Hey people, we (No-Input, Cat!) just released our first album, ‘Leg’ on Bandcamp! We’re a UK-based trio making live improvised noise/drone music in a really fun setup - Tautvydas Kuliešius plays a no-input mixing desk with found objects, Finn West plays textural laptop stuff, and I (Ben Mason) play the laptop, running a bunch of unstable/chaotic Pd instruments I’ve been writing for a while now, and at the same time I’m live sampling/looping Toto and Finn’s sounds, again using some quirky Pd samplers I’ve written.
We’ve always thought our sound is kind of fun, but when other people have listened to our stuff, we usually get told it’s kind of dark and intense stuff haha.
We’re also lined up to be playing Hundred Years Gallery in London on the 24th of March, the date hasn’t been 100% locked in yet, but it’s pretty solid as it stands.
I’ve been working on a (SuperCollider based) “performance” system myself for solo/collaboration sets - any details you’d be willing to share about the patches used for these recordings? Just looking for inspiration!
and I’d love to talk more about these patches, im hoping to make them available on Github later on in the year when they’re all finished.
on these recordings the main one was essentially a digital feedback loop, either using an external audio source or perlin noise to start the system. since it’s digital, you have to consider introducing non-linearities to make the signal more interesting, so there are lots of tanh() functions that act as waveshapers, and a cubic non-linearity that acts as a soft-clip circuit. using perlin noise worked well instead of white noise since you can tune it, so you avoid what i think sounds like ‘drain-pipe noise’ with hissy hi-end in digital systems.
i’ve made some more instruments since, all based around different chaotic/dynamical systems, such as Chua oscillators, Lorenz/Rossler attractors and Duffing oscillators - each patch has a little ‘gimmick’ to introduce even more instability, such as a wave shaper based on the output of the Chua oscillator.
soon i’ll get around to making a demo video of each thing!
Just looking for inspiration!