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.
One of the few ways to coax usable audio information out of Ornament & Crime (a multipurpose utility module that usually performs modulation and timing functions, as opposed to audio processing) is to bring the four low-frequency oscillators in the module's Quadraturia mode into audible frequency ranges. For the 58th session, I began by bringing another LFO into audible range - the Behringer 150 module, which is a recreation of a section of the Roland System 100 - and tuning the first of Ornament's LFOs alongside that. Quadraturia's method of LFO generation is such that LFOs 2/3/4 are each relative to the rate of LFO 1, by way of multiplications or divisions, and so all four were tuned to different pitches that formed a harmonic chord. LFOs 1/2 were sent into a 2HP low-pass filter, while LFOs 3/4 were sent into a Doepfer A-121-3 multimode filter, and these outputs were then routed into Strymon's Magneto module for four-head tape delay and hard L/R panning within a Behringer 305 mixer. The first LFO from the Behringer module was processed through a 2HP Pitch module for time-domain pitch shifted duophony, then filtered through a Disting Mk4, before being routed into Mutable Inst. Clouds, where it was probabilistically sampled, filtered and reverberated, with Clouds' outputs hard L/R panned into the 305 mixer.
credits
released October 25, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, October 15th 2022 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD58, #58 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Arnold Böcklin, Folke Rabe and Hokusai. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All lights observed.
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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
