Pillars of the Firmament, by Milieu

Pillars of the Firmament

by Milieu

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Pillars of the Firmament 01:20:30

about

For the 25th PATHOS catalog release, I have decided to do what was done with Blue Emerald Halftone - issue a session that presently came to pass, in order to keep the Vibra catalog up to date, at least periodically, as many of these sessions are published up to two years after they have taken place.

Pillars of the Firmament is a somewhat new-age session with the Korg Opsix, an altered FM synthesizer, which is to say a six-operator FM synth that is also capable of many other possible configurations, thanks to an extensive internal patching matrix, voluminous libraries of waveforms to use as carriers and modulators, multiple filter profiles (themselves patterned after more famous machines such as the MS-20 and Poly 6) and a deep array of FX processors, from the staple reverbs, delays, pans and filtering to more esoteric things such as granular glitch-effects, amp and speaker emulation, gain circuits and wavefolding.

Here, the Opsix explores a patch I made, centering around Karplus-like voices that are held infinitely by way of tricking the machine's damper input into thinking that its polarity has been inverted, essentially sustaining tone forever. Four layers of this sustained sound have been dubbed together and tuned separate from one another, resulting in a swirling blanket of warmth that definitely doesn't bring to mind the surface idea of digital synthesis, which often comes with a maligned reputation for being cold and harsh. The Opsix is a deep machine, with limitations of its own, of course, but certainly capable of a lot of new sounds that I've not been able to easily achieve outside of software in my studio.

Thematically, the session conjured up images of the heavens, albeit old-world depictions of the heavens found frequently in works of classical art, which usually reflected a more primitive understanding of the cosmos, or an outright religious depiction of it. This felt oddly appropriate considering the Opsix's ability to convey unnatural yet organically shaped sound, almost deceitfully coming out of a digital workflow. It is the divine rendered in plastic and metal, fashioned by longing hands that can only imagine what the stars and spheres really are, so upward they build, deified and profane towers of humanity's hope, reaching out like Adam to grasp the hand of God, but never reaching that destination. The grandeur of futility, and the futility of grandeur.

credits

released May 24, 2022

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, May 23rd 2022, using the Korg Opsix altered FM synthesizer in conjunction with FL20. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Design and text by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music catalog entry PATHOS 25. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2022. All nights preserved.

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Vibratelepathic Antiviral Broadcasts Dayton, Ohio

Explorations in generative music, ambient synthesis and audioholistics.

"It's music... I think"

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