg Monotribe. I called upon the K-Station for an arpeggio (and a few other sounds) you may recognise from other tracks, as I wanted to give the songs on this album a similar sound and style. The bulk of the lead sounds were made on the Roland HS-60. It wasn't long after I got it that I made this song, and I wanted to 'show it off' as it were. The Yamaha TG-33 also makes an appearance. It's a digital 'vector synth' designed for making evolving pads, but in this case I've just used its lovely bell sound. The drums are Alesis SR-16 samples which were initially programmed via keyboard but redone using the Alesis SamplePad to give them variable velocity and a few interesting frills here and there.

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March of the Rads is the earliest track I recorded for Radioatomic. It's essentially an aural journey into a radioactive wasteland. We hear the clicking of a geiger counter, getting faster as the radiation builds, the stark sounds of wind and other strange wiggly noises. I thought I was being clever, only to realise that Kraftwerk already did this in the 70's on the opening track to their album 'Radioactivity.' The geiger sound was realised on K-Station. If you apply a pitch modulation envelope to a sawtooth oscillator you can, with a bit of fiddling, slow the waveform waaaay down until it just becomes a click. Turning it slowly back up produced the backing track, which was then fed through a Danelectro Spring King (spring reverb pedal). HS-60 provides wind sounds and the weird wiggly radiation noise. Monotribe also makes a brief appearance and you can hear some radio frequency sounds towards the end.

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Global Warning while doing research for the album I happened upon this youtube clip, filmed inside Sellafield THORP. At 3:50 you can hear the criticality alarm which sounds perpetually inside the building. I found the whole idea rather creepy and thought it would be a cool experiment to replicate the ambience using synthesizers. The blips were made on the Monotribe through the Spring King. HS-60 and K-Station each provide a layer of filtered noise to emulate the background hum of the industrial building.
 
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Digital Single: Cathode Ray

Fourth in my series of free singles is Cathode Ray / U235. These both lean towards the experimental, so they were a lot of fun to put together. There's nothing like unleashing your 'mad scientist' side in the studio!

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Cathode Ray opens with a march-like rhythm created from snippets of a sample & hold patch on the Korg Monotribe. The Monotribe also provides a recurring bleepy filter sequence. A bassline, drone, and some percussion sounds recorded from a Toshiba radio form the backbone of the track. The Alesis SamplePad was used to sequence some Speak & Spell percussion and tom-toms. Novation K-Station adds some extra percussive sounds. I manipulated my voice with the Marantz PMD201 tape recorder to create the spoken word part. A very nice VST called Lounge Lizard provides the electric piano.

I should point out that the TV featured in the artwork is exactly as I found it. No TV's were harmed (by me) in the making of this e.p.!

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I did something a little different with the video this time. It's shot entirely with a 40mm macro lens and features some of the instruments and devices I used to make the music. My tin robot 'Mini Radiocon,' which you might recognise from the cover of 'Let's Build Mecha!', also makes an appearance.

U235 was the first track I made for the new album project, and my first experiment with the Korg Monotribe. Once I had a patch and a sequence programmed, I recorded several live improvisations, cut them into chunks, and assembled them into a track. I then created various percussion sounds on Roland HS-60, TAL U-NO-LX, and K-Station, and added in a snare from the Yamaha MR-10. HS-60 provides some other synth sounds, more Monotribe was overdubbed, and K-Station and Yamaha CS01 also provide some melodies. Electric guitar can be heard on the ambient sections (backwards). My voice was once again pitch-shifted with the Marantz PMD201.

The title refers to the only fissionable isotope of uranium to occur in nature. In the film A Is For Atom, which I sampled for Isotopes For All, U235 is represented by a frenetic cartoon character. The bouncy arpeggio reminded me of that.

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Digital Single: Reactor Four

This month's free single is a double-bill inspired by nuclear disasters: Reactor Four (Chernobyl) and Fukushima Fifty (Fukushima Daiichi). Both of these horrendous events continue to threaten life on this planet and will do so far into the future. My music is often inspired by grim subject matter, and writing about the real world instead of fiction for a change is my own small way of creating awareness.

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Reactor Four is built on a moody percussion loop created by a rhythm box manufactured in the 60s: the Univox SR-55. Two instances of the loop were pitch-shifted, fed through a software emulation of the famous Moog ladder filter (to enhance the noise that sounds like crickets), compressed, and then fed through two stereo delays. Over this I added an odd pulsing arpeggio and bassline (K-Station) various synthesized percussions (KS & HS-60), and ye-olde strings in the form of GMedia M-Tron (a Mellotron emulation). HS-60 provides further synth sounds, and the Korg Monotribe is brought in on the outro to supply some acid basslines and theremin-like pitch-ribbon improvisation. Vocoding was done as usual through the K-Station. The 'big 80's drums' were originally done via MIDI keyboard, but I re-did them using the Alesis SamplePad once I discovered what a difference variable velocity (aka. loudness) made. The drum samples themselves were taken from the Alesis SR-16.

