back to
Milieu Music Digital
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

Five Held Tones for the Nekoma Pyramid

by Brian Grainger

/
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.

-----

PATCH NOTES (2022/04/28)

May's five held tones are:

1. Mutable Instruments Clouds (Parasite alt. firmware / Resonestor mode / Karplus Strong oscillator)
2. Buchla Model 258t (Oscillator 1 / Combinatorial waveform)
3. Buchla Model 258t (Oscillator 2 / Combinatorial waveform)
4. Buchla Model 281t (Function B2 / Combinatorial waveform)
5. Buchla Model 281t (Function D1 / Combinatorial waveform)

Beginning with a carefully hand-triggered chordal structure from within Clouds' Resonestor mode (which was then multed and sent to the Behringer 305 mixer + Strymon Magneto > Behringer 305), four additional oscillators from two Buchla modules were tuned and routed into Tiptop MISO, attenuated, summed in sets of two, and again routed into 2HP and Doepfer low-pass filters. The outputs of both filters were sent into Behringer 305, where all five sound sources were panned and mixed, recorded via a Zoom H1 digital recorder and migrated into Goldwave for subsequent equalization, compression and mastering.

credits

released May 5, 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 28, 2022. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. Session dedicated to Alvin Lucier. This is Milieu Music number WD53. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All nights preserved.

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

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

contact / help

Contact Brian Grainger

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

Brian Grainger recommends:

If you like Brian Grainger, you may also like: