Five Held Tones for the Runit Dome

by Brian Grainger

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Five Held Tones for the Runit Dome 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 (2022/07/17)

July's five held tones are:

1. Behringer 921 (Sine wave)
2. Behringer 921 (Triangle wave)
3. Behringer 921 (Ramp wave)
4. Behringer 921 (Square wave)
5. SSDP Jade Series Phasr (Sine wave)

The Behringer 921 oscillator, a 1:1 reinstatement of the Moog System 55's oscillator (with pulsewidth modulation coming from a composite modulation array, by way of Buchla 281t and Future Sound Systems' pin matrix), has all four waveform outputs sent into a Doepfer A-135-2 voltage controlled mixer, where it is attenuated and split, to be sent into 2HP and Doepfer A-121-3 low-pass filters. These LPFs are modulated by a very slow sinewave LFO from a Behringer 150 - one positive and one negative - in order to pan the signal by slowly opening and closing each filter. The filter outputs are sent hard panned L/R into a Behringer 305 mixer. The A-121-3's notch and bandpass outputs are sent into Mutable Inst. Clouds as L/R signals, which probabilistically rearranges the signal from its internal sampler buffer, reverberates and filters it again, and this signal is sent into Strymon Magneto, where it is modulated and routed through a four-head tape delay system, and finally sent back to slightly L/R panned inputs on the Behringer 305 mixer. Piggybacking in on the 305's 3rd and 4th channels as a mono signal via stacked cables is the self-oscillating SSDP Jade Series Phasr, a low octave sine wave, providing an ample and stable bass foundation beneath the wavering 921 oscillator and its various signal permutations. Thematically, the pitch deviation and creeping sense of dissonance within the patch's 55 minute runtime is very much intended, given the nature of the Runit Dome and what it physically and ethically represents. In this way, WD55's title is more connected to the music in a direct way than in other sessions in Year Five.

credits

released July 19, 2022

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, July 17th 2022 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD55, #55 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Gordon Gould and Geezer Butler.

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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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