modular, effects, and field recordings from a winter vacation in the southwest. a brief respite from the cold. snows melt and fall, icicles drip, sparkling rivulets flow down to the sun-warmed earth.
https://soundcloud.com/ioflow/a-welcome-thaw-midwinter-dazzling
for this disquiet junto project, the first of 2017, i returned to the process of my last track from 2016.
i still had unused raw material from vacation less than two weeks ago, so i decided to use some of those rhodes sessions and nature sounds as the basis for this track, along with a new recording just for this piece: miniature ice cubes periodically rattling in a glass. i chose my instruments and effects for the frozen, chilly appeal of their names.
i recorded two tracks with the modular, one at a time. first, the rhodes improvisation was run through mutable instruments clouds, which has nearly all of its parameters modulated by envelopes from mannequins just friends and cold mac, themselves attenuated by shades and isms. that audio then goes through a strymon bluesky reverb pedal, set to “shimmer” mode, which provides crystalline higher-octave harmonics.
for the second modular track, i used mannequins cold mac, which is normally a summing/logic utility, as an audio source. by patching “crease out” to “survey in” and carefully sweeping the survey knob, several points of scratchy whitenoise can be obtained from “mac out.” i gated this noise in software to allow only the occasional click, and with heavy EQ it sounded much like additional shattering icicles or rattling cubes.
the modular tracks were combined with field recordings of snowmelt when temperatures briefly reached the low 50s, a most welcome thaw before winter returned.
