Pie Are Squared - The Whole World's a Window and I Can't See a Thing (Lontano Series)

Releases
#1

Haven’t been active on here for a while - it hasn’t been a great year - but I have a new album out on Lontano Series titled The Whole World’s a Window and I Can’t See a Thing that I wanted to share with all of you.

Here are a bunch of download codes, which you could redeem here: https://rohsrecords.bandcamp.com/yum
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Track by track breakdown:
The album is almost equally inspired by the workflow I developed for my first experience playing live last year and a mix I made for the show I used to have on Ma3azef radio. A lot of it is based in looping, resampling, granulating, and then layering the resampled parts over the original. A lot of distortion. Keeping everything at the edge of breaking.

  1. The Whole World’s a Window
    Pretty much lays out the workflow. It starts with a repeating pad sequence that is going through a very straightforward delay and eq effect chain. There is a generative aspect to it where a lot of the EQ parameters are controlled by LFO’s. This track is continuously resampled in another audio track with a Spectral Resonator set at fully wet and being played by a MIDI track. There is also a very muffled kick drum underneath everything that I bring in at points.

  2. Further Now
    This is one is almost all 0-Coast processed by various Argeïphontes Lyre modules. I ran a bunch of 0-Coast sequences that I liked through these filters and processors, then fed the output back into them, and so on. From there it was pretty much all about cutting and layering the various elements in Live.

  3. Further Again
    Started off as a piece I wrote fo an art exhibition years ago that I remixed and blended with elements of the preceding track. They just felt right together.

  4. Tacks Pierce Young Feet
    The only guitar-centric piece on the album, hence the kinda post-rock title, and a product of some experiments I made for one of the disquiet junto projects. I recorded very short guitar phrases, sent them out to two walkmen with 5-second loops, messed around with pitch and speed, then recorded them back (you can see a pattern evolving). Pretty straightforward stuff, but sounds good.

  5. Decay in Grace
    Made entirely using a recording I made at Notre Dame. Cut up bits or organ, bit of the choir, and then put them in a bunch of simpler and sampler instruments and proceeded to add copious amount of distortion and automation on the various filters, delays, sends.

  6. Oscillate Thrice
    The oldest song on the album, made using the Lyra 8 and 0-Coast. Did some extra processing using the Morphagene and QPAS, and the whole build up towards the end of the track is Live’s Saturator in waveshape mode being automated and getting increasingly nasty.

  7. I Can’t See a Thing
    This is almost all generative and is probably my favourite track on the album. Started with a simple wavetable chord progression that then kept being changed using the Max for Live Mutator. I recorded the MIDI out and then looped that and ran the audio through four parallel effects chains that are automated, cross faded with a variety of LFO’s. I then recorded the audio, listened back to all the different iterations, and chose my favourite one.

Hope you enjoy it, and gold star to whoever guesses the inspiration behind the album title

16 Likes
#2

this first track really floored me! the whole album really has a great sense of space and mood. what are you doing for the distortion? It is really subtle and nice - edging towards and away from total mayhem. great work. this album reminds me of something Eno said about people wanting albums with “more consistent, longer-lasting moods” which is definetly my vibe and this album fits it perfectly. thank you!

4 Likes
#3

Thank you so much, was wonderful waking up to this comment. I will make sure to read that Eno interview.

Distortion is the thing that I spent the most amount of time honing in and messing around with until I got it to where I wanted it to, especially with tracks that are made entirely ITB where the original sounds and recordings didn’t have any inherent noise or distortion, such as this first track.

There isn’t one single effect or plugin that I am using for distortion/saturation. On the first track, the main sound runs through this chain, where both the dfx skidder and fors box reverb are adding small amounts of extra harmonics and noise

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This track’s output is then continuously resampled and short loops of these samples run through this chain which I use to emulate drop outs from what I imagine an old analog tape machine would sound like. I am automating the overdrive amount at the very beginning of the chain, and then that’s passed through another chain which ends with the Dynamic Tube and Redux effects. There’s an LFO controlling the amount of signal running through that chain to give it a bit of movement.

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There are also these two effects on one of the sends, and the resampled versions of that second track and higher frequencies are sent to it:

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This is the case for almost all the tracks. I also used Arturia’s Mello-Fi, Decapitator, and Radiator on almost all the tracks.

3 Likes
#4

I took a peek yesterday, I really, really enjoyed it. The mood absorbed me

2 Likes
#5

20 chars of thank you!

1 Like
#6

this is such a cool trick!! thanks so much for sharing the process and audio chains. it makes me appreciate the music even more, seeing all the careful architecture! still enjoying this album immensely a week in…

3 Likes
#7

Had a lovely listen to this on a walk earlier. That last track! :heart_eyes:

3 Likes
#8

that’s lovely to hear, and I am glad you found the process behind it interesting.

It’s probably one of my favourite things I’ve done, and it’s kind of ironic that it’s almost all generative hahaha. glad you liked the album!

1 Like