VicMod

This album is a performance recorded live during my last trip to Victoria, BC. During this trip I reminisced on my time during university in Victoria, of the friends I miss, the experiences I had, and the stressful times working on my degree. It was a time I miss dearly; time to experiment and focus on my studies rather than making sure I can pay rent or what my next steps in life are. The piece is a reminder of those simpler times when I could sit down for several hours and just work on music, read papers and books, and talk with friends about philosophy and music composition.

During this trip I planned to experiment with my travel modular synth, and record something. The piece has 7 distinct parts or movements which are individual tracks. Although they are individual tracks each one should be listened one after another for the complete experience, or listen to the VicMod_Full track that has all 7 parts continuously. The decision on where and when to split each track up was based on my listening of the complete piece and where I heard a distinct transition or change that I felt warranted its own track. The entire piece has a hypnotic effect while listening, and as I was performing it I completely lost all sense of time as though entranced by the pulsing rhythms and rich timbres.

Spoilers ahead!! If you want to experience the music without my explanation, then please listen first!

Modules used:
Behringer Abacus, Behringer Brains, AI Synthesis LPG

Performance Explanation:
During the performance, I used the Abacus as a CV generator that would control the Brains by triggering rhythms and changing timbral parameters. The Brains, which generated the sound, was sent over to the LPG (low pass gate) for some filtering. During the performance I changed a few parameters: the speed of the triggers coming from the Abacus to create unique rhythmic patterns and manually changing some of the timbral controls of the Brains. These changes are what creates the 7 distinct movements.

Post-Processing:
After coming back from Victoria I didn't really know what to do with the recordings. I knew I wanted to create some kind of finished product, but the recording alone was not enough for me. I threw the file into Ableton and started to get to work. I trimmed up the beginning and end and added some effects. Most notably for the sonic quality there is reverb, chorus and amp distortion that adds to the timbral characteristic of the piece. Two major points of slow changes in this piece is the panning and delay. The panning has an extremely slow sine wave oscillation that goes between left and right, but not completely to the left or right which you might have noticed, if not next time listen for it. The delay does not oscillate but instead gradually goes from no delay to extreme delay and then back down to no delay, this happens twice during the piece. Outside of this there are some mixing and mastering processes that I will not go into detail about.