Rushed Snares

My latest album was released yesterday. It’s the final release in Superpang’s digital-only series which started with Liminal Kicks (SP01) in 2020. Rushed Snares (SP200) is a follow-up, designed to end this first chapter of the label with a return to where it started, and I’m very grateful for having been given this opportunity. It’s based on the same aim of exploring sounds made with drum synths when they play very fast, so they’re heard as a pitched sound instead of a rhythm. Whereas Liminal Kicks achieved this aim by simply speeding up and slowing down exponentially, Rushed Snares uses algorithmic number sequences as the basis for the rate at which the drums play.

I found appropriate number sequences by searching the OEIS, which also provides the code to generate them. I used Mathematica to generate the sequences and transform them into MIDI files. Instead of generating drum sounds with equal volume, as in Liminal Kicks, I made them fade out within each time period by setting the volume of each hit as the inverse fraction of its position. So if a period has 2 drum hits, the first plays at full volume (1) and the second at 1/2 volume. With 3 hits, they play at 1, 2/3 and 1/3. Some of the most basic drum synths disregarded MIDI note velocity, however, so the volume fade isn’t always present in some tracks.

The basic idea was to map each number in a sequence to the number of drum hits that play in each time period. For example, the integer sequence {1, 2, 3, 4, …} played at 120bpm would have a time period of 0.5 seconds, playing 1 beat in the first period, then 2, then 3, then 4, etc. Three tracks on the album are based on this simplest of number sequences, but with different length sequences, at different speeds, with different drum synths, and one of them is reversed.

The sequences I looked for were those that didn’t just tend towards infinity but bounced around more, including smaller numbers as well as bigger ones. That way, the resulting sounds would have a range of speeds that can be heard as both rhythms and pitched tones. In addition to the basic ascending sequence of whole numbers mentioned above, I used the following integer sequences. For each sequence, I show the first 128 numbers as a list and in graph form, with an explanation of what it does and why it’s useful.

A020639

Lpf(n): least prime dividing n (when n > 1); a(1) = 1. Or, smallest prime factor of n, or smallest prime divisor of n. https://oeis.org/A020639

{1, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 7, 2, 3, 2, 11, 2, 13, 2, 3, 2, 17, 2, 19, 2, 3, 2, 23, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 29, 2, 31, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 37, 2, 3, 2, 41, 2, 43, 2, 3, 2, 47, 2, 7, 2, 3, 2, 53, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 59, 2, 61, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 67, 2, 3, 2, 71, 2, 73, 2, 3, 2, 7, 2, 79, 2, 3, 2, 83, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 89, 2, 7, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 97, 2, 3, 2, 101, 2, 103, 2, 3, 2, 107, 2, 109, 2, 3, 2, 113, 2, 5, 2, 3, 2, 7, 2, 11, 2, 3, 2, 5, 2, 127, 2}

This sequence was useful for my purpose because although some elements tend towards infinity, it also includes small numbers that repeat regularly. All even-numbered elements in the sequence have the number 2, for example. The prime numbers themselves are the ones that – by definition – don’t have a lower divisor other than 1, and it’s these numbers that grow infinitely as the sequence extends, forming the diagonal line in the graph above.

A000005

d(n) (also called tau(n) or sigma_0(n)), the number of divisors of n. https://oeis.org/A000005

{1, 2, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2, 4, 3, 4, 2, 6, 2, 4, 4, 5, 2, 6, 2, 6, 4, 4, 2, 8, 3, 4, 4, 6, 2, 8, 2, 6, 4, 4, 4, 9, 2, 4, 4, 8, 2, 8, 2, 6, 6, 4, 2, 10, 3, 6, 4, 6, 2, 8, 4, 8, 4, 4, 2, 12, 2, 4, 6, 7, 4, 8, 2, 6, 4, 8, 2, 12, 2, 4, 6, 6, 4, 8, 2, 10, 5, 4, 2, 12, 4, 4, 4, 8, 2, 12, 4, 6, 4, 4, 4, 12, 2, 6, 6, 9, 2, 8, 2, 8, 8, 4, 2, 12, 2, 8, 4, 10, 2, 8, 4, 6, 6, 4, 4, 16, 3, 4, 4, 6, 4, 12, 2, 8}

This sequence represents the number of numbers that a number can be divided into. Like the previous sequence, it grows as it expands and includes small numbers frequently. Also like the previous sequence, it has a relation to the prime numbers, but in the opposite way: Instead of the primes appearing as the largest numbers in the sequence, they are among the smallest – always (except for the first number) equalling 2, since prime numbers have only 2 divisors – 1 and themselves.

A046644

From square root of Riemann zeta function: form Dirichlet series Sum b_n/n^s whose square is zeta function; sequence gives denominator of b_n. https://oeis.org/A046644

{1, 2, 2, 8, 2, 4, 2, 16, 8, 4, 2, 16, 2, 4, 4, 128, 2, 16, 2, 16, 4, 4, 2, 32, 8, 4, 16, 16, 2, 8, 2, 256, 4, 4, 4, 64, 2, 4, 4, 32, 2, 8, 2, 16, 16, 4, 2, 256, 8, 16, 4, 16, 2, 32, 4, 32, 4, 4, 2, 32, 2, 4, 16, 1024, 4, 8, 2, 16, 4, 8, 2, 128, 2, 4, 16, 16, 4, 8, 2, 256, 128, 4, 2, 32, 4, 4, 4, 32, 2, 32, 4, 16, 4, 4, 4, 512, 2, 16, 16, 64, 2, 8, 2, 32, 8, 4, 2, 128, 2, 8, 4, 256, 2, 8, 4, 16, 16, 4, 4, 64, 8, 4, 4, 16, 16, 32, 2, 2048}

I must admit that my mathematical knowledge is insufficient to understand what’s going on in this sequence. But it has the properties that I was looking for, with a mix of small and large numbers.

