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Seven Held Tones for Elia Vouvon

by Brian Grainger

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1.
Seven Held Tones for Elia Vouvon 55:55

about

The Workingman's Drone series continues, changes, stays the same, and as I sit here watching the snow fall outside, held safely inside my wooden studio, considering the natural world as I often do while I write or patch or design, I once again feel that this ritual of ascetic minimalism is not a wall between myself and that world, but a communion with it.

I considered taking a year off from Workingman's, having run it continuously each month since 2021 when it resumed with Year Four, but the recent studio additions of powerful wavetable synthesizers, as well as multiple machines with re-flashable firmware options, led me to feel that there was still plenty of richness to be found in the series' current trajectory.

Year Seven follows the last two years of "Held Tones" sessions while also shifting its focus away from disparate points of interest around the world (either locations, events or structures that have fascinated me) as its writing prompts, and returning to the "roots" of Workingman's Drone, so to speak, with direct connections to trees. The series began with a simple visual indicator of two fir trees, which through the years would grow in size, and expand in number, until Year Five replaced terrestrial flora with imagined (perhaps cosmic) flora, sampled from the inexplicable Voynich Manuscript. So, while Year Seven continues this visual tradition of sampling from that source, the twelve writing prompts now reference twelve of the oldest living trees in the world, which bear individual names, and hold deep historical connections with their surroundings.

Thematic directions aside, the music offered here is identical in approach to Years Five and Six of Workingman's - a fixed number of voices, be they oscillators, LFOs, self-oscillating filters, noise generators, really any sound generator that can sustain a single tone, tuned by ear, panned and mixed accordingly. Year Seven will explore a system of seven tones, likely to be in a combination of mono and stereo, but always balanced and symmetrical, and designed to remain untouched for the duration of the recording.

From here, to another year of composing by way of listening, to another year of seeking stillness in that most paradoxical realm of oscillation, another year of stepping away and listening instead of speaking, always returning to the Earth, always becoming the world instead of outrunning it.

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April's 7 held tones are:

1. Waldorf NW1 (Text-to-speech wavetable)
2. Synthesis Technology E352 Cloud Terrarium, Morph mode (2x Waldorf PPG wavetables, out 1)
3. Synthesis Technology E352 Cloud Terrarium, Morph mode (2x Waldorf PPG wavetables, out 2)
4. Behringer Model D (Oscillator 1, triangle wave)
5. Behringer Model D (Oscillator 2, triangle wave)
6. Behringer Model D (Oscillator 3, triangle wave)
7. Behringer Model D (Low-frequency oscillator, triangle wave)

Input 1 filtered via Arturia Minifilter LPF and centered to mono. Inputs 2/3 filtered via Arturia Minifilter LPF and hard panned L/R. Inputs 4-7 filtered via Doepfer A-121-3 LPF and converted to stereo image via Strymon Magneto, with outputs hard panned L/R. Final mix via Behringer 305 and FL Studio.

credits

released April 5, 2024

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded in three sessions and assembled at White Pillar Workshop, March 21st, 2024 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system and FL Studio. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number WD76, 76th in the Workingman's Drone series. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2024. All nights preserved.

"All work is never finished. The statue remains inside the stone."

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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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