So I’m looking at lots of new tools for my studio.. It’s kinda scary… to spend this kind of money on stuff.. but I feel as though.. if I’m really serious about what I pretend to be serious about.. then what should be most important is realizing a vision I only dimly understand. The question is how to get there.. and so this entry talks a bit about the research I’ve been doing…

Melodyne is it’s name.. the inventor of which gets Steve Job’s like responses when he gives his presentations.. not because he’s a master presenter.. but because of what is software his able to do. Take a look at the video’s here, and see for you’re self the reasons why. 

Why?

There are a number of applications to this sort of technology that I’m interested in

1.  Audio to MIDI conversion: You play an instrument.. and you derive MIDI data from the recording. In the main, I’m interested in this because I could take a section of improvised guitar playing, and say “I want to use this part” and I could then build scores / the production around those notes, around what the guitar playing is doing.
2. I can’t sing… but, as readers know, I’m looking to bring words / vocals to my music. Even if I can’t sing.. I can correct the pitch of my terrible singing.. and perhaps mutate it into.. “he can almost sing.” And then, with enough effects and whatever.. I could perhaps mask the god awfulness of it all!
3. The notion of taking any sorta recording.. and reshaping it in this Melodyne sorta way.. including loop libraries.. is just awesome… and opens up all sorts of new doors.
4. Did I mention I was a microtonalist? The notion of taking music performed in a traditional temperament / tuning system, and retuning it.. or making it microtonal.. shaping it to the context of a microtonal composition.. opens all sorts of new doors.

The biggest issue I’m finding is.. The Melodyne program I’m now looking at (Melodyne Studio, see comparison chart here) is listening at $700… which is what we like to call in the biz “a hunk of change.” This would bring my over budget budget up to… drum roll please… well.. depending on various variables.. hmm.. around $3000.

Time to get on the ball on responding to that recruiter, ha? 

[editors note: Matt is trying to go off the deep end.. linking a change management orientated business strategy… where you don’t actually tell folks what to do so much as you think about the ecological context of there work.. with his own creative process.. so this becomes a kind of first person narrative… somewhat unreliable narrator style perhaps.. (though this is perhaps for certain existential reasons)… case study: Another words this blog entry is really about how business might operate in the future.. but um.. you probably have to think pretty deeply to work all that out..  for the rest of us it’s just him talking about his process.. and dealing with various technical challenges.. while plotting out his future.. or like.. the future of his process… or something like that…

yeah.. so its a long winding rant of a post.. hope you can dig that sorta thing]

So.. I just posted an entry on some of what I’ve been sorta exploring in my music production adventures.. I have yet another post in rough draft form, to add to that.. and then there is yet something beyond that I’d like to post.. on process and the finely tuned human instrument.. or something like that. But all of that seems like old news to me today.. Indeed my last post on the subject was largely written about a week ago.. so lets get to the now moment of it, shall we?

What started off as a somber impressionistic piano piece has evolved into… well it makes me think of a fight between Toshiro Mifune, and John Wayne… if you can imagine that. It’s gone into a full orchestral type production (with some asian percussion)… and it’s now sounding very much like music made by yours truly.. which is something had I wanted to hold off from..

You know.. maybe we could go into that bit about the fine tuned human instrument stuff?:

This is a somewhat complex idea.. But basically we are complex ecologies.. we humans. What is it that causes us to crave ice cream one day and nachos the next… that’s the ecology. Every moment, just where you’re awareness is.. that’s the ecology. This is profoundly important if you want to understand the mysteries of you’re own being.. and I dare say it can lead into a direct experience of God. Ok, that’s probably a controversial statement, but what the hell! 

For an artist this means.. what colors you’re attracted to; what color relationships.. what ideas.. the whole of you’re consciousness..  this is the subtext of process, to put it a certain way.. and if you look at art.. its kind of like a window to the soul… Or at least lets say it can be.

My process is one of embracing this kind of idea… There are different approaches you could make to the artistic process.. which can influence what sort of an effect your underlying ecology has on your work. Still, the ecology will effect performance, thus the value of industrial psychology to business…. to say nothing of a companies culture.

In this blog I’m starting to talk about this subject.. under the guise of “mystery management.” What I’m talking about is ecological optimization.. management not through direct control, but by influencing the ecology.

Ok.. so that’s like a quick overview that idea… Now another thing I’ve been thinking about blogging on is.. my studio change’s impact on process…

Today is the first time in my life where I felt like I had a sound studio that doesn’t really compromise… That’s not to say that this studio isn’t a budget studio.. or that there aren’t things I should think seriously about investing in.. Only that.. I don’t feel like I have to compromise with my work… or any compromises I make, its not because of studio limitations really. The implications are dramatic.. When you’re used to living in an unrealistic situation.. with unrealistic limitations.. you don’t have uber high expectations. When I look back at my old work now.. there’s a lot of places where I think “gee, I wish I had done something about that.” The truth is.. this is common even among grammy awarding wining sound engineers… whom are normally not working under the same kind of limitations.  But lets face it, everyone’s working under some kind of limitations.. you know.. we have x amount of time to get this thing done.. we have y amount of money to spend.. None the less I now feel like I don’t need to compromise….

Next day:

My strategy has always been.. lets work in a circumstance where we minimize our burn rates: If I find a way of working where the cost of working is minimal.. the cost fo time.. energy, whatever… so that I can maximize how much I put into my work.. if I make that one of my differentiators.. I could potentially create work of a higher production value then someone going through the conventional process. So… the notion of time limitations is not one that I really want to deal with in my “personal work.”

Ok, enough said on that for now..  lets get to the implications, of my studio shift, on process… in light of the “finely tuned human instrument concept.”

My strongest background is probably that of a visual artist.. even if this isn’t a muscle I exercise as much as I’d. If you’re a painter.. you have the subject of “how you apply paint to the canvas.” You could do the Jackson Pollock painting dripping thing… you could drop water ballon full of paint on your canvas.. you could use an air brush, you could attack the canvas with a brush so that the brush gestures are a part of the energy of the painting.. you could pain in such a way that the brush strokes seem hidden.. where we perhaps have a realistic depiction of whatever it is you’re painting…

The attack the canvas thing tends to be a very aggressive sort of thing.. it’s about emotion and perhaps intuition.. perhaps about sensation. All this is expressive of your ecology.. It, at least on the canvas attack part of it.. tends not to be highly analytical… Though I confess I’m a highly analytic painter.. but as you well might imagine from reading this blog.. my analytic process integrates this kind of attach process.. integrates chance, integrates accidents.. integrates all of this.. in an analytic sorta way.. or perhaps in other ways.. The analytics of it is a juggler of sorts.