A035182

Coefficients in expansion of Dirichlet series Product_p (1-(Kronecker(m,p)+1)p^(-s) + Kronecker(m,p)p^(-2s))^(-1) for m = -7. https://oeis.org/A035182

{1, 2, 0, 3, 0, 0, 1, 4, 1, 0, 2, 0, 0, 2, 0, 5, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 4, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 3, 2, 0, 0, 6, 0, 0, 0, 3, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 6, 0, 4, 0, 0, 1, 2, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 4, 0, 4, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 7, 0, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 2, 4, 0, 4, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 0, 8, 0, 0, 0, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 4, 2, 0, 2, 0, 0, 5, 2, 0, 0, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 3, 0, 0, 0, 0, 2, 2, 8}

What I liked about this sequence, which is also too complicated for me to grasp, is that it includes zeroes. Dealing with zeroes instead of positive numbers required some re-writing of the code, and then it had the desired effect of leaving gaps where the zeroes are, which made a nice difference to the other sequences.

A003188

Decimal equivalent of Gray code for n. https://oeis.org/A003188

{0, 1, 3, 2, 6, 7, 5, 4, 12, 13, 15, 14, 10, 11, 9, 8, 24, 25, 27,26, 30, 31, 29, 28, 20, 21, 23, 22, 18, 19, 17, 16, 48, 49, 51, 50, 54, 55, 53, 52, 60, 61, 63, 62, 58, 59, 57, 56, 40, 41, 43, 42, 46, 47, 45, 44, 36, 37, 39, 38, 34, 35, 33, 32, 96, 97, 99, 98, 102, 103, 101, 100, 108, 109, 111, 110, 106, 107, 105, 104, 120, 121, 123, 122,126, 127, 125, 124, 116, 117, 119, 118, 114, 115, 113, 112, 80, 81, 83, 82, 86, 87, 85, 84, 92, 93, 95, 94, 90, 91, 89, 88, 72, 73, 75, 74, 78, 79, 77, 76, 68, 69, 71, 70, 66, 67, 65, 64}

The Gray code is a sequence of binary numbers arranged such that from one number to the next only a single digit changes. This sequence represents the numbers in decimal instead of binary. What I liked about this is that it comprises all the same numbers as the simple sequence of ascending integers but in a different order. So although it too tends to infinity, it does so much less obviously. It also makes a fractal pattern when graphed, but that doesn’t translate to being able to hear it as such. It makes small groups of similar numbers with big jumps between them, making sounds that vary in pitch by both small and large amounts.

Hard Return Compilation

The Hard Return label run by Jack Chuter, for which I made its very first release, has put out a big compilation album today. 66 artists responded to Jack’s call to submit “the most repetitive thing you’ve ever done”.

My track repeats the same process used for my solo album, where genome data of the COVID virus is used as the basis for programming drums by converting the data to MIDI files using a program written in Mathematica. This creates a non-repeating pattern, where each bar contains a different composition of drum beats, played alongside a regular bass pulse.

The compilation is pay-what-you-want, and all the money goes to Doctors Without Borders.

2023

The best thing I’ve done this year is take on leadership of my archery club to save it from closure after the previous chairman stepped down when the club was facing increasing costs and dwindling membership. It’s been a steep learning curve and a lot of work, but with the help of other members we’ve improved the course and kept the club going, so it’s been worth it. That’s one reason why I’ve posted so little on this blog of late (another reason is the diabolical block editor in WordPress). This is one of the few successfully completed posts – a round-up of some of the things I enjoyed in 2023.

7FO – ‘ヒ​ー​リ​ン​グ​剣 (Healing Sword)’ (EM Records)

One of my favourite tracks this year, a tip from Derek Walmsley, editor of The Wire magazine. 7FO is pronounced ‘nana-F-O’ (‘nana’ = 7 in Japanese). I didn’t realise until later that it’s pretty much a cover of the Prince Jammy track ‘Synchro Start’ from the album Computerised Dub (1986).

a0n0 – Underground Sea (Tokinogake) / City Lights (Superpang)

a0n0 is the man. Not only a master of noisy computer music, he’s the driving force behind the Tokinogake collective.

Umeko Ando (2017) Iuta Upopo (Pingipung)

I love this gently trotting rhythm of plucked strings and minimal percussion that support the sweet, slow and wavering vibrato of Umeko Ando’s voice.

Autechre – AE_LIVE_2022 (Warp)

On Mastodon, Sean described how the recent live sets, which usually last around an hour, can be seen as parts of a bigger composition that exists more virtually than actually, since it hasn’t been either composed or played as a whole in one go, but can be pieced together by listening out for the common elements spread across different performances.

Derek Bailey and Paul Motian – Duo in Concert (Frozen Reeds)

A magical performance by masters of improvisation. The drums provide a more metric rhythm than comparable Bailey collaborations, such as those with Tony Oxley (RIP), and in response the guitar is more melodic. Like the Roland Kayn box set from Frozen Reeds, this album is mastered by Jim O’Rourke with album art and design by Robert Beatty, and represents another jewel in the crown of the label’s infrequent but always special output.

BECKTON ALPS2 – Fuck Your Nazi Welkin III: Conformity

Angry anti-fascist industrial music.

Emily M Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, & Shmargaret Shmitchell (2021) On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

Article that coined the term ‘stochastic parrot’ for machine learning where a large language model generates seemingly sensible language but without understanding its meaning. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3442188.3445922 There’s a good follow-up commentary by Iris van Rooij – Stop feeding the hype and start resisting.

