Threaded
https://soundcloud.com/jamesbritt/disquiet0320-threaded-james-britt
My first reaction was thinking that almost any book I picked would have, oh a dozen or more chapters. And there was no way I’m making that many short pieces.
So I didn’t pick a book. Consider this the background music for a book not yet read, or not yet written: In a parallel world there is a Disquiet Junto, but for writing. “Here’s a piece of sectioned music. Write the book that goes with this music.”
What stood out in the guidelines was the idea that, while each section should be loopable, they should also nicely flow.
I had the idea then to create a series of compatible riffs/chords/whatever, in a sequence:
- Create a loop 1
- Create a loop 2 that works well with loop 1
- Create a loop 3 that works well with loop 2
- …
- Create a new loop n+1 that works well with loop n
In practice I was not quite so exact; I have a few loops that were all created against a common prior loop.
I numbered loops as they were created, and assembled the results in Renoise. I ended up with 16 sections by pairing numerically adjacent loops.
So much for my fears of “too many chapters to cover.”
The loops follow this section pattern:
1 2
2 3
3 4
...
14 15
15 16
1 16
When played from Renoise the entire piece is loopable; the last sections flows back to the first section. For this release I twiddled the end and used a fade out.
Renoise has a track effect called “maYbe” that allows for random triggering of notes. I used this for some whooshing/buzzing ambient sounds. Should you loop any of the sections that ambient-ish stuff would change on each pass.
I’ve written a Renoise tool called Loop Composer that could be used to define loop durations for each section of the piece. If I get extra ambitious I will release the Renoise file along with a Loop Composer script.
I don’t know where the title came from. I might have been thinking about how books are constructed, with pages (often) sewn in, and the way the patterns in the piece thread their way through.
James