So… when it comes to music production, composition, mix engineering… I will often just attach the sonic canvas… which of course produces expressive results just as it would with a visual arts process.

But here comes the contrast between the old studio and the new: In the old studio there were a limited number of instruments you could use at once, and a limited number of effects. The positive effects of this limitations were.. it didn’t take long to set up a project.. because you weren’t juggling too many elements you could move through a project quickly… I mean if you look at my Zar Matt A Thustra’s Deep Space Adventures project, there’s a solo album created in a month, where speed was a principle value.

The project I’m working on now, at this stage in the process, has 11 instruments in it.. All those instruments, I’m pretty sure, have one insert effect on them, and beyond that, as described else where.. they all have some of there sound going off to an auxiliary reverb. Beyond this.. this project has been one where I’ve had to program, to one extent or another, many of those instruments.. and I’ve had to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to program / configure stuff to get the results I want.

Out side of this, the programing of the instruments performances.. as a part of the composition, has been more elaborate then projects past…

What all this seems to mean is it’s like you go from working in a small sand box to working on some vast beach somewhere.. The scale is all different…  It’s not a project you can just jump into.. you have to take your time with it.. so what does this mean when it comes to the subject of ecology and the finely tuned human?

A few latter, while working on said project:

So we now have 11 instruments. Normally I’d control the mix via mixer automation, and now I’m controlling the mix more via the individual key velocity of each individual note…. (meaning stuff is controlled more by “performance” then “mix.”) The result is that it takes much much longer to write a section, but the expressiveness of the section is many orders of magnitude more. In addition to key velocity, I’m often programing pitch bend and modulation to the instruments.. and there’s a number of other things I could be controlling, but haven’t yet gotten around to figuring out.

If this were not enough, in some cases I’m also controlling elements of the mix via mixer automation.. As stated in an earlier blog entry, I’m don’t want the mixing to call attention to its self too much. For this reason I tend to set the pan position in one place, and leave it there.. but for some instruments.. ones whom I can only control the dynamic range to a limited extent via key velocity and automation.. I now control them via volume automation and there effect send.. which means there’s elements of the virtual stage.. which is to say where the instruments are positioned in space.. that would seem to be moving.

This is a project where I don’t know where it’s going. I have a preconception that as it goes along, at a certain point.. I’ll start moving it away from a traditional orchestral production.. We’ll see the introduction of electronic elements to make us think of electronic classical, and perhaps I’ll start dealing with the mix in a manner I might normally control the mix.. which is to say having your sense of where the instruments are coming from spatially… in a constant state of flux.. This evolution will then be a central thematic element of the production / composition.

Latter that day:

I’ve done this sorta thing before.. In a composition known as “Information Theory: Plight of The Complex.” Which you can find as a free download as a part of my Indra’s Net project.  However.. that project was more of a budget orchestra then this one.. 

Back to the subject of ecology:

Lets call it my psychological ecology, it’s effect on my taste guides me in my interactions with the production.. in the projects forward evolution. Any art project can be thought of as a product of a series of decisions..  You’re staring at a canvas and how you interact with that canvas is you’re reaction to that canvas: It is you’re “aesthetic response.” If you attack the canvas.. you’re throwing at it a lot of energy in a concentrated period of time.. so it’s a bit like the ecology of a moment.. when you work for days straight on a project, well, the ecology of that longer period gets imprinted on the work.

In you’re reaction to the canvas…  over time.. certain things happen: If you’ve ever gotten sick of a song because the radio played it too often.. the artist’s reaction to the canvas can be many times worse…. as he / she is looking at it / listening to it many more times

An interesting quality to my work is that repetition often does not happen in the same sorta way as it might in conventional music. There is no verse chorus verse thing going on..  In conventional music this sorta thing aids the process by which you recognize order in it.. Aesthetic sense.. our notions of beauty… they are very much tied to our ability to recognize order.

Order is, to me, very important. Our concept of reality is a cognitive ordering of.. lets say sense impressions into.. perhaps a rationalistic framework.. though in practice it’s much more complex the this.. but basically. Order is a projection, it is not really the order of the universe. Or.. our framework for organizing reality has implications on how we experience and understand reality. The organization is a kind of lens… that magnifies certain things..  and also has the effect of making other things less visible.

The organizational principles of my music is a kind of critique of our conception of reality.. It’s, in a certain sense, about the organization. Part of what I find exciting about.. say in this particular piece.. is that it’s kind of a cognitive roller coaster ride. It’s in a sense saying “look, this is how you could look at things.” The vision I’m departing is one that produces a kind of cognitive vertigo.. It’s as if you suddenly looked around you’re world through the eyes of an alien. To the extent to which.. we were earlier saying ecology effects one’s notion of reality.. It’s a little like saying “what if we changed your ecology.” It’s like bending reality before your eyes… Could there be an “ideal ecology” that would produce the sorts of results in our lives that we might like to have?

At its best, I would argue, religion is about creating an ideal ecology.

So the point is.. if we explode our concepts of reality..  

A couple days latter:

What the hell was I talking about anyway? Jesus, I’m trying to tie too many themes together here… and you just can’t develop all the ideas, fully enough, in one blog entry.. so screw it.. lets end here. 

Well.. I’ve gotten rather into this sound project, and it seems to involve learning Kontakt 3 in at least some depth. So far the experience of this is mildly painful.. One thing Native Instruments sucks at is user experience.. making things simple.. thinking about the experience of trying to learn this stuff and making it “just work.” Excuse my Apple prejudices.

Examples of obvious problems: You have this manuel… printed, which is nice. In my instance I’m saying “I want to set things ups so that I have a convolution reverb that I can send all the instruments in my kontakt Instance into and automate. One would think this would be fairly straight ahead and obvious.. I mean how many production environments have I used before? But no.. this is stuff you gotta go to the manual for.

I wouldn’t mind if going to the manual was something you needed to do to get a complex piece of technology working… It’s that the manual is designed all wrong. What you want to do is figure out how to do one thing.. you go to that section of the manual and you realize that it’s description of how to do that one thing presumes you understand 5 other things.. and it doesn’t tell you where in the manual those 5 other things are located.

Eventually it seems to come down to trial and error… the manuel gives you some clues.. and you fiddle around and if you’re lucky you work it out.

