#27

I had an old track from around 1999, named “Der Weltraum” (german for “the space / the universe”), which consisted itself of many layers (many of them samples from Shostakovich, Symphony No. 11, first movement (my favourite) … which weren’t recognizable any longer even at that time), and for “Twenty-three Weltraums” I layered 23 versions of it in Reaper to get this version. Some FX and manual panning.

Maybe not mass enough, and no guitars for Glenn … but my contribution to disquiet0334 and my hommage to Branca.

Length of this excerpt is 8:00, because 8 is 2^3. This is so nerdy …

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#28

apparently this is how they self-identify :wink:

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#29

Really like the harmonics in this,

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#30

Thank you for this terrific story.

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#31

White Frosting

I own all sorts of instruments, which are loosely divided into two groups: those I can play, and those I can operate. I can play the guitar, I can operate a violin.

I choose the fiddle for this piece, with the goal of recording scads of samples to mix together. I kinda sorta did that, though initially I did not get the dense layering I had imagined. (“Not what I imagined” being a hallmark of many a Junto.)

But my lack of skill provided various “microtonal variations”, often on a macro-tonal scale. I assembled a number of loops, with each using five to 10 separate samples of approximately the same riff. To some of these I applied some delay; some loops/samples were also re-applied at different pitch/speeds, and other loops were re-pitched entirely, to build up some tonal density,

At about the 2/3 mark there’s a riff that gets some comb filter treatment to bring out more harmonic joy.

While the goal was a Branca tribute I think there’s some “Portsmouth Sinfonia plays Phillip Glass in the subway” vibe going on. Maybe they’re waiting to catch the A train downtown to catch Theoretical Girls playing at Tier 3.

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#32

This is beautiful art, in and of itself.

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#33

Maybe Marc could take all the contributions and squish them together…? That might be awesome :slight_smile:

Anyway, here’s mine:

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#34

Disquiet0334
Branca
Using Reaper at 145 BPM, G Whole tone scale, G Major scale, G Major suspended scale. Used four different guitar sounds both electric and acoustic. Added distortions.

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#35

This is a piece of music that I used to play with my indie band Die Gobs in the early 90s. The song was called 5 Meter Groß and we played it a lot, often extending it to long psychedelic hypnotic improvisations.
For the recording here I managed to layer 16 guitar tracks. Not too much, but something. Interestingly you can´t really hear them, as most of them play exactly the same.
If I find time I will add some more guitars. I also played a piano and some fake drums, using ableton´s sampled instruments.
No click track, everything first take with no edits.
I never heard much of Glenn Branca, but surely love lots of music that is heavily influenced by his work, e.g. Sonic Youth, Godspeed You Black Emperor etc.
What a pity that I missed this, I am sure that I would have enjoyed a Glenn Branca concert a lot.

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#36

The playlist is now rolling. Sorry for the reply delay. I was at my college reunion, which was more consuming (way more consuming) than I’d expected it to be. Now at my parents’ place before heading back to San Francisco.

1 Like
#37

I went for a bit of a different approach this week - I used one of the parts from my Naviar Haiku, which in that track is nice and soft and lovely, but for this I put it through a Big Muff Pi to really dirty it up. The sound source is a two-oscillator voice I created on the modular, which uses a combination of the raw oscillator output, the ring modulated output of the two oscillators, and also one oscillator amlitude modulating the other. That mixture went into Ripples as a filter. Each oscillator gets either the positive or negative sum of a random sequence from Disting.
I recorded multiple takes of this, with me playing with the filter and the Big Muff tone and sustain controls.
Very VERY different to my usual stuff.

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#38

Tribute to Glenn Branca
first time i saw him and band in 1982, never forget this otherworldly Tsunami which blow the audiance to the rear wall of the club.
rough and brutal
ten tracks with Jazzmaster and Washburn G-10V
drums and cymbals.

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#39

It’s not especially Branca-oid, but i made this subdued shriek from 30 seconds of birdsong & mic rumble that i recorded yesterday.

I looped the recording a number of times and set up the sequence to play ~10 times & then layered that recording ~ten times so there’s a at least a hundred versions of the same sound at some level here. I then started dragging and massaging that recording through an interminable number of delay lines, filtering it & dragging it again until any birdsong was implicit only; the rolling rumble, still readily detectable to my ears and the waveform, is the consequence of the mic rumble.

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#40

Great to find you around here again. Great brutal drone your track, the late Branca appreciates, I’m sure.