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Fukushima Fifty was originally envisioned as an addendum to Reactor Four, hence it has the same tempo. The music went in a different direction so it became a track in its own right. A rhythm loop from the Casio MT-100 provides the backbone. I also used a tone from that quaint little keyboard during the refrain. The vocoder that opens the track was slowed down to half-speed, because I liked the imperfections it added. K-Station, HS-60, and Monotribe were also used. Crumar Performer provides the strings this time, and electric guitar adds a touch of menace to the outro. It was recorded through the distortion effect on the Roland SP-404. I honestly can't remember if the soaring 'Vox Humana' synths at the end are HS-60 or Alpha-Juno, but I think it's the former. Percussion-wise, there's some Speak & Spell, but the bulk of it is synthesized from scratch.

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Digital Single: Isotopes For All

The second in my series of free singles is Isotopes For All Parts 1&2. These two tracks date from earlier in the recording sessions than Electro Magnetic, and are a little more indicative of what to expect from the rest of the album.

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Isotopes For All - Part 1 was inspired in part by the works of Atomic Shadow. (If you haven't already, I urge you to give him a listen. He has a new album out called City of Chrome and Glass, which is very good). Further inspiration, including the monologue heard in the track, came from a 1953 educational(?) film called A Is For Atom. The naive and alarming nature of the film, juxtaposed as it is with the cute Disney-esque animation, prompted me to re-purpose it in a way that highlights the more disturbing elements of 1950's atomic-age thinking.

Snippets of the soundtrack were copied to cassette tape and the pitch modified manually with my Marantz PMD201 tape recorder. To my mind this further enhanced both the disturbing and comical nature of the monologue. Forming the basis of the music is some quirky synthesized percussion, rendered using the TAL U-No-LX softsynth. Weaving in and out of the track is a bassline constructed on the Korg Monotribe, and an arpeggio from the K-Station. In between the narrated sections, the Roland HS-60 adds some interesting sounds and the K-Station provides a second bassline.

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Isotopes For All - Part 2 evolved out of a desire to see how the music would sound with a more conventional beat. It was initially a three-minute recording (this became the 'single edit') of Monotribe bassline and K-Station arpeggio with parameters such as filter-cutoff manipulated in real-time, to which the instrumental parts and drums were added. An early version used the Monotribe's analogue drum sounds, but I found they muddied the mix. An 808 kit from the Boss DR-550 left room in the mix for some phased strings courtesy of the Crumar Performer run through a Small Stone phaser.

After receiving the demo, my friend Jimmy sent me an extended mix of the track he'd put together for fun. I liked it so much that I decided to make a longer version myself, and that's how it ended up two-and-a-half minutes longer. By this time the bass patch on the Monotribe (which has no patch memory) was long-since gone. I came close to replicating it, but it didn't have quite the edge of the original, so I used a mix of the original recording and the new.

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96.1Mhz, an experimental 'atmosphere' was included on the e.p. to break up the two different versions of Isotopes Part 2. It consists of a recording of radio interference augmented by sound effects from the Korg Monotribe.

Digital Single: Electro Magnetic

Leading up to the release of my new album, I'll be releasing a series of free two-track singles. The first of these is Electro Magnetic/Nibiru. It will be available for free on my Bandcamp page until the next single is released (at least two weeks).

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Electro Magnetic was inspired by the knowledge that electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) are buzzing around us almost constantly in our technological society. Far from being gloom-and-doom, however, Electro Magnetic is an upbeat electropop song with minimal vocals and a focus on synthesized percussion and electronic rhythms. I came up with the idea when I was walking in the woods, and recorded some hand-percussion into my digital recorder so I'd remember it. It was later re-created in the studio. The sounds were created on Novation K-Station and Roland HS-60. The Crumar Performer is also featured on the bridge, and the Boss DR-550 provided the tom-toms.

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Nibiru began as a bass sequence on the Korg Monotribe. I recorded an improvisation of various filter and LFO tweaks as a single take and constructed the rest of the track around it. Also featured are the Roland HS-60, an arpeggio from the K-Station, and some Speak & Spell percussion samples. The title was inspired by a phantom sun purportedly hiding behind our own.

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Also included is a single edit of Electro Magnetic, which omits the extended breakdown. It essentially follows the same structure as my original demo.

New Equipment: Korg Monotribe

End-of-season work has left me with little time for audio projects, or indeed to update this blog. But I expect the trend to change as winter draws closer.

As it was my birthday last month, I used the money I received to buy a new piece of gear for the studio. Thanks go to my brother for bringing this cool device to my attention (and for contributing some cash!): the Korg Monotribe 'Analog Ribbon Station.' It's a compact analog synthesizer module with a ribbon-style controller, sequencer, and some analog drum sounds for good measure.

Having had a bit of a go with it, I'm impressed with the range of possibilities it offers considering the simplicity of its design. I can see it becoming a staple tool for strange noises in my productions. I also like the fact that it has control voltage in-and-outs, which means it will interface with a lot of pre-MIDI equipment. In theory, I could control the tempo of the sequencer with my old Boss DR-220A drum machine, for example (thereby enabling me to enter a precise bpm/speed rather than turn the dial and guesstimate).

The step sequencer, which can control both the drums and the synthesizer, is very intuitive. The ribbon controller is hardly precise, but the ability to control a wide pitch-band (at the flip of a switch) makes it great for improvisation. The nicest thing about it is the sound of the synthesizer itself, thanks to the design of the filter circuit, which is from Korg's legendary MS-20 synthesizer. The MS-20 is long out of production, and sells for upwards of $2000 (10x the price of the Monotribe).