Year Five of the Workingman's Drone series surfaces, immediately following a fourth year, offering twelve more monthly iterations of sustained-tone drone recordings for the 2022 calendar year.
Unlike Years Three and Four, which focused on studying the voice of a single device or sound source each month, Year Five represents an amalgamation of the first two years of Workingman's (which utilized a wide array of combined sound sources, albeit in representations that moved beyond sustained-tone drone music, and simply conveyed ambient music) and Years Three and Four, which maintained a stricter approach to the drone format, never developing the tonality beyond a decided initial arrangement that was designed to remain in a state of recurrent (and operatively endless) oscillation.
In this way, Year Five embraces five different oscillators or sound sources for every session, each of them held continuously for exactly fifty-five minutes and fifty-five seconds. This approach allows for a wide range of sounds to be utilized, while still remaining adherent to the ethos that drone music should exist in a moment of stasis, as much as possible.
Apart from the numerical connections and relationships present within these sessions, listeners will note a series of specific locations or events referenced in the titles. These places and moments are only a focal point of fascination, through which I am able to reactively shape the timbral and textural characteristics of each session - essentially a 'writing prompt' for the creative act to start somewhere, as it always must. These titles are not dedications or statements of any kind, simply a sonic weltlandschaft to exist as a backdrop for the central subject matter - five tuned voices - in order to convey more profound perceptions of depth and wider ranges of visualization in the mind's eye.
After doing a few Workingman's sessions this year with multiple-output signals from less than five sources, I felt compelled again to diversify simply for the sake of doing so, and so November's session is derived from five very different sound sources. The Dreadbox Utopia LFO was routed into its own Pulserizer input - essentially a bit-crusher - which turned the audible-range sinewave LFO into a pointed waveform with more body, and alongside the SSDP Jade series VCO (using a novel waveform), these were summed and sent into a 2HP low-pass filter. Next, I unified the Bastl Tea Kick's squarewave output with the second more angular waveform oscillator within the Buchla 258t in the same fashion, sending those into a Doepfer A-121-3 low-pass filter. For the fifth signal, I used another squarewave, this time from Bastl's Noise Square, and shaped that via the low-pass filter mode in Expert Sleepers' Disting Mk4. I used the positive and negative outputs of a Behringer 150's LFO to sweep and pan the 2HP and Doepfer low-pass filters, before sending them L/R panned into a Behringer 305 stereo mixer. The signal from the Mk4 was sent into Strymon Magneto, where it was processed into stereo with a four-head tape delay, and also L/R panned in the 305 mixer.
credits
released November 11, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, November 4th 2022 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD59, #59 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Wendy Carlos, Yoshi Wada and Claude Monet. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All lights observed.
My DEEP EARTH series, comprised of darkroom improvisations recorded without computers, live on analog and digital equipment. Time pulses out of focus. Brian Grainger
Slowly unfurling ambient music, wafting from foggy guitars, orchestral tape loops and a humming vintage organ. Pollock shooting off fireworks for phosphene weather. Brian Grainger
A six-hour ambient tapestry, with subtle dub techno undercurrents. Created for the exact length of time my newborn daughter was finally sleeping through the night at the time. Brian Grainger
A longform drone piece from New Zealand sound sculptor Mo H. Zareel plays subtly with listeners' perceptions as its layers unfold. Bandcamp New & Notable Jul 21, 2020
