kwookyworld: the blog

Dailies B-11: Alright OK (3:15)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 13:38:00 +0000

It's ok, i'm alright. A boppy little number that started out life as a krautrock jam and got lost in trademark Kurrel soft harmonies. Apologies for the patchy pitching on the lead vocal. :) Also apologies for the dead link.

Dailies B-10: Arrow (1:42)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 12:02:00 +0000

This is me, musically playing it straight.. This is me, musically playing it straight. As an arrow. Hence the title.

Also an arrow points to things. This song also points to things. So it is straight, and it points to things. Straight to things which are to be pointed to straightly and pointedly.

Also arrows pierce things but i don't think this song is going to pierce much as it is quite soft.

So listen to this while i contemplate writing some more music for Voco, aight?

Dailies B-09: Speed beans (1:12)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:27:00 +0000

Shorter and nastier and reminiscent of an old song i wrote about beans; i really should uninstall e-phonic Drumatic. I reach for it too lazily now.

Also i am bored and annoyed with posting music like this. To give you an idea: every time i post music i upload it, then enter comments into this blog, then into the RSS feed. I could just database the process and save myself the trouble really. I probably know 80% of how to do it from my job anyway..

Something for the new year!

Dailies B-08: Lippapup (1:42)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 13:06:00 +0000

Random. This is what a month of writing only a tiny bit of music does to my brain; it's back into twelve-tone land. (Link fixed.) I like the drum solo in this. I should do more of them. :)

Dailies B-06: Dub n synth (3:38)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 13:37:00 +0000

Dub and synths. The sort of heavily melodic repetetive stuff i write when i want to write music but i can't be bothered actually writing anything too programming-intensive. Sorry for the cynicism. It's a nice dub groove i think.

Dailies B-05: Torpor (1:31)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:48:00 +0000

It was time for a quick Daily featuring a classic cut-up parody of Ronald and Nancy Reagan. I'm going to bed. This job is really tiring me out; figures i'd write something ambient.

Another stoppage notice

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 10:21:00 +0000

Sorry Daily-lovers, but the Dailies are in stoppage again due to having too much music to do. :)

Plug: UR sampler, Tuned to a Dismembered Channel

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 14:04:00 +0000

I'm appearing on the long-awaited Uncomfortable Records sampler under my experimental name Kurrel the Raven with an as-yet-unreleased dark ambient track called 166. More news here.

Dailies B-04: Disco Robot (2:02)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 10:50:00 +0000

The upgrades are done, so back to it we go..

Contrary to the assertions of this boppy little acid house number, i am not a disco dancing robot. It is but nostalgic dancefloor silliness, an excuse for all-ticks-loaded Moroderesque basslines and to get some value out of Eiosis ELS Vocoder.

Karl Bartos i am not, in fact i think i sound more like Disasteradio on a really off day..

Player: The Sinedrone EPs

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:49:00 +0000

Here's all three of my sinewave EPs collected together and playable for your enjoyment in mid-quality MP3 format.

Quicky EP: More sine clusters

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:01:00 +0000

Dailies and lack of HD space be damned: it's time for another sine cluster EP!

More sine clusters (Runtime: 24'23")—
1. Whalesong harmonics (2:26)
2. Earthquake cluster (6:46)
3. Beat shimmer harmonics (7:45)
4. Monolith cluster (7:24)

This one's been made with my most advanced oscillator bank system yet, justin++. Developed in Synthmaker, each of justin++'s 13 sinewave oscillators has controls for amplitude, phase, pan and finetuning and a much better harmonic programming method than the other Justin builds. (If it weren't so buggy and temperamental, i'd be linking it.) Still no LFOs, but we wouldn't things getting TOO complicated would we...

Like the previous sinedrone EPs, there are two atonal tracks and two harmonic ones, though now i can detune the harmonics this way and that they're starting to edge towards the line of being not quite so harmonic as before. Still, beat frequencies are fun. :)

If you like these, check out my other drone EPs: Four Sine Cluster and Just Intoned Drones.

Dailies B-Notice

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 03:46:00 +0000

Sorry guys, i've run out of hard drive space to write music. Should be able to get back on track next week, time allowing. :)

Dailies B-03: So not going there (2:01)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 12:11:00 +0000

I bought Lennardigital Sylenth1 today in a moment of unforgivable weakness instead of spending money on things i should be spending it on (clothes, even a new hard drive would have been good). Then i wrote the intro to a trance song i am not planning to attach an actual song to.

It's just that.. well.. Sylenth1 sounds absolutely fantastic with no effort required. Music starts writing itself. It is magical. It is the fattest wall of sound around for VSTi on Windows at the moment that i know of and i like fat sounds. I think me and Sylenth1 are going to have a good working relationship, frankly. Better than that ELS Vocoder i bought and haven't bothered using much of since.

