Join
now to receive all the new
music
Vibratelepathic Antiviral Broadcasts creates,
including
6 back-catalog releases,
delivered instantly to you via the Bandcamp app for iOS and Android.
You’ll also get access to
supporter-only
exclusives.
Learn more.
Time Lines is the session header devoted to recordings that explore the Doepfer A-188, a powerful and unique module that is capable of a myriad of audio and modulation usages, primarily among them Karplus-Strong synthesis (see: River Ores).
The A-188 is a BBD (or Bucket Brigade Delay) module, unique from the other Karplus-Strong machines in that it is analog rather than digital, with multiple variations on the module's design conveying a different timbral character through their separate delay stages. Two such A-188s are part of the R-EW system - one utilizes 256 stages, allowing for more upper-octave pitches and the other utilizes 1048 stages, effective for bass register and percussive sounds - and both are able to even be routed into each other to produce uniquely controllable feedback.
Considering the "pitch" output of A-188 is a trail of an incredibly fast delay (whose internal clock is in fact a very fast VCO), tracking accurate pitch with it via an external sequencer is difficult, rendering it well suited to strange scales that are in actuality inaccurate permutations of something as simple as a major pentatonic, although this aspect of the machine only serves to inspire new ideas rather than being thought of as a detriment, given the aptitudes of the rest of the R-EW system surrounding it.
This first Time Lines session will be followed by several different ones, recorded months apart, all alien and unique in their own ways, but still undeniably the A-188. In this first volume, strange melodic motifs weave around each other like trails of smoke bending in the breeze as they stream off of a candelabra. The closest analog to Time Lines, as it is presented here, is probably some of the Second Coat material made with the MS-20, which shares some design details with Time Lines in that the MS-20 was being sequenced with deliberately incorrect voltage, and conveyed weirder tonal profiles than it was meant to in a standard patching situation.
credits
released March 21, 2023
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, September 24 2022, using the Doepfer A-188 BBD module (1048 stages) in conjunction with the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist, March 2023. Text and design by ABM&D. This is Milieu Music number AVB61, 61st in the Vibratelepathos catalog, and first in the fourth season of the series. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.
Minimalist compositions that take their time unfolding, bands of sound melting glacier-like from one end of the song to the other. Bandcamp New & Notable Aug 6, 2023