The production I’m working with starts out, of course.. with a quarter tone tuned piano.. and what I want to do is create a string section that.. is more atmosphere then anything.. It’s something going on in the background. I don’t really want you’re attention to be called to it to much..

The way I’m working at the moment.. well I have a limited understanding of some of Native Instruments tools.. so this is all a learning exercise.. at any rate Kontakt 3 includes stuff from the VSL library. The VSL library is one of the top libraries you’d go to if you wanted to emulate real orchestral music on your computer.. Its the kinda stuff they use in Hollywood films if they can’t afford to hirer and orchestra.. and perhaps even if they can.. (so you can give the director / editors / whatever.. a kind of demo-ized version of your score prior to bringing in the orchestra.. and its a good way to work stuff out to, right?)

The VSL library you get with Kontakt, of course, is limited compared to the full VSL library.. but it’s still the best stuff I’ve got. So I start out by loading up a Violin Section. By default you can control.. would you call it the intensity or volume or? Well you can control it via you’re modulation wheel.. and it’s roughly the equivalent of “how hard the violin player is bowing the string.”So.. what I do is.. inside Digital Performer.. as I’m programing out the violin section.. I’m sorta making the violin swell a little bit.. It all ends up being somewhat complicated as I’m controlling key velocity, modulation, and pitch bend…. so far.

Tuning was, and still is, a big question mark for me. Ideally I might like to make the string section set out in quarter tone tuning.. but its not quite clear to me how to go about this, or what the implications might be. It might very well turn out that it’s a real workflow issue.

Lets explore the problem conceptually.. you have these things called “sample maps.” The sample map tell the sampler what samples to play depending on what note you play and how hard you play it.. So in our case all the notes of a violin are set up in that sample map. If you want to make that quarter tones.. do you have to do something along the lines of.. making it so that as you go up the keyboard… it only goes up a quarter tone per key.. and does that mean you have to radically change the sample map? If so, if you’re dealing with a complex sample map… that’s a task that could take a while to achieve.. and if it’s not really clear… all the details of how you do this.. you could very easily make a mess for your self.

Consequently I’ve decided to skip trying to deal with the tuning issue. A number of Native Instruments instruments are actually amazingly good on this front.. but its not clear to me how Kontakt works.. so screw it!

Now I’ve spoken a little about microtonalism.. and its implications.. in this blog.. as well as the implications for how I’m taking on this project. What I’ve decided to do is go with the usual tuning and just pitch bend stuff around. Trouble is.. for who knows what reason.. #1 Pitch bend is not enabled by default and #2 once I figured out how to make Pitch bending happen.. it wasn’t really clear to me how much pitch bending I was setting up..

Ok, let me explain. On you’re keyboard you might have a bitch wheel.. in your sampler you have a pitch wheel range.. You could make the pitch wheel range one semi tone.. which would mean if you move the pitch wheel on your keyboard all the way up while playing a note.. it will be the equivalent of playing the next note up on the keyboard. If you set the pitch bend wheel to an octave.. you’re going to get a pitch that is 12 keys up..

So.. the problem is.. it’s not clear what I’m setting the pitch bend range to.. so again.. I’m force to fly blind folded.. or lets say it’s as if the readouts in my cockpit are giving me information in a foreign system.. the equivalent to driving a car where you don’t get MPH, you get it in the metric system, while the speed limits signs on the highway are all based on MPH… and now you gotta try and do math in your head.. if you’re lucky enough to know the metric system and conversion rates.. but imagine you don’t even have that.. because you really don’t know what the hell is going on.. .

So the results:

The piano part.. I wasn’t sure if I was 100% happy with.. as far as I’ve written it. Some of it sounds a little flaky.. or.. I’m not sure exactly. However, there’s a lot to love in the piano part: It has the very emotional kind of feeling.. a kind of ambience to it.. it’s own sorta impressionistic quality.. Once the strings are added, the parts of the piano that sounded flaky to me.. well they no longer sound flaky. It’s as if, the flaky of it,now sounds as if it has something to do with it’s interaction with the strings.. so now the flaky has been transmuted into interesting. Yup, that’s how we like to roll… But.. the problem is that the strings are calling too much attention to them selves.. It seems that we are not quite getting enough control over them via simply programing there performance.. it’s sounding like what we need to do is control them via mixing.. which brings us back to the earlier issue of how do I automate aux send effects in Kontakt.

I haven’t worked this all out yet. I really want to avoid making it sound like what you are listening to is the result of a lot of mix engineering…. I don’t want it to sound like my music normally sounds like…  At least not at this point in the production. I want it to sound like you’re listening to a group of instruments play..

To achieve these results.. my plan is as follows:  

<editors note, I’m now writing from the perspective of a couple days latter in the production:>

When doing the mix engineer roll you’ll more or less start by creating a “virtual stage.” What this means is you define where various instruments are in space. How far an instrument seems to be from you is largely defined by the ratio of a dry signal, to that signals sound going through some sort of a reverb.. So to make an instrument sound more distant you both pull down it’s level and add to how much of that channel’s audio is going into the the reverb.

The problem was.. I could never figure out how to automate this in Kontakt.. I can set it easy enough, but automation is a bitch…  and then there are the work flow issues related to how you go about this:

Kontakt is a pretty complicated program… You can set the pan position of an instrument in multiple places.. which is to say how much of it’s sound is going to the left versus right speaker:

You can set this on the level of sample maps so.. lets say you have a sample map with percussion sounds.. you might like to make it so that every percussive instrument has a slightly different pan position.. which will give your mix a little more interest.. you do that here.

I’m not totally clear on how this works but.. you can set up an instrument so that it’ll receive MIDI data that will set it’s pan position..  which is easy enough to set up..   you can set the pan position for the instrument in it’s editor.. and you can set in on the total instrument.. (I know these distinctions aren’t totally clear)

As if all this were not enough.. you can give all you’re instruments in Kontakt there own audio out.. and give them all there own mixer channel in you’re DAW (where you can again set pan positions).

So lets talk about some of the pros and cons of various approaches this presents us with:

I started going down this route with the idea that I wanted to use Kontakts internal audio engine to mix it’s instruments. The main reason for this is that Kontakt has a convolution reverb effect.. that’s more realistic then the reverb effects I have in Digital Performer. Of course the problem is that I was never able to figure out how to automate aux sends…

In this sorta set up.. what you want to do is set the pan position of the instrument prior to the aux send.. generally.. that way the sound of the instruments stereo position in the aux send will be the same as the dry signal. There’s reasons why you might not want to do it this way.. but doing it this way will help reinforce the spacial sense of your mix.

