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Five Held Tones for the Barringer Crater

by Brian Grainger

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1.

about

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 (2022/09/15)

September's five held tones are:

1. SSDP AS3340 VCO (Novel waveform)
2. Buchla Quad Function Generator 281t (Pulse wave)
3. Buchla Quad Function Generator 281t (Pulse wave)
4. Buchla Quad Function Generator 281t (Pulse wave)
5. Buchla Quad Function Generator 281t (Pulse wave)

The five oscillators were tuned by ear to form a five-part chord, and routed into a Future Sound Systems MTX9A pin matrix for summing, where they were sent into two different filters (2HP LPF and Doepfer multimode). From there, they were individually panned and processed via Strymon Magneto, Mutable Inst. Clouds and the Wildfire Laboratories modules Lucy Says No (a vactrol-based feedback path) and Equation Group (a passive resistor ladder), before being mixed via a Behringer 305 stereo mixer. Modulation from a Behringer 150 dual LFO, Behringer 921 (6x LFO) and a Buchla 258t dual oscillator was introduced to all involved modules for filter sweeping, granular positioning/size and other aspects of the signal path.

credits

released September 20, 2022

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, September 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 WD57, #57 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Anna Winlock, Enrico Fermi and Mark Rothko. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All lights observed.

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Brian Grainger Dayton, Ohio

Drone music, warm atmosphere and textural ephemera for the working man.

I also release music as Milieu milieumusic.bandcamp.com and Coppice Halifax coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

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