There may or may not be another daily later in the evening; the night is young.

Dailies B-02: Trance and chips (4:15)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 19:21:00 +0000

Podcast link for Dailies B: clicky.

I have a lot of trouble writing trance. I don't know why. It's a genre i actually used to like a great deal but lately its bag of tricks has been a bit stale. So i decided to make a trance tune that steals lots of licks from C64 and Amiga music - i call it Trance and Chips.

Consciously quoted tunes include Project X's ambient title music by Allister Brimble (melody at 2:08 and throughout), one of the Last Ninja tunes either by Anthony Lees or Ben Daglish (too lazy to find out which, right at the start amid lots of Nyquist howling) and Zoids by Rob Hubbard (2:40). One of the descending arpeggios is very like something out of a Jeroen Tel track i can't remember specifically.

For a daily this took a surprisingly long time.

Dailies B-01: Bored Gods (2:28)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 14:16:00 +0000

And here is the first daily for the season, cunningly started while my friend who enjoys listening to them is on holiday. RSS feed is here.

I call this one Bored Gods, and thanks to a massive software quirk i can't work on it anymore. This trackout is what i had before it refused to load again.

in communication with every land
i have to stop myself from yawning
with all the knowledge of the world at hand
i find it pretty boring

information overload has got so bad
i don't pay attention to anything i read
file sharing means there's no music worth buying
welcome to internet ennui

the real world is transmuted to frames and packets
but the conversion is never complete
no matter how much bandwidth or how lossless the codec
something is lost in the ADC
convert analogue to digital, convert thought to keystroke
space becomes nothing becomes infinity
between routers and switches and trillions of miles of cable
is the void that precedes our mental network reality

through self-digitisation we become information
through reality dilution we steer our evolution
through creative self-deception we make strange reflections
and start a revolution from deliberate delusion

Quicky EP: Just intoned drones

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 19:46:00 +0000

So given that i've now made myself a virtual instrument that can make sexy just intoned sinewave clusters, i decided to jam a bit with it and share some possibilities with everyone.

What you're hearing in this set of four jams, chorus and reverb notwithstanding, are up to 11 simultaneous sinewaves arranged in varyingly simple and complex mathematical proportions to one another. Because they're so very simple, there's a weird stasis in the sound. The tones throb and purr and ripple and sing and scrape in surprisingly complicated ways, and when they lock together consonantly they lock together fast. Rightly so after all, since just intonation is such a consonance-laden system.

As with Four Sine Cluster (link), there are two atonal tracks and two tonal tracks. This time the prettiest one is last in the suggested listening sequence. Total runtime is approximately 26 minutes at the moment, though i'll probably edit some of the tracks quietly when nobody's noticed..

Tracks:
A: atonal cluster drone
B: half diminished drone
C: space cluster drone
D: added second drone

If you want to have a go yourself, here's the 11-oscillator version of Justin with 256-stage multiple select and individual oscillator phase control. Even has an oscilloscope as well.

Justin, a VSTi plugin for WIndows

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 21:42:00 +0000

Well! That was quite a long stretch of silence..

I've been wanting to do this for a while but i've finally got off myself and done it: i've made a VST plugin. Yes, it's made with Synthmaker CM (even worse than using a construction environment for plugins instead of coding it, i used a crippled one from a magazine cover—shameful!) but as practical demonstrations of just intonation go it's quite useful. You can explicitly set ratio values in Justin's interface to form clusters of notes, and the note you're playing doesn't have to be the lowest note in the cluster. It's explained a bit in the included textfile and the interface is pretty self-explanatory.

Props to Outsim for letting schmoes like me make our own extremely esoteric and useful-to-absolutely-nobody-else plugins. :)

Download: Justin, VSTi plugin for Windows. (~1MB)

Dailies 0x0A.17: Pill (2:18)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 17:19:00 +0000

Dailies 0x0A finally closes (no point denying it) with some long-since-having-done-it-doing-it-again shoegaze. Guitar tuning for this was something like DADAAD because i couldn't be bothered fingering anything. Guitar ampage courtesy of Amplitube LE and Voxengo Boogex.

It's late enough at night that i'm having trouble seeing straight so i'll just leave you with the lyrics and hope you enjoyed the dailies. :)

eyes closing softly
my head's in a whirlwind

i can't tell what's going on
it's a multicoloured snowstorm
coloured violet red and orange and yellow

eyes opened softly
the stars are singing
my head's in a whirlwind
the universe is ringing

eyes closing softly
i need to be still
what was in that pill?

Quicky EP: Four Sine Cluster

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 13:01:00 +0000

So i had four sine generators lying around and an afternoon to occupy. Here's a quartet of jams with nothing more than four interplaying sinewave oscillators, either set as harmonics so they beat as little as possible (just tuning) or deliberately so that interesting rhythmic patterns happen (beat tuning). Enjoy!

