I’m incredibly pleased and proud to share the release of my first EP, Carnation Lily Lily Rose.
I’d describe the record as a diverse landscape of twisted, lo-fi electronics and haunted distortion, taking inspiration from the work of Xiu Xiu, Sarah Davachi, and Arthur Russell. It was recorded during the winter of 2022, largely improvised on modular synth and presented with minimal editing.
It was important to me that the record have a human feel, that it could breathe and drift, collapse and rebuild.
Most of the compositions started as patches on a Moog Matriarch, which were then run through a Make Noise Strega. I captured the output of both the Matriarch and the Strega, which gave me some flexibility to creatively mix between these instruments, highlighting the sweetness of the Matriarch and the harshness of the Strega.
This is the first volume of completed work that I’ve released — thanks to everyone in this community who (perhaps unknowingly) lent their wisdom and support. Hearing from you all has been a constant source of inspiration over the many years I’ve been working toward this moment.
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Just scooped it up! Thanks for sharing your work. The squealing feedback on the beggining of the first track is so well controlled. It can be hard to get that sense of co trolled chaos that I think you nailed. That alone was worth the price. Digging into the rest now.
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Thanks, Brett! Controlled chaos is a great way to describe the energy I was after in that first track.
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Congrats! I’m psyched to hear this…
Also cool to see a local nautical reference in the title Isles of Shoals! Our friends with a motorboat took us up there for a nice afternoon of floating around a number of years back. Cool place for sure…
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Thanks! I’ve never actually been to Isles of Shoals, but it’s visible from a beach I frequent in New Hampshire. It always seems so mysterious, ghostly somehow, which the mood that inspired the track.
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This is a lovely work. I love the overall compositions, and it’s nicely balanced between musicality and production. Thank you very much for it.
Could you speak a little more on your process, particularly composing? Were you playing the Matriarch, using the arp or sequencing it externally? Am I right in thinking you would process the Matriarch output with the Strega? Did you entangle the Matriarch and Strega with control voltage in any way?
Thank you again.
@xidnpnlss Thanks so much for your kind words. I wanted the record to have an organic feel so I focused on playing the Matriarch, though I definitely patched in a way that a key press might trigger a whole host of things happening – wobbling the delay, opening the filter on Strega, etc.
One of the many lovely things about the Matriarch is that it has multiple outputs, so I could send one set to my audio interface to record directly, and another set to the external input of Strega, process it, and then send the output of Strega to record as well. So for each of the sessions that comprise the album I have a “dry” Matriarch track and a Strega’ed version of the same track. This gave me a lot of flexibility to take relatively simple melodies and build them into denser, morphing structures in post. A lot what you hear on the album is the result of that process. Once I had a mix / edit I like I reamped it, ran it through the Vongon Ultrasheer and printed the final result.
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