Doing it this way means you pretty much need to control the mix via MIDI. This creates a couple problems for you. The first problem is that MIDI only has 128 increments..  meaning you’ve just limited the resolution of your pan positions…. Kind of a minor issue.. and Kontakt even has ways of dealing with this.. but still an issue.. that becomes more serious for other sorts of parameters, like aux sends, that you might want to control.

The other issue with this approach is that you have to control it via midi channels in your DAW…. as a pose to by audio channels. The MIDI channels would probably be the same channels where you are programming the performance of the instrument in question… and the way DP’s editors work.. its not always easy / obvious.. what’s going on with all the parameters of a given channel.. 

The final problem is.. One of the things you want to do is make it so that all the instruments in the mix sound like they are in the same space.. you do this by putting at least a little bit of the same reverb on all the instruments.. so the convolution reverb you’re using inside of Kontakt is not something you can put on instruments out side of Kontakt… so.. you’ll at the very least have to put some reverb on the master out of Kontakt. The trouble is.. for various reasons, you really want a more fine grain control over how much of that reverb goes on what instruments.

What I eventually settled on was giving each Kontakt its own channel.. and mixing via audio channels in DP.. which gave me my better work flow..

It turns out that nearly every instrument in Kontakt.. and even on my piano, have the same convolution reverb effect on it… so they are all rather consistent..  Normally the problem with going this kind of a route is that convolution reverb is a processor hungry effect.. but seeing as I’m working on a Mac Pro with 8 cores.. this would seem to pose no problems at all.

A few Days Latter: 

I actually like the resulting sound better…  and there’s a couple of things worth talking about here: First of all, one thing you want to do in any mix, 99% of the time, is have some reverb effects that go on ALL the instruments.. to various degrees. This unify the mix, making it sound as if everything in your mix is more or less happening inside the same space. The second thing is that we are now working with a reverb that isn’t terribly realistic.. but it doesn’t really call attention to its self as “super unrealistic,” or at least it doesn’t when its stacked on top the individual instrument’s uber realistic convolution reverb.

This brings us into a complicated subject of the aesthetics of reverb.. It’s complicated because there is a history of reverb in music production that.. influences the aesthetic implications of a reverb. The reverb in DP is a reverb that is.. well lets call it “historic.” Basically the reverb effect..

I don’t know the dates of it.. but digital reverb has been with us for a long time now.. prior to which echo chambers where what you’d probably use.. and you would really have to go to greater lengths to get that sound..  And it was also a period where certain studios had an incredible amount of value because of there unique sound characteristics… the dawn of the digital reverb marked the start of a movement out of all that. Reverb is merely..  Well all materials reflect and absorb sound.. and they’ll reflect and absorb different frequencies differently. So… to model that realistically was not at all possible in early digital reverbs.. and I dare say the actual issues are a little more complex then what I’m pointing to now.

Digital reverbs have a more simplistic sound then do real acoustic spaces. In my philosophical point of view I think of this as Plato versus Buddhism: With Plato you have the ideal that gets degraded when it gets into earth.. in Buddhism everything is ideal, its just a question of your psychological attitude towards it. In a sense the simplified digital reverb I think of as plato’s ideal.. and convolution is more like a Buddhist ideal..  

I’ll end this conversation more or less here.. without digging much more deeply into the matter..  and just going so far as to say that the simple digital reverb really does add something to the convolution reverb.. making the sound sound that much better.

In any event, I’d be interested in knowing you’re reaction to all this: Have you played with mixing? Have you played with Kontakt? What’s your experience been like? Hell, do you have your own solutions to my problems? 

Well, as it stands, my last published blog entry should provide the back story, so let us go on with the front story. [editors note, this was actually written a little while ago, so its still back story]

I finally came around to “Ok, lets try this quarter tone thing.” Quarter tones.. it means you take what used to be the smallest musical interval.. which is to say.. take any instrument.. the notes that are right next to each other.. the different between one note and the next.. now divide that by 4.  That’s quarter tone tuning.

For me, quarter tone tuning is a little like going off the reservation without a map..  or its like all the stuff on the dash board, by which you normally drive the car, or perhaps fly the plane.. they all went and took acid on you without telling you about it: When you look at a keyboard.. its obvious what notes are where, and when you suddenly wack out the tuning..  well God only knows, right?

Yeah, I could sit down and actually figure out what the hell is going on.. make special maps, and move forward that way, but somehow that doesn’t seem quite right to me. One of the thing that really appeals to my sense of adventure is.. being lost. It’s a little like Luke Skywalker turning off his targeting computer when he goes up against the Death Star.. where not going to rely on anything other then… I guess our own sense of things.

A challenge for the artist, always, is that you have a certain sense of taste.. you have habits.. you have all these things..  things you rely on.. and now we are pulling the rug out of all that… to go see what happens.

So I broke out my keyboard.. I’m no keyboard player, but I can noodle around on a keyboard.. and by doing that, I can kind of explore different possibilities as I go along. “What’s this harmony sound like” “how does this sound next to this.” What I find myself doing is just exploring this strange world.

A few latter:

The compositional process, for me, is a kind of dialog between.. myself and the canvas.. which in our case is a kind of sonic sculpture. I frequently call what I do with sound “sound art” as a pose to “making music” as… I think of it as more of an “artistic” process then “a musicians” process: I don’t think of my self as a great musician.. but a great artist I could be.

So what you’re doing is building this.. lets call it a “sound sculpture.” You’re putting stuff onto the sonic canvas, and in the end its what’s going on in the canvas that matters. All your skills, all you’re knowledge, all your musicianship.. all your abilities as a sound engineer, whatever it is.. in the end it comes down to that thing on the canvas.. 

Knowledge and skills amounts to language.. It’s a framework for understanding reality. Your framework for understanding reality.. has implications on the image of reality you behold. So for instance, my journey into quarter tone tuning.. is one of doing funny things with respect to your framework. For me its like “well I’ll just improvise inside of this context” so it’s a search for a context that will make magic happen.

The thing is, its not just about frameworks, its how you relate to that framework. The term “Dogma” comes to mind. I don’t know if religious people think this way.. but you could say.. on the one hand you have “the law” and on the other you have “your way of relating to the law,” and then you have a heretic like Jesus who comes along.. goes to the extreme of saying “yo, it’s just about loving God.” Jesus would tell you it doesn’t matter if you actually have that affair with your neighbors wife.. it’s did you do that in you heart. This, of course, was radical stuff.

Next Morning:

So I’m now trying to copy my Kontakt Sample library. Kontakt, of course, is a software sampler… Kontakt comes with an apparently incredible sample library… I say apparently because I’ve had a number of technical problems.. including defective DVDs, which has kept me from being able to explore said library. I still don’t have the damn thing working.. but now it looks like its simply a matter of copying the library from the DVDs..

The reason I’m doing this is because.. Well starting out with this piano.. just kind of the direction that was going.. It’s somewhat impressionistic.. and I had thought of throwing in some electronic sounds into the mix.. but I’m now thinking that what I want to do is.. keep thinking in the world of… kinda classical type orchestral stuff.. I mean just timber wise. And my understanding of the matter is that the Kontakt library stuff is the best library for this kind of thing… in my personal libraries anyway… So now its time to get that stuff working.

I do think having electronic stuff in the mix could be very cool.. if you’ve ever listened to OHM.. you hear electronic classical in action..  and I’d like to create that kind of a feel… where the work is basically orchestral.. but with electronic elements.. where the electronic elements function in a particular capacity.. but where the orchestral stuff is really the base of it all. I say this though I never know where my work is going to take me.

Back to the spiritual / relationship to law stuff:

My spiritual beliefs are clearly heretical. Jung has said that religion is a defense against religious experience..  which is to say that the church acts as an intercession between you and God. My sense of the.. way that religions roll in society has diminished.. and the kind of modern cultural climate surrounding it is.. I don’t always feel like religion is really doing a great job of serving the modern situation. There’s a reading of the Bible where you can say “Jesus didn’t come to bring people to the church, he came to bring the church to the people.” So I’d say that’s really the challenge for modern Christianity. 

My feeling is.. well I feel like.. do I even need the church? Couldn’t I just have a direct relationship with God? This is a somewhat dangerous idea.. but when I talk about our relationship to law, to conceptual frameworks, even to language.. I’m talking along these lines.. and so you can see how, on a process level in my work, my work explores this.

Hmm, how about we explore Ozzy’s take on this?

Always nice to have a little Randy Rhoads tribute, ha? (The boy could play!) 

I’ll end this entry here.. so.. I don’t know, what do you think? 

No really, I’ve been meaning to write.. its bad of me not to.. I’ll just post whatever random, who knows what, comes out of me tonight.

Lately I’ve been a little depressed.. I suppose it being mothers day season, this my first since my mom passed, plays a roll in this depression. In any event, I’m not getting much of anything done, or haven’t this week.. my psyche has seen better days…

In a defiance of all this, I cracked open DP a few moments ago.. started loading instruments, playing around… feeling like “I just want to be productive, it doesn’t matter how.” This is a good place to start.. I mean start anywhere, start where you are, just work at it.. It doesn’t matter if what you do is of any value, just get those damn wheels turning.In truth there’s probably grand possibilities all around.. and if I can just get out of this funk, I might just realize a few of them, and there by escape total doom.

In my little music project.. which probably wont reach “bean hill” status.. I fired up Native Instruments piano program.. for the first time.. and fooled around a little bit.. “oh, you can do quarter tone scales in this?”

Quarter tones is like the “Charles Ives” school of microtonalism. This is a slightly out there planet for me to talk about.. but I generally don’t give quarter tone music too much respect in the microtonal department. The reason has to do with justintonation… Basically.. once upon a time a musical system was created, that everyone uses today.. only trouble is that the pitches are all wrong.. Justintonation fixes this problem.. I’m generally not all that geared to justintonation because.. well just because of how my music is structured.. so what I normally do is.. “abstract from the traditional diatonic system.” What I mean by this is.. I start on the planet everyone else is playing on.. and sorta move out from there.. though I clearly don’t play by earthling rules!

Anyway, so quarter tone tuning is something that actually would work with the structure of my music.. but the problem is.. though it can come closer to correct pitch relationships then what everyone else is using.. it doesn’t quite get there..

My thinking is.. well.. 2 fold basically. #1 You can have instruments that are expressive with pitch, and #2 You could have different tunings going on at the same time. Let me explain the implications:

If you where to start with a quarter tone tuning system.. and then you were dealing with instruments that were expressive in terms of pitch.. there pitches would, one way or another, fluctuate around that quarter tone foundation.. inside of those fluctuations.. its at least possible that you could have the proper note relationship thing working.. in the justintonation sense of it.

Having multiple tunings.. means the cross relationships.. between the pitches of different instruments with different tunings.. could create the proper pitch relationships (particularly if we add the pitch expressive layer to the mix.)Working this way would create certain organizational challenges.. but the results could be interesting.. since I would be working in a way where I can’t really predict the results too well… and this often leads to interesting music. 

A few latter:

As I read what I’ve written I notice something. Most of the time, at least since I put together the new studio, I’ve been working hard to reach square one.. to do work that is.. “not sucky.” I mean.. its like you’re “pre good at this.” It’s like you have to work real hard to reach results that are.. not terrible.. but when we look at me working with music.. I throw some stuff out there, without giving it the least bit of thought… and look how sophisticated it is!?  Just seemed like a worth while observation.. anyway, let me post this.

It’s late at night, got lots to talk about, but probably won’t talk about a 10th of it.

One of the thoughts I’m thinking about.. is, “the magic.” I’ve written a rather long blog entry on this subject, not published.. and what’s worse is I now feel inspire to extent those ideas in new directions, but how can I do that without posting that last entry?  God, I got a lot of stuff I should post….  

So this subject of magic. This is a complex subject, but.. when I talk about magic, what I’m really talking about is something going on in my music right now.

It’s a strange thing.. you go out there and start hacking away.. and eventually things start coming together, but it doesn’t really feel like the coming together is really something you’re dong… its more like you’re a vessel of something.. you’re channeling it. If you were to take a very deep look at the creative process, you’d find that the artist is actually creating the work.. (I know, surprising, right?) but I mean.. the artist is creating “the magic.” 

All this talk is like back story… because I don’t really care to layout before you a psychology of the creative process at this time.. though this is no doubt a very interesting subject.. It’s more like there’s something going on in my work that compels me to write, and I should somehow find a way to speak to this…. so lets talk abut this from the angle of the music.

