KVR Audio

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 12:25 am

I've been holding off on posting my newest tracks until my artist's page on audioshots was up and running. Thanks to the amazing generousity of Spe3d and his great work, my site is now operational HERE. Check it out if you've got a mind to.

Or you can go directly to my latest work, the complete digitally remastered version of Until The Isban Moon

Some of you may have seen my posting earlier of parts I and Ia of this piece. The complete work is just over 24 minutes long, split into 3 songs. It's best to hear them back-to-back, as they were not intended to be heard as separate songs. If you're into abstract soundworlds, check these out for sure!

Again, thanks to the kind folks at audioshots!

intel · Post by **intel** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 2:07 am

there's some really good stuff here. thanks for sharing.

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 2:12 am

intel wrote:there's some really good stuff here. thanks for sharing.

You're welcome, and thanks for checking it out! I've got a ton of new stuff in the works. Too bad I've got a day job

herodotus · Post by **herodotus** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 2:26 am

This is really fascinating stuff here emdot. Doing the whole project on reel to reel is impressive as well.

These pieces do have a Subotnik/Wourinen/Luening vibe to them that I like, only with much more audio-savvy production values than the old guys usually had.

Pt.2 is very cool indeed.

Soniccat · Post by **Soniccat** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 2:34 am

Cool site emdot, glad you finally got one up. Looks very good. Will be checking out your music when I get some time. Congrats.

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 3:25 am

herodotus wrote:This is really fascinating stuff here emdot. Doing the whole project on reel to reel is impressive as well.

Back in '96 reel-to-reel was all I had available. The entire piece was actually done as one long sequence in my old Ensoniq EPS. I recorded the dry sequence tracks to one stereo pair on tape, then one FX track to another stereo pair. I then mixed both of these back through my MIDIVerb II and MIDIVerb III FX units and recorded this FX track as another stereo pair. That's all the original piece was. These were transferred to digital and cleaned up in 2003. These digital track were what I used here, applying some compression, reverb and in Part III some Spektral Delay. I find the results really encouraging.

herodotus wrote:These pieces do have a Subotnik/Wourinen/Luening vibe to them that I like, only with much more audio-savvy production values than the old guys usually had.

High praise indeed. Subotnick is my most admired composer of the old analog days. No one was as inventive as he. Wourinen's award winning Time's Encomium is probably the best conceived piece of academic "bleep-bloop" (excuse the phrase) music I've heard, and Luening's work with Ussachevsky is fascinating.

I've never set foot in an academic music institute other than to listen to music, but I had two things while composing this that those you mention didn't have. The first was the tools to make improvosational composition possible (most of this is MIDI recordings of live jams, largely unedited or quantized). The second is the musical tradition that these early pioneers handed down. By this point in my compositional career I had developed an appreciation and an ear for abstraction, which was not really possible for those that came before. They were literally skirting into the unknown. Whereas I was drawing from a fairly wide, if obscure, range of musical oeuvres.

Thus for me this piece was an intuitive reflection of sensibilities already in public domain, whereas for those you mention, their works were largely risky and laborious experiments.

What a load of crap one does spout when all one wants to say is . . . THANKS!

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 3:30 am

Soniccat wrote:Cool site emdot, glad you finally got one up. Looks very good. Will be checking out your music when I get some time. Congrats.

Thanks! Just come on over and hang out at my site whenever you want. Kick back, we'll pop open a couple [insert whatever here] and chill!

vtx · Post by **vtx** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 3:05 pm

site looks great, like the graphic,
the spikes in isban are way cool,
the whole thing is very mysterious and the mix surrounds you, well done
have fond memories of the old EPS, used to use the mic input for some cool efx..
good stuff man

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:58 pm

vtx wrote:site looks great, like the graphic,
the spikes in isban are way cool,
the whole thing is very mysterious and the mix surrounds you, well done
have fond memories of the old EPS, used to use the mic input for some cool efx..
good stuff man

Thanks! I really love the EPS despite its 12-bit sampling rate. A little delay and reverb added to it makes all the difference in the world. But the really great thing about it is the performance controls it has. They really made the best of the technology they had and still kept it a reasonable price.

