David Prescott
This series keeps getting more interesting. Of all the "held tones" series so far, this one sets itself apart by having so much going on in the subtly nuanced changes. I'm not quite sure how to describe it, but it's great on large speakers and small, louder and quieter, etc...
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.
Having recently acquired a Korg Opsix altered FM synthesizer in May for my 39th birthday, it was an easy decision to consult with five of the six operators within the machine in order to construct June's five held tones. All five operators are additive waveforms, which for the most part imitate stops on an organ, and were individually tuned/detuned, given varying degrees of feedback via frequency modulation, and finally routed through the machine's internal effects array, which utilized the "unison ensemble" effect, a variation on a chorus effect that selectively detunes the sound and widens it artificially in a stereo field. The machine's BRF12 notch filter was also used on the signal path. From there, the signal was sent into my R-EW Audioholistics modular system, where it was processed by a 2HP time-domain pitch shifter, multed and sent to two different filters - a 2HP low pass filter, panned hard left, and a Doepfer A121-3 multimode filter, with the Doepfer's LPF output panned hard right, and the high/bandpass filter outputs panned slightly left and right, respectively. This output signal was routed into a Zoom H1, which conveyed it directly into Goldwave's recorder for subsequent DAW integration/final parametric equalization/compression/mastering.
credits
released June 15, 2022
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded live at White Pillar Workshop, June 13th 2022 using a Korg Opsix altered FM synthesizer in conjunction with the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD54, #54 in the Workingman's Drone series, dedicated to Suzanne Ciani.
My DEEP EARTH series, comprised of darkroom improvisations recorded without computers, live on analog and digital equipment. Time pulses out of focus. Brian Grainger
Slowly unfurling ambient music, wafting from foggy guitars, orchestral tape loops and a humming vintage organ. Pollock shooting off fireworks for phosphene weather. Brian Grainger
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