I have some kind of a system of composition. It’s a system from another planet, as I don’t really understand “how you’re supposed to make music.” It’s a system that is rich with my own inventions. I think most of the music we hear.. I don’t want to say it’s soo derivative.. but it is more conventional. My music is a kind of giant leap into the unknown.. and I think that’s the most compelling part of it.

It’s an attempt at invention.  You have a lot conceptual frameworks.. These frameworks are ways of thinking about various aspects of music making. This could be ideas about harmony, orchestration, counter point, melody, rhythm, mixing, process, sound synthesis, um.. a lot of different things.. These frameworks question the presumptions of the inherited views on these subjects… and they provide alternative answers to certain fundamental questions.

Why I tell you I don’t really understand the conventions.. I’m in part saying.. look, I rebelled very early in my artistic development.. So I never really listened to the conventions of tradition enough to really have a deep understanding of what all that is about. 

I don’t really take my frameworks too seriously.. or I should say that they are just ideas to get you part way there.. They are like a starting place. I suppose its like this idea that.. language has certain limitations for what it can say, what it can point to.. and what is really important is something beyond language… but of course language has it’s utility.. and it will take us part way there.

Eventually you have to put down all our ideas and simply have a direct experience..

I feel like I’m speaking in  such abstract terms..

Hmm.. some time ago I wrote a blog entry on “my process of philosophy,” which I think speaks to what I’m trying to get at here. For all intensive purposes, we are talking about a philosophy of music here.. all be it in a way that’s really.. kind of about process, and pragmatic issues of the artist.. It might not sound like there’s anything pragmatic about it.. but.. in my process of philosophy, though I don’t recall talking about “magic” does in fact talk about something that.. if I were talking about magic.. I’d eventually have to get to this…

Magic.. in part.. well here’s what you gotta do.. pay attention to details beyond the degree to which reason would suggest it as important. Pay attention to details for the purpose of the psychological process.. not just from the perspective of the logic of the physical universe.

Ok, here’s a quicky on “who God is.” (are you impressed by my balls yet? I mean to bring up God here?) God is a symbol for the unknown..  The deal is.. that the ratio of the known to the unknown is a ratio of 1 to infinity.. Our conception of reality is.. sorta ridiculous in relationship to “the real thing.” The meaning of anything has to do with context, and when you realize that the ultimate context of anything and everything is mystery.. my gosh.. interesting..  

So you see here,… my talk of mystery management.. is um.. perhaps a deeper idea then it might often seem.

Anyway.. so the point is.. paying attention to details beyond what rational ideas would suggest, in part.. is saying “listen I recognize that mystery has more to do with what makes the world go round then my conceptions.. and so for the sake of that, I should try to work beyond my understanding.”

So when I say something like “I feel like there’s something going on in my music,” what I mean is that there is something going on beyond my understanding.. that’s going on a level that is beyond what my conscious mind has consciously been creating.. my efforts to go beyond are starting to pay dividends.

It’s an effect of the interrelationships of the details I’ve been paying attention to. It’s the implications. 

Let see if I can explain how this works in a more tangible way:

At a certain point in the project I’m working on (as of this writing, you might be able to hear it here, though it shant be there for long).. at a certain point I start playing with microtonalism. I’m writing monophonic lines.. inside of a diatonic framework.. Each instrument is playing around with various chord tones.. but the microtonalism is abstracting it from there.. so that the actual harmonies, and counter point stuff, is not something you would find in your text books.. 

I understand that for the average reader.. what I’m talking about… it’s as if it were in a foreign language.. What I’m saying is something “a little technical” which has interesting implications.. which I’ve probably gone into in past blog entries somewhere.. for now I just want to say.. this is an example of a sort of crazy attention to details.

At the same time as this going on..  you have various blocks… where different instruments seem to be taking on different rolls, and what instrument performs what roll.. or how the the different instruments come together to divide of the labor of the rolls.. is in a constant state of flux.

Ok, hold up right here.. If you’ve been reading me for any length of time.. you’ll no doubt realize that that the “organizational principles” of the music I’m creating are following ideas I have concerning the organizational principles of social media..  my answers to “the technological disruption we are in the middle of.” So in a very interesting way.. the music is exploring social media / new media disruption..  This is something I’d like to go into more detail with but.. I’ll leave it here for now.

 Another aspect to all this that seems to me worth talking about is.. that I sorta approach the music making process from the stand point of a painter.. Or it seems more like the work of a painter then a music person. One are we this being realized is in the mix, and how the mix integrates into with the composition.. The instruments in our mix are in motion.. They are in motion in relationship to our listener.. the are close to us, they are far away from us, moving from one speaker to the next.. 

This is a sorta tricky juggling act..

Latter still:

well I must run.. got a Boston Media Makers thing to run off to.. so I’ll have to finish this up latter.

Indra’s Net, is of course some music I made some years ago.  I find myself showing it to people, listening to it, and reflecting on it.  It’s not my latest work, that would be Zar Matt A Thustra’s Deep Space Adventures.  Indra’s net is probably more representative of things to come inso far as ZarMattAThustra’s Deep Space Adventures was rushed to be put together..  and is..  more experimental, and made with different tools on a weaker computer.  Though I imagine my next work will be something of a combination of the positives of these things.

Of course you can find both CD’s for free by clicking here.  And I invite you to comment back here your thoughts on it.

Indra’s Net is a crazy piece of work.  It’s ambient electronic music of a sort unlike anything you’ve heard before.  (Which is not to say that it is without aggressive moments.)  It takes you into these alien worlds.. places unlike any place you’ve ever been to before.  It is a hypnotic trip of the mind.   

In the story of my work it represents a huge step forward from my Viveka project (which you can currently only hear parts of, for free online) in that it is a quantum leap forward in terms of the tools I was using.  At least in terms of the digital instruments, Indra’s Net is uncompromising.  But the full breadth of what they are capable of was not realizable on the system I was using.  

