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.
The ARP 2600's three oscillators all shared the same internal filter and amplifier path, and were tuned independent of each other, and mixed in mono, while the Werkstatt and MS-1 were both panned further apart in the left and right sides of the stereo field, and utilized more resonant and heavily filtered tones from their internal low-pass filters, filling out a bass register. All five signals were sent initially through a Mackie ProFX8 mixer, with shelving equalization applied to the full mix, before being routed into a Peavey FX2 mixing desk for final parametric equalization and compression, as well as a multing of the Mackie signal being first inverted, then routed through a Danelectro Reel Echo delay unit, and finally sent through a slightly resonant high-pass filter.
credits
released February 4, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live without overdubs directly from the Blue Marvin ARP 2600, Moog Werkstatt and Behringer MS-1, into Mackie ProFX8 and Peavey FX2 mixing desks. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Session dedicated to Ray Kurzweil. This is Milieu Music number WD50. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All nights preserved.
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
