We got to release Awt's excellent "Lost Found – Found Lost Love Album" on OXO-Unlimited today I've got to say I'm really excited about it! It's a really good album, when I first heard some of the tracks at the Blipp Blopp festival we arranged at Kulturhuset in Stockholm I was totally blown away. Now these incredible tracks have found a home, what are you waiting for?
Here's something I've been playing around with recently: using effects in feedback matrices and morphing between presets. I got the idea when playing around with frequency shifted feedback in a Serge modular system. So I created a crude macro that let's you morph between the presets, but intend to improve upon it before releasing it (morphing speed modulation, snapshot lists etc). A lot of effects in Reaktor unfortunatly use non-interpolating parameters, like switches (which is good for saving cpu), thus creating clicks when morphing. I will be creating a set of effects intended for morphing like this which are completely designed for morphing (complete with polarizing mod matrices and such). In this particular setup, grainstates fx, a stereo frequency shifter with a wide range and crossfade between up and down-shift, a spacemaster reverb and an analogic filter box are being mixed using a matrix mixer. This allows for any output to be sent to any input. All of the effects are morphing randomly between presets and so is the matrix mixer. Works quite well as a proof of concept if you ask me!
Limit Cycle EP, containing the tracks Limit Cycle, Ax34 Suimle, Tryastvec Pattern and Mosaic, has just been released by Fools Forest! This EP basically started out with me getting into the Max4Live beta, spawning the track Ax34 Suimle. When Fabian at Fools Forest heard it, he said he wanted to release it and I said go ahead. Limit Cycle followed Ax34 Suimle and then Tryastvec Pattern. At that point there were going to be just those three tracks but before Fabian had the time to finish up the cover artwork I finished Mosaic.
These four tracks are in a sense experiments: They are all made using possibilities open up by Max4Live, the extension to Ableton's Live sequencing software, which allows for easier control over things such as algorithmic composition. And this EP is filled of just that. Variations on the concept spawned by Per Nørgaard's Infinity Series are restrained by mutating scale quantizers while psuedo-random pattern and weighted random generators create constantly moving rythmic material. These numbers comes to life via synthesizers in which all sound parameters are slightly, slowly moving, creating an organic texture of sounds. These tracks could have been created before Max4Live of course, but I can only imagine having to spend at least 6 months on every track, working out these tremendously complex mathematical relations between the notes by hand, in a traditional sequencing enviroment.
With this, I would also like to say that Max4Live is quite possibly, in my opinion, the greatest innovation within music technology in the 00's!
I hope you'll enjoy listening to it as much as I did making it!