Theo Burt – Automatics Group Remixes – archive 2012 to 2016 (BUS)

Belated release of remixes of The Automatics Group’s processed versions of big club tracks. Their album Summer Mix (Entr’acte, 2011), based on a process of removing the phase information from the audio, leaving behind just ghostly remnants of rhythm, is one of my all-time favourites. In these remixes, Theo Burt uses processes where the tracks are “divided into quarter-beats and reordered so that each piece is followed by the piece most similar to it from those remaining”, with the result that the familiar tunes are mangled into exquisite corpses.

Kieran Daly

Seriously weird and seriously funny, Keiran Daly’s YouTube channel is worth following. https://www.youtube.com/@powerbob38

Dead Hand – Radio Hour

Streaming on Tuesdays 22:00–23:00 UTC, this show plays music alongside live sounds from a VLF radio antenna which picks up electrical storms and other atmospheric conditions.

Droid – interview with Autechre

Maybe the best ever interview with Autechre. https://nialler9.com/autechre-conversation-about-music-art-funk-and-emotion-interview/

Everyday Samething

I’m on the mailing list for this label that releases albums in such limited and inaccessible ways that it’s difficult to know whether the whole enterprise is actually an elaborate piece of performance art. Some are released on cassette, others are download only, or promo only. The latest album, Birdbath I by Birdbath, is released as a video on YouTube and a limited edition of 4 business cards priced at £100 each which have a QR code that links to the same video. A friend spotted some tapes for sale at a merch stall at the Cafe OTO summer fair, but there’s no Bandcamp presence. They do have an Instagram account and a Substack though.

Ed Hawkins – Climate Indicators

https://ed-hawkins.github.io/climate-visuals/indicators.html

Catherine Christer Hennix – Solo for Tamburium (Blank Forms Editions)

Music to get lost in. A glittering slowly-evolving composition for a custom-built instrument that plays precision-tuned recordings of a tambura. RIP.

Nathan Ho – Haywire Frontier (Tokinogake)

Punchy debut album by Nathan Ho, who also writes an insightful and informative blog on music technology and technique, including computer music synthesis, algorithmic composition and audio effects. His in-depth exploration of wavelet synthesis is a good example of his stated aim of “bridging the worlds of music tech journalism with in-depth academic papers to create resources for technically proficient musicians”. https://nathan.ho.name/

Daniel M Karlsson – Ephemeral Broadcast

Some of the best sounds I’ve heard this year have come from Daniel M Karlsson’s ephemeral broadcasts – spontaneously scheduled live-coding streams that (as the name implies) are deleted shortly after. The video above shows a similar process, but simpler and shorter. https://www.youtube.com/@danielmkarlsson6823

Mary Jane Leach – Woodwind Multiples (Modern Love)

Four compositions for multiples of the same woodwind instruments – flute, oboe, clarinet and bassoon – combining taped recordings played back simultaneously with live performances. https://boomkat.com/products/woodwind-multiples

Ursula K. Le Guin

Shamefully, until this year I hadn’t read any novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, just some interviews and essays (e.g. The Carrier-Bag Theory of Fiction). I read The Word for World is Forest (1972) and The Dispossessed (1974) and loved them both. Le Guin’s writing is a joy to read – clear and economical, precise yet poetic, neither hurried nor drawn-out, and says as much between each line as within them.

LOLTRAX

New and interesting label that’s put out just one compilation album so far, including 100PA (Parsa and Ramtin Niazi), Kindohm and Pantea, among other artists new to me.

Tom Mudd – Guitar Cultures (fancyyyyy)

Absolutely love this latest work by Tom based on extensions of his research into physical modelling synthesis. Whereas Brass Cultures (2019) pushed the sounds to physically impossible parameters, these compositions based on plucked strings are less obviously synthetic, exploring more subtle possibilities of expressive performance afforded by an algorithmic approach, as heard in the improvisational practices of human players like Derek Bailey, Hans Reichel and Fred Frith.

Ahl Nana – L’Orchestre National Mauritanien (Radio Martiko)

Joyous recording from the Boussiphone studios in Casablanca in 1971 of a band that paved the way towards the Saharan ‘desert rock’ popularised by Ali Farka Touré and Tuareg musicians such as Tinariwen, Bombino and Group Doueh. This release from the label Radio Martiko has perhaps mixed up the band name with the album title, where ‘Ahl Nana’ translates to ‘[The] Nana Family’, because the original albums from which these tracks are taken have it the other way round: Ahl Nana by Mohamed Ould Nana avec L’Orchestre National Mauritanien.

Paradox – Breakbeater / Detronic (Sneaker Society)

This single and last year’s Streetbeat / Drum Throne have had a lot of plays in this house.

Ben Peers – Doubled (Tokinogake)

Classy computer music from a relatively new kid on the block, part of Tokinogake’s extended family.

Pentangle – Live on Belgian TV, 1972

My dad took me to a Pentangle gig at Mansfield in the 80s, which was probably just after Terry Cox, Danny Thompson and John Renbourn had left the band. In this video the full line-up are present and are on top form. I particularly like this version of ‘Willy O’Winsbury’ with Bert Jansch on Appalachian dulcimer and without the recorder that’s on the album version.

Éliane Radigue – 11 Dec 1980 (imprec)

We are lucky that Éliane Radigue is still as active as ever, making works like Occam Ocean that are as good as any other piece from the previous 70 years of her musical practice. This album isn’t a new composition, but presents performances of Chry-ptus and Triptych broadcast live in 1980, now remastered.