And this is what brings me to the day dreams about a new project:

1.  On the old system you had limited processor power.. and one of the places this effects is your ability to create an ambient space inside of which the music happens.  Reverb tends to be a computationally expensive effect, especially convolution reverb.  A part of making a mix, that sounds like it has a lot of depth, will involve creating multiple layers of reverb, sometimes EQ’d and compressed in different ways.. where instruments are placed into those spaces in varying degrees.  For the sort of work I’m doing you’d see these instruments and sounds moving in and out of those spaces.  Some of the tracks on Indra’s Net have very little of this going on due to how much power the instruments took up.
2.  Because you have a very limited amount of power you tend to be very judicious in how you place effects on instruments..  I suppose this goes with #1.  The implication is that stuff doesn’t always get crafted as much as you might like.
3.  I have a lot of new tools.  I think most of Indra’s Net was done with Komplete 2, and I’m at least on 3 now, plus Kore.   Some of the software of Komplete 3 wouldn’t even run on the old system, never mind run well.  In addition to this I’m now working with new versions of Reason (Reason wasn’t even used on Indra’s Net) and Ableton Live.  So this represents a huge kind of technological leap forward.. particularly when used on a system that can handle all this.

So all of this represents an evolution in the production tools.  Beyond this we also have me at a much more sophisticated place in terms of my production and mixing skills, and there are certain point in the Indra’s mix that I’m not 100% happy with.

Latter that day:

As I sit here writing this, I wonder what is likely to come.  We are days away from MacWorld where new equipment is likely to be unveiled.  If the Mac Pro line gets a bump I will surely buy that, other wise there’s at least some chance I might go with the new Mac Pro.  I’m currently in the process of doing research into the various tools I’m working with to see what sorta multi core support they might have, to get a feel for what difference a Mac Pro might mean to my work.  Is a Mac Book Pro “good enough?” What’s the power difference between a Mac Book Pro and a Mac Pro look like?

In my mind Mac Pro = uncompromising power.  Uncompromising power = Amazing possibilities.  But what’s in my mind, and what exactly might be real are probably two distinct things.  I have a will to ‘kinda sorta over do it.’  What I’d like to do is plop down another $450 for the Komplete 5 upgrade, and then another $700 or so for Liquid mix, and go from there.  But spending that sorta money isn’t sanity, even if it would do wonders for my work.  It would make sense if some label came up to me and offered me some sorta contract that including some sort of an advance, or it would make sense if I had some kind of income going on, but for the moment, we must hold back.

It’s ok though, because we are talking about something amazing without even going that far, so let us try to explore some this:

Conventionally I have a limited number of instruments I’m able to work with at anyone time, as well as a limited number of effects.  While this is still to be the case, the limitations are no where near so stringent..  Which means we can enter into more complex soundscapes.  Imagine if you will..  a complex arsenal of sounds.  This is a production process that would take a good deal more labor per second of audio then Indra’s Net..  But imagine you have all these sounds.  Just because it leaps into my mind, imagine you have an orchestra.  Given, this is a somewhat limited orchestra, but imagine its there.  Our orchestra is playing something..  The composition has complex interrelationships of performance dynamics, to such an extent that it can remind you of a real orchestra playing the great classical music of a great composer.   Not only this but our orchestra is a microtonal orchestra.  There is an expressive quality to the music, that as a result of the microtonalism, simply makes us feel as if we are in a world with a greater tonal fidelity then anything we’ve heard before.

Ok great..  Now imagine it really sounds like we are in a real concert hall.  But that’s not all.. Imagine the music is a 5.1 Surround Sound Mix, and we are in the middle of the sound.  The orchestra is, in mix engineer language, on a virtual sound stage in front of us.  It sounds more or less real, and we are captivated by it.  This until the reality goes too far:

Somewhere behind us, somewhat faintly in the background, we being to hear the whispers of a conversation.  Out of this conversation emerges a fight.  All the people around the fight are great disturbed by the fight, by it getting in the way of hearing the performance, and then before we know it, security is called in.  Imagine, if you will, that this was something like an audio play.. something you weren’t really expecting.  We, after all, thought we came to listen to the music!

The next thing you know we are following our fighting couple as they get thrown out of the hall.  So that the 5.1 Mix takes us through the crowd, and out side..  As we travel out, the orchestra moves further away from us..  and the acoustic space of the where we are, changes to suit where we are..  And there’s a suitable level of sound design to reinforce all this.  The sound design is a kind of composition.  A composition that plays with the ambiguity as to wether we should interpret it as noise, sound design, or composition… but tries to be read, if you’re reading superficially, as the sound of the environment.

Now what of these characters we are following, what’s there story?  Hell, what’s our story, why are we following them?  

Out side on the street we can hear cars driving buy, often with stereos blaring.  Each one represents a different sonic cluster, should we call it.  Another words the stereos superficially mimmic different styles of music..  metal, hip hop, whatever. And in a Charles Ives sorta way, as they move around in space.. there music links up with each other..  so that we might hear as a kind of whole.. Wizing around the streets… as we move through the streets.

Ok, lets stop this right hear.  I don’t know that I would ever try to make music like this.. It at least sounds interesting on the level of an idea, but who knows what happens when we try and execute it.  One of the ideas I think of as I write about it is the idea that we could have a range between realism and formalism.  Another words, at what point do the sounds sound real, the space sound real, like we are really in it..  And then at what point is, as if on some sorta acid trip, melt into some other reality?  The other reality was there all along after all, just masquerading as a more conventional reality.  Perhaps the music is an investigation of metaphysical presumptions, or perhaps the unconscious in everyday life?

What I’m describing to you is sorta how my music works..  Though we are not normally in settings that sound so… specific or like a known reality.

One thought I had while imagining this was “what if we scored the story?”  Another words, ok, you have an orchestra over there, and then you have this fight over there, and then we are over here, and all around us are the people of the audience.  What if we scored these stories.  How might the orchestra react to this going on in its midst?   

A few latter:

I don’t know that that story really describes where I really see my music going.  Technology is really only one small part of it..  And in the end its more about creativity and ideas.

Do you mind if I speak with some arrogance?  If you’re reading this you probably fall into one of two camps:

1. You never heard of me in your life.
2. You’ve met me, but don’t really know too much about me, or about what sorta work I might do.

Depending on the camp you fit into..  Well I have no idea…  and you might not be coming from a place where what I’m doing makes any sense..  I mean I think there are some people for whom my work clicks, and others for whom it doesn’t.  I’m afraid that what I’m about to say might sound terribly arrogant to the first group..  

I think this music kicks ass.  I think it kicks ass on a level that is far beyond conventional ass kicking.. I mean I think we have a certain set of expectations that we have of work we find in our culture.. a range if you will.. at the top of which is “kick ass” and I think this stuff is a little off the charts. 

