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 resonator mode in Disting is triggered once, then the trigger is removed, as the resonation will continue infinitely and behave like a tuned oscillator, although it is in actuality a resonant filter. Sovereign is a unique tuned oscillator and a signal processor that exists somewhere between ring modulation and phase-locked loop processing, built upon the dual-tone multifrequency tone decoder (used in telephone services), and further shapes the output with selective voltage starvation. Rings is processing pink noise (output from a Behringer 150) and tuning the output signal into something near-chordal. The Buchla dual-oscillator is sending oscillator 1, frequency modulated by oscillator 2 (although this oscillator's output is not heard), along with the prior three signals into Tiptop MISO for subsequent attenuation and summing into two combined signals. These were sent into 2HP and Doepfer A-121-3 low pass filters, then directly into a Behringer 305 for mixing and panning. Finally, two tuned envelopes from the Buchla 281t (brought into audio range) were sent from the quadrature outputs into Strymon Magneto for digital tape processing and gain saturation, sending the processed stereo panned delays into the Mutable Inst. Clouds (which samples and re-pitches Magneto's output at a higher octave, adding reverberation), with both the Strymon's dry output and Clouds' output sent into the Behringer 305. The 305's output was captured with a Zoom H1, and sent directly into the desktop where it was recorded by Goldwave. Minimal post processing was applied (parametric equalization and conservative compression) in a DAW before rendering and uploading.
credits
released April 6, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live without overdubs directly from the R-EW Audioholistics modular system into a Zoom H1 digital recorder on April 5, 2022. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Session dedicated to Florian Schneider. This is Milieu Music number WD52. (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
