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River Ores is, by a large margin, the session header I've recorded the most material with for the Vibratelepathos catalog. This is primarily due to my deep and seemingly unending fascination with Karplus Strong synthesis, but it is also a monument to the versatility and range of this method of working, that I have yet to become bored with what I find when I approach these machines.
For the ninth volume, I approached a session from as far back as June 18th, 2021, which at the time was more of a test run for the Strymon Magneto four-head tape delay processor than anything, and led to the session being quite varied as the patch changed and went through several different phases. This session was shelved until now because I was unsure of how best to edit and present it as a properly mastered release, and only after working on a completely different set of releases as LSZ (the more experimentalist iteration of Limestone Ziggurat) did I come upon the best way to approach this session's final pass.
The LSZ recordings mentioned here - Upon the Curvature of a Hill, Grass to Heel and Ranges Glimpsed - all focus completely on a similarly varied session with the Future Sound Systems MTX9A pin matrix, exploring a feedback patch, and they harvest specific sections of this session in order to replay those sections as loops, with different types of processing applied afterward. Loop-based music has long been a love of mine, not just in the usual ambient music areas, but with minimalist electronic artists such as Media Them, and the deceptively simple workflow of looping a given sound over and over for a length of time relative to its emotional content has, time and time again, exceeded my expectations.
Obviously, not all loops are even remotely the same, it all comes down to usage and context and the texture of something that bears repeating, and this working method is an interesting counterpoint to the completely serialized approach of generative music and modular sequencing that I have continued to explore within this series. Instead of melodies that bloom and wilt, but never recur, here are melodies that always recur, hardly ever change, and through this inversion they are able to unexpectedly yield different listening experiences. Loops can make you second guess your ears, make you wonder if they really were always the way you're now noticing them to be, and the repetition and rhythmic nature of their aesthetic also goes a long way toward suspending the listener's awareness of time passing, playing with the perception of the moment in the same exact way a seemingly endless drone would.
Given my rich results with my LSZ experiments, it was only a matter of time before I approached loop-based composition here at Vibratelepathos, and like many things that seem to find their way to me without me having to force them or seek them out, it became apparent that this piecemeal River Ores session was the perfect place to find some isolated sections of endlessly repeating bliss. This is what you will find here, three loops taken from the same session in 2021, all using the same patch, the same machines, but re-contextualized in their presentation to highlight and emphasize aspects of their melody and texture and rhythmic cadence that I feel elevates them to something more transcendent and profound.
All three pieces have been treated in relatively the same way, using a very subtle phasing effect to alter the body of the frequency bands the loops occupy, as well as some slight tape-like pitch deviation applied globally to the loops, to further enmesh them into a singular beginning/middle/end composition. The subtlety of these post-processes keeps the loops relatively the same, but not 100% exact copies of one another - they are loops played back via mechanisms that are themselves processes in motion, with timbral and textural changes happening in realtime, not at the same rate of the changes happening within the compositions of the loops themselves.
None of this is particularly relevant to the experience, however. I'm writing it all here so that you can have at least some small explanation of what I've done, and why, but in the end, the loops themselves will tell you everything, even what I cannot articulate. Music presented in this fashion always inspires me to do other things after the fact - writing, designing, all types of thinking out loud, and so in this sense, I feel that they are just as valid of a holistic tool to include in the Vibratelepathos catalog as the more 'standard' releases of comfortable sounds and somnolent vibrations.
credits
released May 9, 2023
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded principally on June 18th, 2021 at White Pillar, using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system, primarily exploring the 2HP Pluck Karplus Strong synthesizer and the Strymon Magneto four-head digital tape delay module. Subsequent session work completed May 2023 at White Pillar. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number AVB64, #64 in the Vibratelepathos catalog. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.
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