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#41

After spending the weekend unsure I had something to record, inspiration arrived on Monday afternoon.

I revisited the ‘layered sameness’ Junto last week and saw parallels with the instructions this week.

So after pondering the process, I had an idea to record a chord progression many times.

I’d hoped for two dozen takes but found I could only manage 17.

Then the video needed almost a day to render.

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#42

For this project I just used a single synth voice run through different fx and recorded 12 loops of uneven lengths. I had to take an unscheduled 8 hour break between recording thanks to a thunderstorm of biblical proportions.
For the synth voice I used a mother 32 patched to a muted DFam sequencing the mother’s modulation. The loops were dumped into logic and gradually faded in until about 1 minute 30 when all the loops are playing. The uneven lengths created some shifting focus for the resulting cacophony.

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#43

I am very surprised I did not know of Branca - i love Sonic Youth, and now see the influences. So this is a wonderful musical discovery for me.

This is a drone piece using layers of e-bowed electric guitars. I used various guitars through various amps. Effects are kept to a minimum - just a little background delay for depth and a nice long reverb for space.

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#44


I started with notation for 8 instruments in muse score. Recorded a 1st Iayer of it.Recorded some Zen Magnets on a guitar, brushes, grate. I then utilized a MAX patch I built to re-feed the Zen Magnets on a L/R triggered off all of the MIDI. I then took the two and recorded an instance of that. A duplicate was created, reversed and then refed recorded with the MIDI and the melded recordings.MaddBranca.pdf (656.3 KB)
Process Zen Magnets on Guitar https://youtu.be/yPAcAaSd_7Y

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#45

the audio is composed with 42 layers taken from a single acoustic guitar tone. Those 42 layers were edited with a number of different effects, and then recorded onto a small tape recorder as I walked around my studio. The recorder was placed inside a fishbowl shaped glass vase, and recorded with binaural microphones. The binaural fishbowl and the digital file were then combined. The resultant audio is a 4:44 densely layered drone track that you can listen to here:

i used max/msp/jitter for the video, using a single image from the recording process. the image was converted into a halftone screen emulator, which takes the input matrix of the original image and splits it into a grid. each element of the grid is then replaced by regions of a second matrix based on the mean value of each slot in the grid. I captured the peak amplitude values from a 20 second audio clip, multiplied those values, and routed them to one of the grid coordinates. I then layered multiple recordings of the video and edited those videos in Premier.

short video here: https://vimeo.com/272266534

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#46

Good grief - only just made it it at 23:30 GMT! I’ve been wanting to join in with a Junto project for literally years now - I used to attempt every single one way back at the beginning… and this has been a nightmare to get finished due to llllllll.co not sending me a verification e-mail, not being able to get back into my old account, not being able to upload to Soundcloud, messing up export in Ableton, etc. etc…

Anyway - here’s my attempt. It’s about a third of the size I’d intended; I used only a third of the material I’d recorded, but it still ended up with 103 tracks in Ableton and 11 minutes of punishing guitar noise…

I love Glenn Branca’s work, and I don’t feel I’ve done the tribute I’d wanted. I do feel I’ve referenced some of the people who’ve been influenced by him, though (Swans, JG Thirlwell/Foetus, etc.)

I recorded a child’s 3/4 size student guitar, a cheap Tiger brand. I played several very rough versions of a rhythm and a very basic melody on only the top and bottom E strings (doing a cheap rubbish version of Branca’s E tunings used on some of his pieces). I recorded both rhythm and melody several times, playing the guitar with: a toffee hammer, a steel thimble, a wooden stick, my fingers, and an e-bow. The idea was to have 100 guitars going at once, all slightly out of time, but I think I ended up with about 30 guitars sounds at once, plus reverb, tape echo and delay.

Everything was recorded on a Zoom F8 using a home-made contact mic, a Rode M3 and a Sony stereo lapel mic, which was attached to electrical tape across the middle 4 strings. I then cut up all the audio in Audacity and played, bent, mixed and mastered it all in Ableton. The 103 tracks were probably around 70 audio tracks, 3 effects returns, and the rest group tracks for organisation.

Phew, now I need to listen to everyone else’s work! Hope to join in more from now on, hopefully with shorter tracks…

Couldn’t embed audiomack player, so please go here:
Branca Brainache on Audiomack

(had to use Audiomack, as Soundcloud let me down) Hope it works for everyone!

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