A. Just Cluster
B. Beat Cluster
C. Just Cluster 2
D. Beat Cluster 2

Dailies 0x0A.16: Fallingrisingflying (1:24)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 06:36:00 +0000

Today's daily is some laidback trippiness out of more experimentation with eXT's step programming. I think today between doing loads of laundry i'm going to be writing something i can listen to while indulging in my latest obsession: sudoku. (Very little of the music i have is capable of blocking the world out without being distracting.)

do you ever get lost in your consciousness
do you ever wonder whether you exist
do you ever stop to check if you're dreaming
by reading a sign then looking away and reading it again
to see if the words have changed
have you ever examined the detail invented by your brain
when you're looking at a tree or the sky in a dream
do you ever get the feeling things aren't what they seem
to be - are all statements for you simultaneously
incomplete, self-reflexive, meaningless, false, and true
do you ever feel like the only human being
in a world of dumb primates as far as the mind can see
except you know that to everyone else you're just
another mortal naked ape as well?
do you ever sigh about how the verb "to be" smacks
of omniscience that anyone who uses it lacks
unaware that all they know about is how the world seems
to them from where they are and where they've been
and if we as a species spent less time talking about
what is and instead explicitly described
what we saw from our perspective as it seemed
somehow that subjectivity might be more objective
and do you ever wish you could live inside your head
and do you ever get that feeling lying in bed when you're not sure
if you're falling or (falling or) rising or (rising or) falling or (falling or) flying (or flying)

Dailies 0x0A.15: Coffee Twitches (1:25)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 22:11:00 +0000

This one is a bit messy, as befitting a track made on the first serious encounter with any given piece of software, in this case energyXT 1.4.x - and yes i know eXT 2 just came out but i like the Chord option in the old one too much to let it go just yet. :)

So i've owned eXT for many moons now, having purchased it initially as an expander for Buzz since Buzz doesn't do audio or MIDI recording/editing as well as it does sequencing. It's only now that i'm starting to get to grips with what a total beast eXT actually is in and of itself. I love the chord function for instance. I can trigger chords off the padKONTROL pads instead of playing them out on the keyboard, putting much more attention towards the expressiveness and rhythm of them instead of panicking when i forget where to put my fingers. And as for programming breaks? The slicer module in eXT's built in sampler is great stuff, especially when you throw the sequencer over into step time. Love it.

I'm not really convinced by eXT2 yet but it's not like i have to stop using the old version on ceremony. :) By the way, the name is in honour of yet another night spent sleepless due to coffee consumption and having beats to make.

Dailies 0x0A.14: Thomp! (1:09)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:13:00 +0000

I'm back and i've got a Korg padKONTROL. I need lots of practice on it. Suck my practice acid.

Dailies 0x0A: Official stoppage notice

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 15:43:00 +0000

Sorry for the stoppage; normal service will resume after the middle of June. :)

Dailies 0x0A.13: Ambient tea break (3:19)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Mon, 14 May 2007 13:56:00 +0000

Due to transient mental damage caused by working six days in a row at work, today's daily is quite floaty. It's also a return to texture from the rather less well navigated area of melody, at least less well navigated by me. :)

The source sound is a really, really sexy physically modelled brass instrument called Brass 1; you can get the demo from Wallander Instruments. Playing it as a straight instrument sounds almost exactly like the real thing with a slight touch of pipe organ to it. Even if you don't listen to it as an exact simulation, what a sound..

Actually this reminds me of Aurora Borealis by Wendy Carlos, except without all the arpeggiations and synth sequences and length. Aurora Borealis you can find on the remastered Sonic Seasonings 2xCD album as an extra, and goes to show that Wendy definitely has the chops to do killer blissed-out ambient.

Dailies 0x0A.12: Copy and paste (3:18)

noreply@blogger.com (Simon) — Fri, 11 May 2007 17:16:00 +0000

This is a song about program features. It is somewhat wistful. It's also more than a bit repetetive; i'm too tired to track any good ideas today. It builds off a quadraSID riff that augments into a fatter and fuller sound courtesy of a few extra SQ8Ls and Wavestations doubling the original riff. An Oatmeal provides the main melodic interest, starting off with a simple riff that widens into five-part harmony.

This tune would have been headache-inducing to write in Buzz. It was in fact written on the latest Buze alpha (0.4.6). Buze has a really nice feature that allows you to copy and paste entire machines, allowing things like note doubling in a few keystrokes. It also lets you track multiple channels of harmony very easily - every time you enter a note it sounds all the notes on the same tick in that pattern. Such a godsend for doing complicated melodies. So this song is about the usefulness of those two features in particular.

Also this is the first time i've put the tune into set-and-forget mastering instead of bothering to master it precisely. We'll see how it sounds on the Mackies tomorrow i think.