Sometimes, with so many sessions taking months, or even years, to surface for their inclusion in the Vibratelepathos catalog, it becomes necessary to break apart from the schedule and issue a recording that is brand new, if for no other reason than to maintain a level of current thinking and workflow approach within the catalog as time goes on. BLUE EMERALD HALFTONE is such a session, recorded mere hours before being published here - as close to the actual moment of conception as is possible, except for a proper live performance - and it reflects many different facets of my current creative thinking.
To begin, all sessions produced under the BLUE EMERALD HALFTONE header are created using only Buchla oscillators as their tonal source, as well as much of their modulation, given how well-designed Buchla devices are with feedback loops and frequency modulation in mind. These details may seem that they might yield obtuse results, noisy patches and unstable pitches, but to the contrary - Buchla voices, when appropriately filtered, shaped and sequenced, can sound like some of the most divine synthesizer voices imaginable, like the clouds in a blue sky parted to reveal horns and a pipe organ built into the firmament itself. Whether Buchla machines were used or not in certain classic electronic recordings, I have found many similarities to Eno's seventies productions such as Discreet Music and his first two albums with Robert Fripp, in the sounds emanating from these devices. There are beautiful timbres almost always within reach, and even with a modest rig such as mine (I currently own two Buchla modules, which themselves contain six tuneable voices) it is continually possible to derive gorgeous results from what seems like very little patching at all.
Of course, it is pointless and selfish to compare my work to a master such as Eno - in truth, I can only ever hope to make myself happy within my creative process, and I feel that I have done so here, even if and when my work echoes back to me shades of others that I've spent so many years listening to that they must permanently reside in my subconscious. Who knows if anyone else besides myself would even hear those things in these recordings?
In the end, BLUE EMERALD HALFTONE represents a longform work of quiet synthesizer music, generated by a sequencer brain that functions according to Dress's sequence (
oeis.org/A001316 ) in the form of four major pentatonic scales. The master clock of each sequence is also triggered by a probabilistic and progressively subtractive module called Missed Opportunities, essentially allowing fewer and fewer trigger events to happen according to the same singular master clock. Two oscillators from two different Buchla modules - 258t and 281t - were summed via Tiptop's MISO and routed in groups of two to low-pass filters from 2HP and Doepfer, before being multed into a Behringer 305 mixer as a dry stereo signal, and into Strymon's Magneto digital tape-delay module, itself also sent into the 305 for final attenuation and panning. At any point in the development of this patch that required numerical input, one of three numbers was arbitrarily chosen: five, seventeen or twenty-two. This includes Brownian probability ranges, modulation depths and intensities, time divisions and other esoteric parts of the process.