Lucy Railton – Corner Dancer (Modern Love)

Not just cello but a wide range of sound sources, creating a much more abstract and darker tone than 2018’s Paradise 94’ on the same label. https://boomkat.com/products/corner-dancer

Pomu Rainpuff

After buying Metal Gear Solid V in a Playstation sale last winter, I watched some playthrough videos, including one by Limmy, which is great of course, and then came across one by the vtuber Pomu Rainpuff who had been playing through all the Metal Gear games in story order (see the full playlist here). Pomu is part of the English language speaking group of virtual YouTubers from the Japanese NIJISANJI agency which specialises in 2D animated avatars that track facial expressions. The video above is not from the Metal Gear series, but it demonstrates part of what makes Pomu special (for context: it describes Pomu’s visit to a maid cafe in Japan with two other vtubers, Enna and IPN).

Dan McQuillan – We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it. (danmcquillan.org)

A critique of AI by the author of the 2022 book Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Another more recent article is equally good and succinct: AI as Algorithmic Thatcherism.

Ripple et al. (2023) The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory.

My 2017 end-of-year list started with an image similar to the one above, by the same author. That was from the second World Scientists Warning of a Climate Emergency, signed by 15,000 scientists. This is the 5th. https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/advance-article/doi/10.1093/biosci/biad080/731957

SDEM – Vortices (Skam Records)

SDEM has already had some involvement with Skam through their occasional AMKS.LIVE streams, but this is his first album on the label. Massive range of textures and tones, with twists and turns from noise to ambient through all kinds of unstable broken beats, and a deep groove underlying it all. It feels like SDEM should be supporting an Autechre gig next. https://bleep.com/release/389088-sdem-vortices

Jah Shaka

RIP

Terrine – Standing Abs (bruit direct disques)

I heard about this album through the interview with Claire Gapenne a.k.a. Terrine by Sasha Frere-Jones. It’s an album of musique concrète that starts with a shout and the kickstart of a two-stroke engine that’s repeated and mutated to form a rhythmic base for subsequent layers of machinic scraping noises recorded in an abandoned yoghurt factory.

Tokinogake

The Tokinogake label has put out loads of good albums this year. Some are already mentioned above. Others include the smooth techno of SILO by tameike, the double album of computer music contortions by Özcan Saraç – 0​:​1 and Inevitable Equalization, the gritty and tense drones of I by Hugo Lioret, and the psychedelic mathematical patterns of Binary Controlled Sequencer by mashiroa. But my favourite, because they represent the diversity and individuality of the members as well as its shared community of interests, are the compilations Time Series Processing 1 and 2. Much of Tokinogake’s activity has stemmed from the collective of musicians and associated labels that it has brought together on a Discord server. Being involved in this group has been one of the most rewarding things for me personally, both creatively and socially. Tokinogake established this online community from the remnants of the $pwgen Slack group that had originally formed around users of Marcin Pietruszewski’s Nu Pulsar Generator software and which subsequently involved farmersmanual, General Magic and Tina Frank in the production of the compilation album Get This: 32 Tracks For Free – A Tribute to Peter Rehberg. The Tokinogake collective extends these relationships and includes links with fellow labels Superpang, falsch, Xkatedral, sm-ll, 3OP, Hard Return, Memory Glands, and Traced Objects. In addition to releasing albums, it commissions and publishes mixes, produces films (example below), and conducts online interviews with some of the label’s musicians where anyone can ask questions in an open process that unfolds over days or weeks, building a rich insight into different but related creative practices. The server has custom emojis for EVOL, Mark Fell (wearing flat cap with rolled-up umbrella over shoulder), Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman with googly eyes, and Richard Scarry’s Lowly Worm driving the apple car.

Catherynne M. Valente – Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

An essay written at the end of 2022 that articulates some of the frustrations and grief of experiencing the deterioration of social media and other internet services that sustained community and creativity. It describes the degradation of platform services that happens as companies switch their priorities from users to advertisers, a phenomenon for which Cory Doctorow coined the term ‘enshittification‘. https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

Michael L. Wong and Stuart Bartlett (2022) Asymptotic burnout and homeostatic awakening: a possible solution to the Fermi paradox?

This article hypothesizes that the complexification of civilization risks reaching a point of ‘asymptotic burnout’ where the limits to growth are exceeded. It builds on a previous study by Bettencourt et al. (2007), ‘Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities‘, that analyses various properties of cities – such as housing, wealth, energy consumption and infrastructure – and shows that they vary in how they scale with population:

• energy use and housing capacity scale linearly in proportion with the population;
• the total length of roads and electrical cables scales sub-linearly, meaning that economies of scale are achieved as cities grow and populations increase;
• in contrast, income, GDP, the number of new patents, disease and crime rates all increase super-linearly.

This explains why larger cities have greater rates of productivity and why the pace of life is faster. But if the conditions remain unchanged it also implies unchecked growth, which is unsustainable. To avoid a crisis and subsequent collapse, “major qualitative changes must occur which effectively reset the initial conditions”. Bettencourt et al. show that to sustain growth requires increasingly frequent resets, and that this theory corresponds with observed technological changes in growing populations. Building on that idea, Wong & Bartlett argue that an ultimate crisis – ‘asymptotic burnout’ – can occur where the time between resets becomes smaller than the time scale of innovation able to achieve a reset. The article concludes that all civilizations eventually achieve either burnout or homeostasis, which is why we haven’t yet found evidence of extraterrestrial life when the Fermi paradox suggests we should, and quotes Karl Schroeder’s re-formulation of Arthur C Clarke’s 3rd law: “Any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from Nature”. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2022.0029

Wooli Bodin – YAPTC Decode Mix

A great mix by Chris Douglas (Amhain / Scald Rougish / Dalglish / etc.) made for an Icasea podcast 10 years ago. Unearthed and shared by Tom Knapp (SDEM), uploaded to the Internet Archive by Peter Seligman (Trash Panda QC). https://archive.org/details/yaptc-decode

Shedding – This Is My Horn, Vol. 1

Shedding – Connor Bell, from Louisville, Kentucky – has a new album out based on a gestural and improvisational approach to electronic music synthesis.

