#134

Hey everyone,
Just wanted to give an update. @Olivier has nearly completed the artwork and it looks incredible, I am really exciting for y’all to see it.

The mastering situation is going okay–I am not making progress on it as fast as I would like. Because this is new to me, I’m probably being a bit obsessive about it (as I’m a bit nervous that I will make a naive error and “mess up” someone else’s track), combined with the fact I don’t really have a good and efficient “workflow” figured it out, it’s slow-going. I’ve “finished” tweaks and created the DDP for the first disc, and I feel like the relative listening experience across the release is pretty solid, but I still feel it’s not quite there when I A/B it up against other stuff I know well (though it is getting closer for sure). That being said, it has been a really rewarding learning experience, and after listening to the songs a lot, I really have enjoyed thinking about the different ways in which people chose to balance the sample (there are some interesting patterns and trends that have emerged).

I’m excited for everyone to be able to listen to and see the full package on this. Apologies that it is taking so long. My goal is to try to make at least a little progress everyday so that it will be done soon without it becoming too overwhelming and stressful. I appreciate everyone’s kind words, “likes” and encouragement throughout this process, and I appreciate the trust y’all have put in me to make it happen.

-John

13 Likes
#135

Thanks so much John! I think we can all agree that having you take your time and get it right, is an investment the community is willing to make in order to have another person available to organize and master LCRP compilations. It’s a very valuable gift you’re giving to us, as much as it is also a learning experience for you.

So, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I have no doubt you are taking LCRP to the next level.

8 Likes
#136

I second @jasonw22: You take all the time you need. You’ve gone above and beyond in putting all this together. Thanks!

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#137

Allow me to add my gratitude to this. As someone who is still finding my “sea legs” in this domain, I appreciate very much your generosity in taking on a new skill in service of the community “Hear hear!” say I for taking your time and for sharing your gifts!

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#138

Dear John, I just wanted to echo the sentiments of @jasonw22 @loma and @dnealelo. Its been really nice to hear you being so open about refining your skills, and I’m positive you’re doing a great job. Take your time, and it will be ready when it is ready!!

4 Likes
#139

Hey everyone, I am excited to finally share Day + Night!

I just wanted to thank everyone again for all their kind words and encouragement throughout the process of making this happen. And specifically thank @disquiet for the great idea for the compilation (and some editing help on some wording), @Olivier for the incredible art (he did a lot of really cool layout for the CD, which should be up and available for purchase in a week or so), and @jasonw22 for all of the time he spent helping to pass down the process of mastering and generally just helping to figure out all the questions that popped up.

I will share some more about the mastering process and the things I learned in a few days. If anyone is interested in sharing more about the processes they used to come up with their tracks, I think it would be really cool to discuss that here. Also please share that the release is out on social media or what not, if you’d like!

I’ll leave y’all with an excerpt of something I wrote about the release (this is on the bandcamp page in addition to some general things about LCRP for people who might be coming to it unfamiliar with lines).

As you listen, I’d encourage you to explore the ways in which certain sounds perform a call and response (either across the stereo, frequency or transient spectrum), how particular sound sources and spaces morph into others, and the way the tonalities of “day” and “night” move about (both in time and out of time).

Thanks and enjoy!
John

16 Likes
#140

my favorite lcrp artwork (so far)
and such a fantastic theme

i missed all this discussion but congrats to all participants
enjoying this one

7 Likes
#141

Thank you again @jlmitch5, @Olivier and everyone else involved for all your hard work on this project.

It’s raining heavily here in Tokyo, so I’m going to listen to the album on the train today.

Here are my notes:

BACH AT THE CHICKEN SHACK (diachronic - night and then day)

  • This track is based on Chaucer’s magnificent poem about a cock called Chanticleer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nun’s_Priest’s_Tale
  • My original recording takes up the first 2.5 minutes of the finished track. It represents Chanticleer’s nightmare. Jason’s original recording takes up the second 2.5 minutes. It represents waking life.
  • I’m not sure what is being chopped up on Jason’s farm, but it made for a stately bass drum which beats 57 times (in honour of Chaucer’s probable age when he died.)
  • I sampled the crowing cock and a cheeping bird, turning them into very crude synths. They emerge at the end of the track to sing the first few bars of Bach’s Goldberg Variation #21. (If Chanticleer and Pertelote can discuss all the subtleties of Biblical and Aristotelian dream interpretation, then Chanticleer’s seven wives can surely anticipate Bach in their jubilant song on his return.)
  • The track title is my terrible pun on Jimmy Smith’s jazz album “Back at the Chicken Shack.”

