Floating - Week 20

This week I didn't really know what to do, so I recorded a 30 minute jam using my Korg Volca Drum, MicroKorg, and Sonicware Liven Ambient 0. I then took different portions from the jam and rearranged them into a more cohesive song that had a bit more structure. The backbone of the piece is my Volca Drum running through the delay and reverb built into my Stylophone CPM-DS2. I had the drum have a low percent chance to trigger in a few different locations on the 16-step sequencer. The drum was sort of a gong sound, with some randomization that makes it sound different every time. When it runs through the delay, it creates a percussive sound that comes in and then fades away before being triggered at random again. To add to the texture, I took some portions of the recording where my Liven Ambient also had the delay turned up. I would play a note with a slow attack and release, the resonance pretty high, and the cutoff low, then turn the cutoff up and down quickly so the the delay would catch and create this almost digeridoo-like sound. I also had a recording of me sweeping through the cutoff to extend a note a bit that I utilised at the beginning, middle, and end, but it mostly gets swallowed up by the lead synth. To create the lead synth, I took a part of the recording of the MicroKorg where the notes had an almost instant attack and slow release. It was running through my reverb, compressor, and harmonizer (set to an octave or -7 down) pedals, which added to an effect that almost sounds like a string being plucked. My timing was a little random, so I took a portion where I played three notes and repeated it three times. The strange thing about hearing it over and over is they sound a little different each time, even though it's a perfect repeat. I also added a few other portions where I was playing notes into the MicroKorg in order to give additional texture, namely the portion in the middle where I am playing two notes and slowly speed up until I totally lose the rhythm and they descend into chaos before returning to the "chorus" of the three notes being played, and the ending where I played a simple melody with a much slower attack that allowed me to play "ghost notes" that are almost inaudible in between the stronger notes. To end the piece, I created a melody out of the ghost note section that has a great beginning, but ends with a stronger note to end on. It sort of rounds out the final section, and gives time for the drums and other droning sounds to fade out. I forgot to mention but the notes harmonise pretty well because I was just playing the black keys again, and there are sections where I was only playing one note but in different octaves on both the MicroKorg and Ambient 0. They all got separated from eachother in the edit, but this ethos seemed to pay off in terms of creating a cohesive feeling with a lot of different experimental techniques being utilized. For the video, I used footage I shot on my Sony Handycam HDR-260v while on a balloon ride with my new (and only) wife back in February. Her father kindly purchased this ride for us as a wedding present, and I used the experience as an opportunity to get a ton of footage for future film projects. The camera has really good image stabilization, but I sped it up between 200-400%, which is why it's a little jittery and the cars sometimes whiz by. I added an adjustment layer over the footage and messed with the colors a bit to make the image feel a little warmer and richer, and I tried to make all the cuts match the video as best I could. I selected the shots almost at random, I just wanted the four longest clips so there would be a lot of room for them to be sped up without forcing me to make cuts unless I actually wanted to. This video was pretty heavily inspired by Jörg Thomasius's Meditation (1985). You can see it here if you'd like, I think that it's one of the most underrated experimental songs I've come across: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VtAWjn88Pk Eventually I will post the original jam recording to the Video Sketch Archive alongside the analog video wizard visuals I created while reviewing the music. You can follow the channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@sc0o0tt