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.
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PATCH NOTES (2022/08/21)
August's five held tones are:
1. Blue Marvin ARP 2600 (VCO 1 / Pulse wave)
2. Blue Marvin ARP 2600 (VCO 2 / Pulse wave)
3. Blue Marvin ARP 2600 (VCO 3 / Pulse wave)
4. Blue Marvin ARP 2600 (Ring modulator / 2x instances of sawtooth LFO in audible range)
5. Blue Marvin ARP 2600 (Sawtooth LFO in audible range)
As the patch notes make obvious, this month's session originates entirely from within Behringer's reissue of the "Blue Marvin" version of the ARP 2600 analog synthesizer. Focusing primarily on three pulse waves that are tuned according to the fastest possible rate of the machine's internal LFO (which is just barely putting it into the audible range as a sawtooth oscillator). The LFO was then sent to the 1-input/3-output multiple, where mult 1 went dry into the VCA input, mult 2 went into the gain input set to x1000, then into the ring modulator, and mult 3 went into the +10v voltage processor and inverted, before being sent into the second input of the ring modulator. The three oscillators and the output of the ring modulator were mixed through the ARP's low pass filter, and alongside the VCA output of the dry LFO, were sent into the spring reverb tank that is built into the machine itself. A very small amount of pink noise was also added into the filter path, but isn't very audible in the final output signal.
credits
released August 22, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, August 21st 2022 using Behringer's reproduction of the Blue Marvin ARP 2600 analog synthesizer. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD56, #56 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Claude Debussy.
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
