Five Held Tones for the Foundation Stone

by Brian Grainger

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Richard Erickson A beautiful wall of sound, minimal but full. A wall full of sound.

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Five Held Tones for the Foundation Stone 55:55

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 (2022/01/24) -

January's five held tones are:

1. SSDP Jade Series VCO (Novel waveform)
2. Doepfer A-196 PLL (Square waveform)
3. Cre8audio Chips (VCO 1 / Square waveform)
4. Behringer 921 (Pulse waveform)
5. Wildfire Laboratories Sovereign (All four prior waveforms, composited, processed and re-tuned via Mutable Instruments Clouds)

The first four voices were mixed and attenuated via Tiptop's MISO, where they were summed in sets of two and routed into two different low-pass filters (2HP LPF and Doepfer A-121-3). The output of both filters was multed - first, a dry signal sent into a Behringer 305 mixer, and second, the same signal sent into Strymon Magneto for additional processing - with the outputs of Clouds and Magneto both sent into a Disting Mk4 using the E5 stereo compressor mode, which was finally sent into the Behringer 305 mixer. All four mixer outputs were routed through a Zoom H1 digital recorder, and uploaded with minor parametric EQ, fades and volume leveling applied.

credits

released January 29, 2022

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live without overdubs directly from the R-EW Audioholistics generative system & modular processing path, into a Zoom H1 digital recorder. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Session dedicated to Eliane Radigue on her 90th birthday. This is Milieu Music number WD49. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All nights preserved.

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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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