I just realized i need to share my process with this album. Excuse me for that. So here it goes:
Firstly, for those who are not familiar with the Cocoquantus, it’s a double (stereo) lo-fi delay/looper with pitch-shifting, skip and reverse functions, and a very complex 5 oscillator system that can cross modulate each other. There is also a pitch knob for all oscillators and a chaos knob that is extremely interesting for live performances.
The most important feature though is that the Cocoquantus is not trying to discard the noise inside the delay circuits, but rather opens up all possibilities to work with it. You can loop it and pitch it up or down, you can modulate it with LFO frequencies or with audio rate signals, you can run audio through it and loop the audio together with the noise, you can reverse it or skip through the audio recording.
So I started messing with the noise inside the delay circuits that can also easily distort adding more frequencies. You can patch outputs from the oscillators inside the noise and record it in the buffers, then you can change their frequency and record the new frequencies on top, you can pitch down the loop, change the frequencies again and re-record on top of it. The possibilities are endless and the results can be mind blowing. Specially if you’re used to work with noise.
Of course the deeper I was exploring this amazing instrument the more i could understand the way the oscillators effect each other and how the chaos knob works. There is a point in the chaos theory where events can repeat and therefore even though you are in a chaotic environment you can spot some familiar patterns. At the last few tracks, i was deep inside this chaotic environment and i was experimenting with recording certain moments and performing certain gestures that i found that can have interesting effects.
Every track is thus a unique performance of a certain patch that is impossible to recreate. I usually explored all the possibilities I could think of with each patch and kept the most interesting ideas for the recording session. For each track I practised many live recordings but the takes that have made the album had a huge impact on me and I knew they were the best ones immediately when I finished the recording. Somehow I was connected with each gesture and each sound that I could hear while performing.
For me, this album stands apart from the rest of my music. Mainly because I usually start from silence and try to reach a meditative state. This time I started from noise which in some ways is the opposite of silence and tried to sculpt it into interesting states of existence. I see noise as a big block of marble containing all the possibilities, and the process of composition similar to the process of making a sculpture. On some of the tracks I still managed to find a meditative state, which i would describe as noise ambient music. On some other tracks the chaotic noise patterns felt ecstatic to me, played at loud volumes had a huge impact on my energy/mood/psyche.
If I somehow managed to communicate any of these experiences to some of you, I would consider this album a success. Thank you so much for the support, the reactions from the lines community are very positive and I am grateful for that. Cheers!