Out today (self-release on Bandcamp at https://mikeksmith.bandcamp.com) is my debut solo album “Chaos and Stillness”. It’s an album of ambient, textural, drone music. I’m a statistician / data scientist / professional geek in my day job and a lot of the time I incorporate randomness and generative ideas into the music. I’ve used Ableton Live here with plugins from Spitfire Audio (Labs & Olafur Arnalds’ Stratus) and Slate + Ash (Auras and Cycles) as well as the Ableton Drone Labs and Mood Reels. One of the things I was experimenting with in this release is the MPE capability of the Slate + Ash Auras plugin which allows you to slide fingers up the squishy keys of the Roli Seaboard and bring in other layers of the samples. Very nice sounds in this plugin… I got into using the Norns Shield AFTER pulling together the music in this release, so hopefully the fruits of that exploration will be heard in next year’s music…
The album was mastered by Ian Hawgood of Home Normal, who was just the ideal person to polish the tracks as that Home Normal sound was very close to what I was hoping to achieve.
I hope y’all like it. I’d love to hear what you think.
https://mikeksmith.bandcamp.com