first junto submission, nice to have some time over the holiday weekend to experiment!
https://soundcloud.com/joseph-branciforte/july-3-2017-disquiet0287
i tried to stay true to the strictures of the assignment, even though it was initially difficult to find something musical to say. i settled on an explicitly rhythmic approach (not my normal thing), chopping up an existing ambient piece of mine into 16th note chunks in my daw and reassembling them into new sequences. i was interested in creating small melodies and larger structural units from material that was largely static harmonically. by juxtaposing small chunks with contrasting spectral content, i was able to imply some sense of harmonic development, or at very least, accent patterns.
short video of the daw sequence:
a process-related note:
over the last year, i’ve moved away from composing in a daw to working almost exclusively with a hardware- and modular-based setup. returning to the computer for this project confirms that i am moving in the right direction, i.e. away from the daw. i found the work more tedious and no more fulfilling than working without the daw. although the ability to endlessly edit and re-arrange opens up some compositional possibilities that i might not have explored, the process leaves me with little sense of closure or place. if i were to try something like this again, i’d probably build something in max/msp that would allow me to chop up a long sample and improvise new patterns in realtime.