The idea being a search to perhaps bridge my love for solo and duo jazz recordings and the relationship my heroes have with their instruments with my love for the synthesizer.

https://post.lurk.org/@sellanraa/111536727900512617

Connor asked me to make the album artwork. After trying and rejecting some hand-drawn images that didn’t suit the music particularly well, I listened to the music again, and the synthetic horn sound seemed to suggest a sinewy kind of line in an acid yellow colour:

Connor agreed that this was the right direction: “the yellow is almost like a horn in a weird way – like digital future-horns”. He liked the acid yellow but wanted it to ‘pop’ a bit more than it does against white, so a grey background seemed to work better, especially when combined with a coloured outline separating the yellow and the grey. As a complementary colour to yellow, a purple outline worked quite well:

The image is based on the cellular automaton pattern that I use a lot, block CA rule 39. After generating a square image in black and white, where the number of generations (rows) equals the number of cells (columns) in pixels, I used the paint bucket tool to fill a single line (click on the image to view full size and see the detail clearly):

But Connor wanted the background grey to have more texture. So I used the same approach of making lines by using the paint bucket tool, extending the original single line and following it around the image. These CA patterns tessellate and they wrap around both top-to-bottom and left-to-right, which means that if a line disappears off the bottom of the image, it can be followed from the same point at the top of the image and the line continued. Eventually, after wrapping around the image multiple times, it meets the original line. If you then remove all the black pixels from the image, it looks something like this:

By filling these outlines with the same acid yellow + purple for the central shape, and using shades of grey in the background, the final artwork looks like this:

And here’s a close-up to show some of the detail:

At some point, I’ll post a fuller description of the properties of these CA patterns – how they tessellate, how the lines vary as they wrap around, and how I make use of these properties to create artwork like this. I’ve been working on a draft post for ages but haven’t managed to finish it off yet. But hopefully this provides some insight into the process.

This Is My Horn, Vol. 1 is available for free on Connor’s site, and also on Bandcamp:

2022

Illustration by Edward Gorey.

If the amount of time, attention and money spent on the death of a monarch had instead been focused on inequality and sustainability, we might not be in quite as much trouble with national economic and global environmental crises. It’s too late to achieve the climate target of staying below a 1.5–2.0°C increase in global average temperature. Tipping points are already beginning to happen, and they interact, so others could be brought about quite suddenly. Some of these will accelerate or intensify the impact on greenhouse gases, biodiversity, ice loss, sea level rise, floods, drought, loss of habitat, crop failure and famine. The morbid negativity of these facts doesn’t mean there’s nothing we can do; on the contrary, the need for a reshaping of society and economy is ever more urgent. The counterpoint to this worrying stuff is recent research showing that rapid transition to sustainability is possible technologically and economically: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(22)00410-X

This year I turned 50 and quit smoking. I moved from Twitter to Mastodon. I’d set up my Mastodon account a couple of years ago but hadn’t really engaged with it. After moving from one of the larger servers (mastodon.social) to a smaller and more specialist one (post.lurk.org), I now feel like I’ve found a good home and a welcoming community. My Twitter experience had been almost entirely positive, so I was reluctant to move. Quite a few of the albums listed below are things I first discovered thanks to Twitter friends.

…………………..

A LARGE SHEET OF MUSCLE – THE POLICE ARE SATELLITES (Bandcamp)
Relatively sparse compositions that together feel like a soundtrack to a disturbing film. It reminds me of Gruppo Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza or the solo work of some of its members – Ennio Morricone and Roland Kayn. Unlike the raw phone-recorded monologues and field recordings of some previous albums by Lou Johnstone (WANDA GROUP), this is closer to music concrete made with recorded and synthesized sound, carefully shaped and arranged. It’s comparable to Jim O’Rourke’s Steamroom compositions.

Laurie Anderson – Mister Heartbreak (1984)
A new-to-me thing via Twitter, where Marc Masters and Seán Clancy both said that their kids loved the song Sharkey’s Day. I do too.

ANMA – Envlps (Syncopathic)

Yara Asmar – Home Recordings 2018 – 2021 (Hive Mind Records)
My favourite is track 2, called ‘sleeping in church – tape 1 – on a warm day i turned to tell you something but there was nothing there’.

Autechre – ‘Ask Me Anything’ stream (Twitch).
We got loads of insights into Autechre’s approach from these streams. Like how they developed their current software-based setup (“the rig”), how their versions of it differ (mainly in terms of display and control: one is minimalist; the other is always adding extra bits), and how it works when performing live. I transcribed the answer to a question about Autechre’s use of reverb: https://aestheticcomplexity.wordpress.com/2022/06/06/sean-on-autechres-reverb/ The mix CD that @hellospiral asked about in the first stream got released a few weeks later, before the second stream. Someone in the chat who was involved in the production of Grace Jones’ latest album asked if Autechre would be interested in remixing one of her tracks, and Sean was well up for it, which would be cool. The two streams are up on YouTube here and here. A final treat, on 30th December, was the live-streamed mix of music contextual to the 1992 Warp compilation Artificial Intelligence. The mix is available to listen to here: https://autechre.mixlr.com/recordings/1977679 And here’s a track list, including a link to download the mix as MP3: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fy1mZkeMTI1CvLWmPy7NOAwFkFu-a6FHrx2EMgt4_3w/edit#gid=0

Burial – ANTIDAWN EP (Hyperdub). Nice cover artwork by Maya Hewitt. This EP is almost entirely without beats or basslines. It’s 99% atmos and ambience made of the usual Burial material: vinyl crackle, re-pitched vocals, and soft plaintive chords, all smothered in foggy reverb. It sounded fresh in January, but the subsequent and similar Streetlands EP released in October already feels like a tired formula. I’d like to hear the opposite kind of thing, with a focus on the beats, because Burial does that complex skittering stuff better than anyone since Photek.

