This is ridiculous - and I don’t make that up: I woke up at 4am today and couldn’t sleep anymore. Went to my computer to find the Disquiet Junto assignment about making „Insomniac Works“. Jeez.
Thankfully, I do have some audio sleeping pills that I listen to when working, minutes before sleeping or getting back to sleep. I quite enjoy this lucid dream state when you know that you’ll still be able to listen but you are not conscious enough to steer your train of thought.
Anyhow, here’s my take for „music for 4am (that isn’t techno)“.
Here’s my take. A repetitive pianomelody over some samples of waves from Freesound. There’s also some marimba, glass bells and a moog bass patch (Arturia) that I play as a high lead. Everything is played in C major scale on a push2.
The BPM of the track is automated to go slower and slower, to be more and more relaxing.
Hope everyone is well, https://soundcloud.com/hypoidsound/reliqua-disquiet0350
Reliqua (disquiet0350)
Not to get all emotional and sentimental, but this prompt hits home for me. I’ve had a few run ins with the wide-eyed beast and the music of past Juntos has helped immensely in overcoming some of its tricks. The disquiet 0240- Emerging from a Drone in particular has at least a dozen tracks, that if played on vinyl would have been worn through from needle time. I’m not sure how many participants I’ve chatted with, but consider this another thank you to everyone here. I really can’t say how much this place, it’s people and their music have helped me through some dark times and sleepless nights.
I can only hope my little bits might do the same.
This is a simple piece based on a soon lost Alchemy patch, with live manipulation of the performance pads for a small amount of interest. I tried to start with a more interesting section and then flow into a longer repeating loop. A few minimal percussive elements are introduced, but mostly the high hat came through. This pattern is slowed slightly over time while concurrently the Alchemy patch is increasingly sent to a tape delay. Then underneath two Micrologue drone patches rise to take over for the ending. Nothing fancy just some E2, E3, and a bit of white noise to sooth and follow the Alchemy’s note beginnings.
Overall, some eq helped tame the occasional squawks and stereo delay and a small reverb add some space.
The title is Latin for rest.
Hope you enjoy and it helps in some way
https://soundcloud.com/suss-musik/chiasmus
Suss Müsik knows all about insomnia for the mentally fragile. We’ll spare you the details, other than to say this: when one is dedicated to the craft of “post-classical ambient minimalism for crepuscular airports,” exploring the nuance between dusk and dawn is something of an occupational necessity. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
“I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain / Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper’s eye,” writes the poet Dylan Thomas. “There grows the hours’ ladder to the sun / Each rung a love or losing to the last.” These two couplets succinctly describe the duality of insomnia, which in Suss Müsik’s experience takes two forms.
The first form of insomnia is a woozy precipice between not quite being asleep or awake — not exactly alert, yet consciously aware that time is passing. The second form (usually following the first) is a whirlpool of cognitive dissonance: the body may be tired, but the brain actively rages at an endless cycle of unanswerable questions. How many years do I have left? Did I remember to pay the insurance? Do I have cancer? What’s that sound downstairs? Who or what is touching my leg?
For this piece, Suss Müsik sought to represent both forms of insomnia through sound. The piece begins with the insistent tempo of a CR-78 drum machine, which signifies the ticking of a clock, its rhythm punctuated by jabs of piano. A field of electronic fog slowly emerges from within and builds to a quiet roar. With the whine of a saxophone, everything retreats back into the subconscious. The ticking CR-78 returns to close things out.
The piece is titled Chiasmus, named after a grammatical structure in which a phrase is reversed with no repetition in words. Next time you have insomnia, try to list as many of these as you can remember from when you were in school.
The grainy dark: a short granular loop with a woozy swell
The night outside: a long field recorded sample of campfire and crickets, fed through a delay
Sleep games: number counting
Calming memories: a borrowed phrase from a lullaby
Hey y’all, it’s been awhile. Experimenting with some new tools and processes here.
An exploration of GRM Tools Band Pass filters using a field recording featuring a Sandhill crane calling. My home state of Michigan has proposed a hunting season for this magnificent bird, and the thought of that possibly passing sickens me. The mix was originally in 5.1 and I’m not thrilled with the stereo conversion. More for me to learn and play with I guess. While this may not be the most gentle sounds to lull one back to sleep, it’d totally fit for me. Bird sounds always relax me, and these sound like they’re deep in the night.
I created this track on my laptop while vacationing in Vancouver, B.C. Rather than go out searching for audio material, I decided to keep it simple and just use sine tones.
The structure is simple as well: A seven-note pattern, C-D-C-F-E-F-D is played once over the 3-minute length of the piece. Layered over that is the same pattern played twice as fast, repeated once. Over that, the same, twice as fast, repeated twice, and so on for four or five layers. The faster the pattern, the lower the octave, though layers do share octaves.
The “instrument” playing all the tones generates a sine wave with added even harmonics (2nd, 4th, 6th), with a slow envelope for both volume and for the slow vibrato. The volume is also modulated by the LFO, so the tones shimmer.
Because (you might have notices) the repeat count does not compensate for the halving of the length each time, the faster layers finish first, gradually leaving just the slowest at the end.
i recently adjusted my meds which resulted in severe insomnia. usually i could only sleep in bursts of 1-3 hours, if i was lucky. this junto got me interested in investigating and interpreting my experience of those nights into a soundscape…
so, the idea of this track was a combination of some kind of desperation felt and being locked in the hypnagogic border between sleep and and being awake. it consists of a loop from the vtol garmonbozia and different samples taken from recordings of the mroztronium grackler. arranged in ableton with some minor tweaks/mixing.
I’m an insomniac, and this track is modeled after things I normally listen to to try and sleep. The stylistic requirements are that it 1) has to include some white noise, a la rain or a vacuum cleaner or fan, 2) has to have some kind of general drone that changes pitch and 3) has to somehow have a lot of quiet detail so I don’t get bored.
This collage is essentially three tracks. One is a recording of my back porch at 3am, I recorded this for an art installation in Mexico City this year. The other two things are guitar/feedback solos, one using a pedal called an OWL, that’s the large sound with moving chords. The other is using feedback through a BugBrand AudioWeevil. This track is slowed down 100% so as to keep the notes in the “soothing” range, could maybe even be an octave lower.
I am glad you enjoyed it! I used RTcmix (http://rtcmix.org/), which I use for almost all my D.J. projects. I forgot to mention that each 7-note pattern also slowly floats across your hearing from left to right using spacial simulation (also part of RTcmix).
I started this process with a completely different piece that happened when I got a Norns last week. I’m very fond of the Aleph lines module for tape delay simulation. I was playing with some sequences on the Flin script on the Norns through the lines module and I got a great resonance feedback thing going with a tempo I liked. But it sounded too spooky.
I erased everything and started over but in the morning I checked the read buffers in the Aleph and there was still a shorter loop going on in there and it was totally different than I remembered and less spooky. That’s the drone part that anchors the piece.
My whole setup depends on a digital piano with speakers and the Aleph is also a mixer with four inputs and outputs. A guitar with a different looper pedal is going into the Aleph and the digital piano has a MIDI record mode so I can play phrases to store but they don’t loop. I can trigger them with a button. I recorded the mix out of the digital piano headphone jack into a computer.
The drums are the Playfair script for Norns that’s doing Euclidan patterns. I forget the guitar line notes, lol. The piano chords are supposed to be matched to the guitar line. The chords are D minor and F# diminished.
I had a subtle patch going that I think suits this weeks Disquiet Junto quite well.
The guitar runs the sequencer and the whole eurorack setup by a contact mic through Mutable Instruments Ears. Recorded live in one take.
