Following immediately on the heels of Year Five, Workingman's Drone returns with Year Six, carrying twelve more monthly volumes of sustained tone music. Adhering to the same format as Year Five, with a dedicated focus on unchanging 'held tones' for the duration of each session, 2023's recordings consist of six different sound sources - oscillators, feedback, granular synthesizers, etc - all tuned and panned by ear for each piece.
Due to the temperamental nature of analog tools, oscillators will sometimes drift slowly across the piece's runtime, allowing factors such as temperature and electrical current fluctuations to affect the music in real time, and these drifts have been left intact on Workingman's Drone releases in order to capitalize on the unique sensations that become possible with glacial pitch deviations in a dense stereo field. The resultant recordings are minimally equalized and compressed for mastering and final release, and offer a view of the endless in their hypnotic shimmering walls of polyphony.
Workingman's Drone has always paired well with psychedelics, meditation, sleep deprivation and other forms of deep listening, and listener experimentation is always encouraged. Differences in stereo systems, volume levels, bass output and closed ear/open air playback will yield many new sonic experiences, highlighting my interest in producing music that is as much a utility as it is composition.
Adjacent recordings to Workingman's sessions are often captured and issued as Limestone Ziggurat/LSZ releases, and may also appeal to listeners seeking to explore more sound material in this vein:
weltlandschaft.bandcamp.com
As with Year Five, Year Six's titles refer topically to various locations, events and other esoteric subjects that exist only as a possible writing prompt for each session. These subjects are in no way shape or form meant to be endorsed or advertised by the recordings, and should be considered in pure aesthetic terms only. Additionally, each session is published with one or more dedications to artists, writers, scientists and other creative minds that share a date of birth with the month of the recording. These people have all, in one or several ways, influenced my own endeavors and so it is my desire to thank them here, where and when I can.
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PATCH NOTES (2023/04/04)
April's six held tones are:
1. SSDP Jade Series VCO (3340, novel waveform)
2. Behringer 1004 VCO (Negative sine and ramp waves, positive triangle/square/pulse waves)
3. Expert Sleepers Disting Mk4 (K1 wavetable VCO with custom wavetable)
4. Expert Sleepers Disting Mk4 (K1 wavetable VCO with custom wavetable, sub oscillator output)
5. Buchla 258t VCO 1 (Ramp wave)
6. Buchla 258t VCO 2 (Square wave)
1+6 filtered via Doepfer A-121-3 LPF, panned 5:00. 2+5 filtered via 2HP LPF, panned 7:00. 3+4 filtered via Behringer 1006 LPF, mono. Post processed with a slow stereo inversion applied to further animate the sound field. Recorded 2023/04/04 at 5 PM.