So far I’ve blogged very little about my music..  Not really enough so that you’d really get deep into what its really all about..  Hell I haven’t blogged too much at all yet.  I’m just trying to get used to blogging via wordpress..  out in the open.  But I promise you this.. if you stick with me..  I’ll show you some serious ass kicking like you never saw before.  I know from the surface it might not look like that at all.. like you could expect such a thing.. but trust me..  beneath the surface, tucked away in a secret compartment somewhere.. are the tools of ass kicking.  Right now I’m just sorta fooling around..  but soon… shit will fly!

LOL which still doesn’t get at it, ha?  But to really get to it is going to take a lot of blogging on my part. We are going to have to explore a lot of different subjects together.  I have some idea.. a kind of philosophy.. lots of people have there philosophies.. and I don’t know if I can really call my self a philosopher or not..  but I have some amazing ideas.  I have ideas that could change the way you think.  I have ideas that could open you to whole new worlds.. whole new ways of experiencing life.  These are my gold.  And with them I hope to knock your socks off.  

So I guess we should start by talking about what Indra’s Net is.   You can hear this music by going to mattsearles.com/music or, at least in the short run, on my Virb.com/mattsearles profile.  It’s also worth mentioning that it’s both free, pod safe, and creative commons 3.1 share alike with attribution.. so use it for whatever, just give me attribution.. and if you want to use it for some sort of commercial thing, shoot me an email so we can talk about.  

A New Kind of Music 

Indra’s Net is my attempt at making a new kind of music, or it’s one such attempt.  I think of my music as a kind of radicle leap out of the worlds of conventional music, or any sort of music I’ve encountered anywhere else, and its that leap that I find most exciting about it.

Indra’s Net is ambient electronic music, I think its safe to say.  Or if it fits into any genera, that’s probably where it fits. But that doesn’t really get to it.

In many ways music bares the mark of the process that creates it: electronic music and working on a computer can have a big effect on process.  I think of my process of composition and production as being a combination of painting and film making:  A moment in the composition is like creating a painting, and the mix is like moving a camera through a painting..  a painting that it’s self is a living moving thing.

The ambience is like the atmosphere of a space, of a world.  The composition operates on on principles of.. well this deep sort of psychology / philosophy framework of understanding reality.  It’s a little like looking beyond or beneath reality’s surface. 

On top of this you have a kind of surrealistic like process.  You make a mark on a canvass, and like staring up at a cloud, you ask “what am I seeing.”  From here the process becomes a kind of dialog between artist and an emerging dream:  The artist is a facilitator.  So the result is a kind of investigation of the unconscious.  Its an inward exploration. 

To make things even more interesting there is the issue of the relationship between composition and production:  The mix is a part of the composition.  In mix engineering you create a virtual sound stage where in each sound or instrument has a specific location in space, and along with this different instruments are isolated into there own frequency space which has some effect on where you place those instruments / sounds in space.  In my work the location of sounds and instruments, as well as there frequency space, tends to be in a constant state of flux.  So even as we have this experience of a point of view moving through a sonic space, we have the experience of elements of that space moving around..

This is interesting from a traditional compositional point of view:  The harmonic make up of a moment has to do with the sum of all sounds.. but here harmony gets spacialized.  We have harmony that comes out of a kind of modalism, as in Jazz, where parts move in and out of key, in such a way to suggest alternative harmonic structures.  When this takes place in space our notion of harmony is shifted.

Another thing that might be worth touching on is microtonalism.  Conventionally 99.9% of all the music you ever heard in your life is based on a 12 tone equal temperament system.  Working with microtonalism means that we leave conventional harmonic / melodic stuff behind.  Where this is perhaps most interesting comes at the subject of tonal and atonal music.  Atonalism and tonalism are like these two monsters movements in music history.  One of the ways I use microtonalism is to create a music that has a kind of figure ground ambiguity in relationship to tonalism and atonalism.

So this is how it works:  Serial atonalism is sorta an atonal convention, where you could avoid creating a tonal center via not repeating a note until the other 11 notes have played, as well as not emphasizing a note over the others.  From a process perspective composing atonal music this way can feel a little like a mathematical exercise.  But one could interpret this pattern as “maximizing the length of time before a note is repeated.”  If you are working in a microtonal tone space, where perhaps you’re dealing with 72 or more notes, one can maximize the time before repeating a note without bothering to think about it too much. Further, you could compose traditional tonal music.. diatonic harmony style… but then bend the pitches around microtonal wise, so that what you would hear is like tonal music on acid.. ultimately atonal.. but in such a way that you could perceive it as ether tonal or atonal.  In this way you are exploring where certain traditional ideas about music, musical composition, and music theory, break down.

The notion of figure ground ambiguity is another theme we pick up.  In part we are saying that context provides meaning, both in terms of time, and in terms of harmony..  reality is in some sense a constructed thing, and we are exploring how reality gets constructed.  We have multiple pathways through the music, each with moments that can be interpreted in one or another way, so that one could listen to the same track multiple times and hear it differently each time.. 

The problems with Indra’s net

Indra’s Net was produce on a cheap / free laptop.  Yuck!  Which adversely effects things.  The bigger issue is the head phones I was working with:  The head phones give you a full dynamic range, plus they make higher frequency noises sound louder then they are.  This latter point has the advantage of giving a more acute sense of spacial location while mixing, but there’s also a down side:  You tend to mix sounds in such a way that they are not as loud as you might other make them, since you are living in a fuller dynamic range, and because certain things sound louder then they are.  The results was certain elements of the production endoing up sounding too quite / you are not able to hear them on certain systems.  The last problem of Indra’s Net is, because the lap top I created it on had no disk space, all the track got rendered out as MP3 files.  Latter I’d try to render the tracks out of Cubase as uncompressed files, but some of the renderings didn’t work since different versions of Cubase where used and some of the effects of older versions where not present in newer version of Cubase.

So to correct these problems I loaded the files into audio programs and rendered them out louder and with more dynamic compression.. making them finally loud enough.  The trouble was that the origional files I was working from where MP3 files, making them sound a little crummy in some places.

Further Reading on Indra’s Net

Around the time I created Indra’s Net (a long long time ago) I blogged about its creation and ideas.  Here are some links to those old entries:

• Thinkers and Indra’s Net: Arthor Schopenhaur

• Inventing a New Music

• A Most Terrible Happening (More Stuff on the Net of Indra Project)

• More Future Thinking in the (Sound?) Work of Matt

• A Modest Evolution in the Indra’s Net Project

• Indra’s Net Notes Part 2: Electric Metal

• Indra’s Net Essay (part 1)

• Indra’s Net.. to come out in SACD format (someday)