I'd like to see more MIDI controllers come with programmable buttons like the EPS. Two simple buttons to control the layers of your instrument and suddenly it became incredibly alive.

I haven't used it much in the last few years because mine kind of crapped out on me, some loose solder connections inside I think. But I just recently got another one as payment for some studio work I did for a friend, this one with max memory, the 8-output breakout box and a SCSI drive. So, I might get back to it soon. There was one piece that never got finished that I recently was checking out and it was pretty cool.

Oh, I am working on a follow up to Until The Isban Moon, so maybe I'll bring the EPS back for some new stuff. I've made instruments with it that I can't really see doing on VSTi's.

vtx · Post by **vtx** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:20 pm

sounds good, I'd love to hear you do something wild on the EPS,
ya those 2 buttons were killer using the distortion and lead sounds, I remember getting these random screams on 1 button and a cool slide on the other,
going way back with that baby, eh, we rented the older mirage to try some layering and stuff, the 8 bit crunching on the mirage gave it an edge to.

have a good one...

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:58 pm

I always used those layer switching buttons most effectively on soundworld instruments. We'd create these sounds that are most similar to what you'd hear from a Fizmo by filling all 8 instrument slots with various instruments--some of them with one-shot samples made from industrial sounds like air compressors and tire changing machines and drills. Then on on instrument we'd move the sample loop down to nothing . . . The EPS would freak out and start randomly playing bits of all the other instruments onboard! The cool thing was that it gave kind of predictable results: specific notes would always trigger the same bizarre pattern. So we'd find notes that produced really cool pattersn, then record them and resample that sound. We'd do this 8 times and load all the sounds back into the EPS . . . and do it again! Once we had sufficiently messed up sounds, we'd load these kinds of instruments as a bank and then edit the instruments so that the mod wheel would move the loop point. By combining all this we could perform some really complex warping in live time.

Sometimes the best sounds are found when we push our instruments beyond what they were designed to do!

herodotus · Post by **herodotus** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 7:44 pm

emdot_ambient wrote: They were literally skirting into the unknown. Whereas I was drawing from a fairly wide, if obscure, range of musical oeuvres.

Yeah they really did have a struggle. But the previous generation had it even worse. I remember reading Louise Varese concerning her husband in New York and how hostile everyone was.

Apparantly the one who had the most hatred directed at him (by concertgoers and critics alike) was Bartok, which seems odd.

Still, they have been dead for a while, and they are more influential today than ever before.

emdot_ambient · Post by **emdot_ambient** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 1:50 pm

herodotus wrote:
emdot_ambient wrote: They were literally skirting into the unknown. Whereas I was drawing from a fairly wide, if obscure, range of musical oeuvres.
Yeah they really did have a struggle. But the previous generation had it even worse. I remember reading Louise Varese concerning her husband in New York and how hostile everyone was.

Apparantly the one who had the most hatred directed at him (by concertgoers and critics alike) was Bartok, which seems odd.

Still, they have been dead for a while, and they are more influential today than ever before.

Yeah, and the infamous premiere to Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. Do audiences really get this upset anymore? I guess they only do when someone like the Dixie Chicks speak out politically.

As for their influence, I'm not so sure how many people really realize that the culture has kind of absorbed many of these ideas and reprocessed them in popular music. The technology in music today has made wild mangling so easy and quick to do that it's come into even fairly mainstream music production, all via seemingly non-academic circles. So the influence of these pioneers may actually be 3rd or 4th generation.

Kind of like what one reviewer said about Eno. He said he's hearing a rash of bands that are emulating earlier bands that were influenced by Eno. The new bands may not even know where their influence originate but it percolates through anyway.

Subotnick is still my greatest influence of all these. Learning to really get into something like The Wild Bull requires a new way of thinking about rhythm and melody. Once achieved, his music is sublime.

Emdot Ambient -- Artist's Page & New Tracks