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.
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.
My DEEP EARTH series, comprised of darkroom improvisations recorded without computers, live on analog and digital equipment. Time pulses out of focus. Brian Grainger
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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