hey people, I just released a new album on Bandcamp called ‘like cuddling a ghost’. half made in ppooll, the rest in Pd (with some help from Tom Mudd’s Gutter Synthesis) in semi-improv sessions.
inspired by the ‘laptop music’ of the early-to-mid 2000s, like stuff from Editions Mego, Touch and Room40, kind of noisy/ambient/drone digital textures.
hope someone likes it :))
I’m going to have to spend some time with this and headphones tonight but upon first listen I really appreciate your sense of pacing and breath, foreground and background, and the build and release of the different elements as they progress. Great timbres too. Thanks for sharing.
wow thanks so much, that’s so kind of you! i really appreciate the comment about the pacing, that’s always been the hardest thing to get right for me, especially with more texture-based music.
hope you enjoy you headphone listen :))
Really cool and kinda creepy. The name realty fits. How you making this stuff?
Thanks so much! the name actually came from a Bandcamp comment on a Xiu Xiu/Grouper album that I thought fit my thing pretty well.
I made this stuff largely in two environments, ppooll in Max/MSP (tracks 1, 4, 6 and 7), using the granular and Beauty patch(es) for textures. The other three tracks I made in Pure Data with some custom patches that are essentially primitive momentary samplers, with the audio source being Tom Mudd’s Gutter Synthesis. Then I just added a liberal dose of reverb to make it sound good haha.
I’m new… are those codes we can run on norns? I ordered a norns on Monday!
i always come back to exactly the early-2000s laptop music scene you’ve described. there’s something special about the convergence of the era’s software limitations with a particular avant-garde approach to ambient or even pop music that makes that music so special. you’ve captured this vibe and taken it in a different direction which i’m loving! some of the tracks have 2003 tim hecker echoes which is just wow
@appa hmm I’m not a Norns user, but I don’t think ppooll can run on a Norns, mostly because of it’s clunky UI, maybe Pd stuff can get onto Norns but I’m not sure? if I ever get my hands on a Norns maybe I’ll try porting some of my patches, but in the meantime I’m definitely planning on getting a Pd environment thing available for other people, got some exciting ideas for my dissertation I’m starting this year! but re: using this code, this kind of stuff is all free just to use on a laptop, hence the ‘laptop music’ thing lol.
@slumplifter thanks so much, your comments are very kind! I totally agree, I had a bit of an obsession with emulating OS9 last year (which ended unsuccessfully), but diving into it using old, clunky software was very inspiring, the limitations and I fell in love with those ‘good-bad’ sounds.