Freur – Doot-Doot (1983). Another discovery via Twitter, mentioned by Andrew Male in response to Dale Cornish, if I remember correctly. Overblown 80s vocals that actually work well in the context of glossy, slightly edgy synth-pop. The singer, Karl Hyde, and one other member, Rick Smith, later went on to form Underworld, a name they took from a film they did the soundtrack for. ‘Doot-Doot’ is the name of both the song that was their biggest single and the album it’s on. It’s the kind of track you could imagine being a resurgent hit if it featured in Stranger Things.

Dub
While trying to cope with the intense heatwave that we suffered in July, when irritability increases in proportion to the temperature, and when music that’s otherwise usually enjoyable begins to grate, dub music was my go-to. I’ve been working my way through Snoopy’s list of the top 125 dub albums. Only two of them were already in my collection (#20 Skin, Flesh & Bones – Dub In Blood, and #29 The Upsetters – Super Ape). I enjoyed the series The Strangeness of Dub by Edward George on Morley Radio, an educational journey into dub culture through social history and critical theory. https://morleyradio.co.uk/series/the-strangeness-of-dub/ And I’ve been tuning in to On the Wire, the long-running dub and reggae show on Radio Lancashire by Steve Barker, who put together a list of dub & reggae specials here: https://otwradioarchive.blogspot.com/p/reggaedub-and-other-specials.html

Mark Fell – Structure and Synthesis: The Anatomy of Practice (Urbanomic)
This book is an anthology of Fell’s thoughts on music and music practice. Edited by Robin Mackay, it collects together and expands upon essays and other bits of writing that have been published in various places, like the Collateral Damage article for The Wire that analysed DJ Pierre’s use of the TB-303 in making Acid Tracks by Phuture. The book includes a glossary of terms that defines his neologisms, including Ambient Togetherness, Awful-atarian, Bell-endism, and Shitegeist. ‘Just turning knobs (JTK)’ is another of the stand-out entries in the glossary, derived from the aforementioned article on Phuture: “Pierre explains how he couldn’t figure out how to work the 303 – it didn’t come with a manual – so he just started to turn the knobs.” The book is designed by Joe Gilmore, who reveals that: “the typesetting and layout are structured with a very tight set of rules which were designed to give the book a focused, cohesive aesthetic and visual rhythm”.

Rhiannon Firth – Disaster Anarchy: Mutual Aid and Radical Action (Pluto Press)
A book about how people support each other in times of crisis. It relates to a Guardian article by Nesrine Malik, which notes that the UK economy is looking more like an emerging market (what used to be called a ‘developing country’) than the developed market it supposedly is:

Lockdowns and a lack of in-person contact during the pandemic smothered anger and civil action. These are the forces this crushing cost of living crisis is now unleashing. Another feature of some of the economies of emerging markets, in addition to trade volatility and high inflation, is a realisation on the part of an exploited workforce and stretched citizenry that the government will not deliver. One outcome of that is the emergence of an informal parallel system of support, one in which people share resources and donate their time to help each other out.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/22/england-citizens-ungoverned-unstable-strikes-civil-disobedience

Robert Fripp / The League Of Gentlemen – The League Of Gentlemen / God Save The King (1981)
God Save The King is a compilation of remixed tracks from The League Of Gentlemen and contemporary singles. As such, it’s less structured and conceptual in comparison with the original album, but it’s cleaner and punchier. Robert Fripp posted a few videos throughout the year, and on this one he plays the repetitive rhythm part from the track ‘God Save The King’.

Machine – Machine (1972)
Re-released by WeWantSounds this year. Another good one from the same label is Mawood (1971) by Abdel Halim Hafez.

Minced Oath – Superstrate / Smoke and Scissors
Superstrate was released at the end of last year, while Smoke and Scissors came out in October. Minced Oath is Dunk Murphy, AKA Sunken Foal, who also runs the label Countersunk.

Anthony Moore – CSound & Saz (Touch)
Whenever I’ve played this to friends who aren’t particularly into drone music, they’ve been surprisingly impressed by this music and have commented to say how much they like it. I like it a lot too.

Nik Colk Void – Bucked Up Space (Edition Mego)

NOXIN – Dream Sequence (EVEL RECORDS)
Glitchy gongs, pitched percussion and dubby delayed horns surrounded by digital clicks and cuts of high frequency noise and booming resonant bass tones. Made with Max MSP. Great stuff.

Julian Oliver – Knotworks
Accessible and informative video guides to tying knots. https://julianoliver.com/knotworks/

Gascia Ouzounian & others – Female & Gender Non-Conforming Sound Studies List
Originating from a tweet by @gasciaouzounian, the crowdsourced list was uploaded online by @lutlopl: https://ethercalc.net/rwwkg3scy4sa

Gavilán Rayna Russom – Trans Feminist Symphonic Music (Longform Editions)
This is a beautiful piece of music. An extended synth performance in four movements, based on difference tones – artificial tones that are subjectively perceived when two tones are played at the same time.