RAINS, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (synchronic - night and day at the same time)

  • Cut bellyfullofstars recording in two, placing the first seven minutes in left channel and the second seven minutes in the right channel. The different patterns of rainfall in their own spatial regions makes it sound like we are standing between two buildings, the water drops striking different architectural features around us.
  • Played my recording (with a gentle fade in and fade out) in the centre of the mix at the 1 minute, 3 minute, and 5 minutes marks.
  • Paulstretched my recording to seven minutes length, placed it in the centre of mix, and added a repulsor every bar to generate a gentle rhythmic push.
  • Cut two 0.2 second samples from bellyfullofstars recording and used them as the basis for a hi-hat, snare and kick drum. The rain becomes all encompassing at times, so I made a reference to Dave Lombardo’s famous thud-thud-thud drum intro to Slayer’s “Raining Blood”.
  • I sampled bellyfullofstars trains and had them run from left to right (around 2 minutes) and right to left (around four minutes) to suggest a return journey.
  • Towards the end of the track, I slowly increased the value on a smear VST, and was surprised with the result - it sounds (to me at least) a little like a train entering a tunnel, which creates a nice reference back to bellyfullofstars’ train recording.
4 Likes
#142

The bass drum is a llama eating dinner from a plastic bucket that hangs from a metal barn door. :llama:

7 Likes
#143

That is a string of words that has probably never been seen before!!

5 Likes
#144

It’s too much to handle. Dave Llamabardo!!

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#145

I listened to the whole thing last night while reading and it was really enjoyable! Nice work one and all.

ETA notes on my tracks:

It was cool getting paired with both recordings made by @samarobryn because it was fun to hear the similarities and differences.

The Other Night
Both recordings are stretched to the same length with no attempt to preserve pitch. As mentioned up thread I liked it just like that, but thought about other ways to play with “balance”. I thought maybe using these relatively raw sounds in quite different ways, in terms of dynamics and rhythm, might be fun. So I gated the relatively noisy night recording to make it all on/off and relatively hard, while the daytime sounds gently fade in and have a ping-pong delay that softens and washes them out a bit. I didn’t want to go all out and just smear these quieter sounds because I liked the unique events popping up.
Then I made it boring and trad by adding chords and drums. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: The “synth” is from samarobyn’s bird sounds and the drums are from my sounds of everyday activities in a small village. Something about repeating the chords with the relatively long gap in the middle felt like balance to me.

Daytime Fireworks
The main thing happening here is the two recordings through a vocoder. Samarobyn’s daytime grove recording is the carrier, my fireworks recording is the modulator.
Some amount of the original grove sounds are in the mix at the start and the original fireworks show at the end. Basically a giant crossfade, but drawn into my app based on what my ears were into.
Harmonic stuff comes from a train toot. Ping-pong looping to create movement.
The title’s a nod to the literal translation of a Chinese movie’s title, which for some reason the distributors changed entirely for English-language markets. It was an after the fact thing, though, it wasn’t on my mind while writing.

6 Likes
#146

So so happy with how this has come out, amazing work!

5 Likes
#147

I really enjoyed this (in spite of it shining a rather unforgiving light on my effort!) so thanks everyone.

Particular props to @jlmitch5 for getting it to sound so consistent given the disparate nature of the source material.

4 Likes
#148

Unfortunately a little problem with my ears currently prevents me from fully enjoying this latest LCRP, but I did try to listen to it and from what I can hear, it seems like turned out really amazing! But I have to listen to it properly when I get better…

What I can say so far is that the cover artwork is wonderful, great job @Olivier! It’s definitely one of the best I have seen so far.

A couple of notes on my recording(s).

My field recording was taken during a late evening on the Greek island of Rhode, in a really tiny village called Koskinou. There was some animal in the bushes making some crackling noises, but we were not able to find out what it was (hence the title). I think the overall quietness was a great pairing with the noise (and artificial sounds) from John’s Pinball Museum recording. The sounds in the latter apparently come mainly from a machine called “Gorgar”, which Wikipedia tells me, is the first speaking pinball machine. No idea where the name “Gorgar” came from (but maybe @jlmitch5 can tell us more about it?), it likely is the name of the red demon which is featured on the machine’s artwork. To me it did sound a bit like “Gorgon”, and there was the Greek thing again.
Maybe the noises in the bushes where Gorgar himself hiding from our sight.

And, a couple of notes regarding the process:

  • I have to admit that the track is more the result of trial&error than a precise concept. I’d usually try to go for something like what @Jet made (great track btw!), with a simple and clear concept, but for some reason that just wouldn’t work this time.
  • My general idea was to create a series of raw sounds from the field recordings using two distinct methods: looping of small parts which had a certain rhythmic quality to it and stretching out of some parts that had a more tonal quality. I wanted the overall sound to be a bit like Helm’s Olympic Mess, where the rhythm is mostly implied by the looping of bits of sound. I also liked the idea to use different lengths to create polyrhytmic or polymetric rhythms.
  • The night recording did of course pose some more challenges, but the crickets and cicadas provided me with some material. The pinball sounds where of course a feast for that!
  • Stretching was also quite interesting with the pinball sounds, since there’s a lot of tonal material there coming from the fx and the music. I did have to do some denoising to “carve them out” though.
  • I think I did use some other techniques as well to create the “raw” material, but I can’t remember exactly what.
  • Once I had all of that, I started to assemble things into a piece.
  • The overall structure is intended to be a big morph between the night towards the day. Layers mostly come in and fade out slowly, with some hard cuts thrown in for good measure.
8 Likes
#149

Listening now - really lovely work everyone.