Samplebrain
Designed by Aphex Twin and built by Dave Griffiths, this is a free app for mashing up audio samples. It works by chopping up audio into pieces and matching these pieces by similarity to a target sound. https://gitlab.com/then-try-this/samplebrain

Source Direct – Snake Style 2 (Source Direct Recordings / Tempo Records)
A belated proper release for a mid-90s tune. Dark and menacing, like the best of their stuff, it goes hard. https://boomkat.com/products/snake-style-2

Thinking Plague – Moonsongs (Endemic Music, 1984).
I first heard this band thanks to Helena Celle tweeting the track ‘Warheads’. I feel like I should have heard them before, because they sound like they might have influenced a few different bands, like Battles, The Mars Volta, and Mr Bungle. There’s a long interview with the band from last year, with details about the recording of Moonsongs here: https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2021/03/thinking-plague-interview.html

Jim O’Rourke – NTS Radio
https://www.nts.live/shows/jim-o-rourke

UAN0014 – UAN0014 (UAN)
Masterful minimalism from the absolutely anonymous label.

Iannis Xenakis – .Electroacoustic Works (Karlrecords)
Many of these compositions I first heard and got to know as MP3 rips of scratchy vinyl albums, so listening to these remastered versions is getting to know them all over again. The added depth and clarity give these well-known compositions a new lease of life.

Tom Zé – Estudando o Samba (1976).
A final discovery thanks to Twitter friends – this one from Jen / @JSpacewoman.

A Year in the Woods

I’ve been down the archery range in Annesley Forest almost every weekend this year. Here’s one photo from each month of 2022.

Slime Mould

While practicing archery in the woods this year, I’ve spotted some funny-looking fungus-type things that I’ve since learned are slime moulds. I was aware of slime mould as a weird life form already, having read research into using them for solving mazes and analogue computing applications, but hadn’t seen any in real life until recently. In June I shared a photo on Twitter of a “weird orange fungus” that had caught my eye in the woods (it was almost glowing orange – the picture doesn’t capture its intensity). Replying to that tweet, C. Reider identified it as Wolf’s Milk slime mould (Lycogala epidendrum).

That same weekend, I also saw this thing, which I later identified as Fuligo septica, also known as Scrambled Egg or Dog’s Vomit slime mould. Like other species, it has a resistance to high levels of metals, but this one is unique in its resistance to zinc – a property related to its yellow pigment. In this photo you can see the trail of slime that evidences its movement.

On the tree of life, slime moulds are classified as Protists, which means they are neither animal, plant or fungi. There are three types of slime mould: plasmodial, cellular, and amoeboid.

Plasmodial slime moulds are the most likely to be seen. These include Physarum polycephalum (the yellow one that solves mazes) and Fuligo septica (pictured above). They begin life as individual cells that join to form a plasmodium – a single-celled but multi-nuclear blob. The photo below shows Fuligo septica at an earlier stage in its life-cycle, when the plasmodium has transformed to a spongy aethalium, but before it releases spores, when it hardens and darkens.

Cellular slime moulds spend most of their life as a single-celled organism, like amoeba. But if food gets scarce, they emit chemicals that allow them to find each other and they join together into a multi-celled organism that can sense and move towards food. Individuals also converge in order to reproduce, in which case the cells differentiate in function, forming stems with fruiting bodies that release spores, like mushrooms.

Amoeboid slime moulds share some characteristics with both the plasmodial and cellular groups and are more difficult to classify.

The Forestry Commission, which manages these woods, have marked up some trees with fluorescent spray paint, and it’s easy to mistake a slime mould for a patch of paint among the pine needles on the forest floor. For example, here’s a Physarum polycephalus, which I spotted for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Closer inspection reveals the veiny network of the plasmodium.

This bright orange slime mould is Leocarpus fragilis. Up close, you can see that it’s made of lots of small blobs, each attached with a thread. These are the fruiting bodies on stalks that will release spores.

Last weekend, I found two white slime moulds. The first looks like small blobs made of individual fruiting bodies, like white caviar. I haven’t yet been able to identify this species.

The other one is probably Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa. At a glance, from head height, it just looks like some normal white mould on a rotting log. But looking closer you can see that it’s made of small translucent star-shaped fruiting bodies, a bit like fingers made of jelly.

[Addendum, 18/09/2022] This weekend going round the archery course, there weren’t as many slime moulds or fungi because it’s been drier recently. But I saw the same patch of Physarum polycephalus slime mould that has now turned from yellow plasmodium to black fruiting bodies (the ‘many heads’ referred to in the name polycephalus):

Sean on Autechre’s Reverb

Yesterday, Sean Booth of Autechre did an ‘ask me anything’ stream on Twitch.tv. I watched the last half live, and today I caught up with some of the bits I’d missed at the start. I was pleased to find that he’d answered a question about Autechre’s use of reverb. Here’s my transcription of that section (in the first video, from 00:38:50 to 00:43:58 https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1495243649).

[Chat 20:49]
travx259r: your use of reverb has always been inspiring. any comment on your approach designing reverb in songs?

[Video 00:38:50]
Sean: Yeah, I mean, I sort of… A lot of my reverb… Oh wow! Look at this bug. Oh, it’s flown off. Yeah a lot of my reverb is tuned. I love eighties reverb. You could always hear a good producer in the eighties cos he would not just arbitrarily shove the reverb on something, it’d be somehow in tune with the other elements in the track. You get it more in hip hop than anywhere else. You get it where somebody’s laid the beat down and the reverb’s in the mix already but then the MC’s come in, and the MC’s got the reverb in his cans and somehow it’s informing the pitch of what he’s doing. He’s sort of in tune with the whole tuning of the track, and I dunno how much people are aware of when they do this stuff but I just think that they’d do it anyway, they’d do it naturally, right, so they just find the tuning. It’s a bit like if you write a beat on a 606 and then you go to write a 202 pattern over it, you’re gonna write something that’s in tune with the snares and the hats. For it to sound good, you don’t just arbitrarily… Cos I’ve never done that, I’ve never thought “Oh, these are rhythm elements and their pitch is unimportant, and these are the song-writing…” You know, I can’t think like that at all. To me, the whole thing is music. And I think good producers – this is what makes good techno producers – a lot of the time is they’ve just got a knack for picking up that natural tuning. And it’s the same way you might pick up the natural… the types of rhythm that work at different tempos, for example. You know what I mean? And you’ll have the types of tunings that work with certain drum machines, if they’re not the sort of drum machine that you can tune. I mean, you can tune a 606 I guess, if you get the back off, but a lot of people don’t.

I think with reverb, the sort of eighties reverbs a lot of the time they had a very definite tuning. They had a sound that some people described as metallic and inharmonic, but you always got a sense that there was some sort of key coming off it, sort of a HHHEEE [breath sound] or a HHHUUU, you know, different notes. And so, um, I quite often use very simple reverb topology, but, like, I have a hand in influencing the tuning of it, so, depending on what the chords and the melody are doing, the reverb’s tuning will be different and it’ll change over time. That’s the key thing, I think, if you want to get that [American accent:] ‘Autechre reverb sound’. Again, I’m not telling you how to do it that way, that’s just what I like, I just like those shitty reverbs from the eighties, the MIDIVerb and the Quadraverb. The topologies are seriously fucking useful and very very low on your CPU and give you “THAT” sound, if it’s that sound you’re after. In my case it’s just experience of having had those machines for years and just loving ’em because I’ve had them for years, you know what I mean? I’ve just grown to love them the way that you love your dog or something, so, you know, it’s like that. And I’m not saying they’re the best type of reverbs. They’re definitely not. You know, there are some modern convolution reverb that are just beautiful. That thing Zynaptiq did, whatever it’s called, that’s a seriously gorgeous sounding thing. But it is what it is, right? It does what it does.

Quite often I’ll use other techniques that aren’t reverb at all, so I’ll have, like, lots and lots of delay lines and all-passes but not set up in a normal reverb topology, and just explore different topologies because there’s just so many ways you can connect all-passes and delays and combs that you can make anything, almost any of those combinations of those things is going to be a bit reverb-like. But you might find that it might make more interesting tones or sounds than you would get from a reverb that’s designed to be an all-purpose reverb, if you know what I mean. Quite often the smaller, shitter topologies can sound more interesting. There are no rules with reverb. When you start researching different types of reverb design over the years you realise that there are no hard and fast rules. Everybody’s just doing different shit. And some of the more effective topologies aren’t necessarily the most complex. You know, getting complex results doesn’t rely on building a complex machine. This is a really important thing to note. Sometimes the most simple machines can give the most complex results and the most pleasing results. You might not even be after complexity. It’s something I like, but not everyone does. Just experiment, basically. But that’s just general advice. I’d say always experiment.

Blood Music Birthday

Last night was the Blood Music Birthday event at Iklectik, London. This was a gig to celebrate Simon Pomery’s recent birthday. The line-up was:

• UAN – minimal, morphing repetitive beats
• En Creux – no-input mixing
• me – video + audio piece
• S McEvoy – piece based on tinnitus sounds
• Blood Music – ‘For the Vagus Nerve’, spoken word, processed guitar
• Roberto Crippa – synth-based rhythmic textures
• Tom Mudd – physical modelling synthesis
• Blood Music with Roberto Crippa – improvised drums and synth

Travelling down to London was a bit of an ordeal because of the storm and high winds which meant trains were cancelled. Luckily I got a lift from Tom and Maude who were travelling down from Edinburgh. It was lovely to finally meet face-to-face with everyone and to hear them play live. Iklectik is a nice venue – the sound system was good, the staff were helpful, and there was also a resident cat. Everyone played well and sounded great.

I showed an animation I made with the Fractal Flames algorithm – an old piece with a new soundtrack based on analysis of the video frames. Using Mathematica, I analysed the frames in terms of file size, number of colours, and number of black pixels. I also created derivatives of these datasets, e.g. measures of permutation entropy and the difference between consecutive numbers. Then these datasets were converted to MIDI files and played with Razor VSTi synth. The result is an experiment in synchresis, trying out the extent to which the visuals and the audio inter-relate when there is an arbitrary but formal correspondence between the two and when what we see affects what we hear, and vice versa.

UAN

En Creux

Guy Birkin

Blood Music – ‘For the Vagus Nerve’

Roberto Crippa

Tom Mudd

Roberto Crippa + Blood Music

Tom Mudd, Maude, S McEvoy

Get This: 32 Tracks For Free – A Tribute to Peter Rehberg

The loss of Peter Rehberg prompted the $ pwgen 20 collective to express their grief by making music in his honour. This activity snowballed into a larger collaborative project as more and more artists expressed a desire to contribute. The result is a collection of 32 tracks by friends and fans of Peter including many whose music has been released via [Editions] Mego. The album was released on 22/01/2022, which marked 6 months since we lost Peter. The album is free/name-your-price, but any proceeds are going directly to Editions Mego to cover expenses.

Design by Tina Frank.
Mastered by Russell Haswell.
Promo video by Takashi Aoki.

In addition to designing the album artwork, Tina Frank’s contribution is a video, pliii:

$ pwgen 20 is a collective established by Ian M Fraser and Victor Moragues. The group initially coalesced around the project of making music with pulsar synthesis using Marcin Pietrusewski’s NuPG software. This led to the release of 3 compilation albums: Pulsar.scramble followed by Pulsar.scramble volumes 2 and 3. The Tokinogake collective also contributed to the tribute to Peter Rehberg by making a promo video, and many others contributed, especially C Lavender.