Wish I’d had the time to contribute to this…

4 Likes
#150

I’ve listened to the album a couple times in chunks, and have been really impressed with how cohesive the tracks are in relation with each other. Hoping to sit down with the whole thing at once soon!

Here are some wordy but generalized notes on the process for piece Grey Earth:

  • I spent a lot of time thinking about the themes related to Day + Night. Eventually I settled on a related sub-theme of a balancing opposites. Not only were the recordings obviously opposites in terms of Day and Night, but @howthenightcame’s recording of Tokyo traffic and city noises provided a nice contrast with the natural setting of my frog choir recording.

  • I’ve always had an appreciation for the compositional processes behind musique concrète, from which this piece draws heavy inspiration. A lot of my initial work was limited to techniques that were only available at the time concrète came about. Discrete pitch / playback speed manipulation (Ableton’s warp engine turned OFF), reverse playback, simple EQing, reverb, echo, etc.

  • Once I’d gotten a few good sound snippets with pure concrète techniques, I decided to twist things up by allowing myself to use ableton’s warp engine to… well, warp the sounds. As an example, I love transposing something in one warp mode, and then un-transposing it with another. Say down a fifth with Beats mode, and then back up with Texture mode. Or up 2 octaves with Texture with low grain size and high flux and to get something super digitalized and aliased, and then bring it back down with Complex Pro. With large transpositions, this gets very wild VERY fast.

  • At some point I decided that it would interesting to warp the sounds beyond recognition, and turn the nature sounds into sci-fi city sounds, and the city sounds into sci fi nature sounds.

  • Continuing from the previous point, as I was constructing the piece I began to imagine some sort of vague story, based on the sounds I was hearing and my own (more-so than usual) personal distress regarding our planet. I pictured some kind of advanced, future world with synthetic creatures to replace the natural ecosystems they lost over time, and I imagine the piece is following the journey/escape of an individual from their home in the city to a so-called nature spot. It’s a bit reflective of my own feelings, and how I sometimes need to go out and be in nature to refresh myself, but I worry that a time may come where there’s no longer any natural places to escape to.

  • As I was working with the source material, at some point I ended up with these textural but pitched drones. While I don’t have time to play many video games these days, I had been revisiting a lot of soundtracks of games I played as a kid. One of my fav compositions ever is the music from the final hours of Majora’s Mask right before the moon is about to crash down. Given the similar dire nature of my piece, I somewhat shamelessly borrowed the cluster voicings from that piece, and used that for my own drones.

  • Finally, I also used a simple pinged resonator patch I built with Max using MC. It’s nothing fancy, just running audio through the bandpass output of 6 parallel [svf~]'s with high resonance, with some short impulses added in to excite the filters. They’re tunable, with layers of base frequencies, octave above, and a 3rd layer, which was actually my original attempt at doing this patch but I got the math wrong and just ended up with these dissonant, really high pitched pings but I thought was a nice texture so I kept it while adding in sections with the correct MIDI-frequency conversions. I ran the last nature section through this patch after I finished the form, and added it back to the piece afterwards. It’s using the same Majora cluster voicings as the drone pads.

5 Likes
#151

Omigosh! This has been out three days and I didn’t notice! (For some reason, I didn’t get a flag; I’ll have to revisit my settings.) Thanks, @jlmitch5, @disquiet, @Olivier, and @jasonw22 for all you put into it. I’ll have to wait until tonight to download and listen to it; it will likely be this weekend before I can get some notes up.

So exciting!

4 Likes
#152

Great work! Really enjoyed how you worked the tracks together and it was quite interesting reading your process!

2 Likes
#153

Fantastic work everyone!

I thought I’d talk about my tracks…

desynchronosis - I thought it would be fun to play around with concepts around time and discombobulation, particularly since GoneCaving’s track is documenting their morning routine and I was pairing it with my night track. As I made this track, I also thought back to my time when I was still doing night shift and losing track of time because I was essentially operating with an upside-down schedule.

The track is bookended by two versions of GoneCaving’s track panned hard right and left respectively, one playing ~30secs after the other, then one other version running through a resonator and panning around. I did the same with my tracks about a minute in :slight_smile:

a dark grove - the original track from ermina was quite long at ~22mins, but also beautifully eerie. So my first challenge was to try and match my track (which was about 5mins) to this, and the first thing I did was time-stretch. After panning and adding resonators to ermina’s tracks and my time-stretched ones, I then layered a looped version of my original track underneath.

What you’re hearing in the compilation is the edited version kindly suggested by @jlmitch5, which neatly ends around a point where everything builds up to a lovely crescendo :slight_smile:

4 Likes