A collection of recordings made by my newest Max/MSP patch Sinewives, combined and mutated by my other patch, the Free Arcadia Transmitter.
The world is burning, but we are aware of the emptiness inherent in all things. This too, shall pass.
May all beings find and achieve happiness.
I first heard Éliane Radigue’s work sometime shortly after I started my own journey into Tibetan Buddhism. I stumbled upon a reference to her “Songs of Milarepa” and suddenly was captivated by her music. Shortly after, I found a cassette copy of Jetsun Mila that doubled that captivation. It is a sublime, slowly moving piece, and was everything I loved about Coil’s Time Machines but seemingly tilted specifically in my direction.
I started slowly accumulating a few of her recordings, each more compelling to me than the last. She has become an enormous influence on my music, which I think is obvious to hear when you listen to my more drone-oriented work.
Yesterday, when I found out she had passed, I was actually listening to Sinewives (my newest Max 9 project) very slowly feeding me with FM tones, and her influence on me was thrown into stark relief. In her memory, I post this episode of Radio Free Arcadia, which is made largely from recordings of the output of Sinewives using the Free Arcadia Broadcaster device. Upon listening back I think it’s appropriate, if not coming close to her brilliance.
In horror of death, I took to the mountains—
Again and again I meditated on the uncertainty of the hour of death,
Capturing the fortress of the deathless unending nature of mind,
Now all fear of death is over and done.-Milarepa
May all beings be happy!
After what must be more than two decades of attempting to properly learn Max/MSP, this holiday season I took some time out and made one more attempt. I’m very pleased to say that this time it appears to have clicked for me, and I’ve actually got a proper device I’ve been thinking about for some time.
I’ll go into details about the device as it continues to take shape, but it is beginning to fulfill my desires to have a machine that crawls my library of bits and pieces and re-contrextualizes and re-assembles them, creating a shifting stream of sound that can be guided or left to its own to continue churning out music on its own. A Radio Free Arcadia broadcaster and DJ, if you will.
This first example was assembled from a few different sessions with the machine, including:
This device will continue to evolve, and I hope to start broadcasting live with it in the very near future.
Don’t forget to check out the first release on the new Offnominal imprint – Treces by Mail Order Mystics, who are myself and my very good friend and collaborator Ryan Dempsey. I suspect the next episode will involve the broadcaster being fed with that album.
The year ends with a final episode of collected explorations. We will draw a close on this ‘Season’ of the podcast and with for you all to have as good of a closing of 2025 as possible, and a hope that 2026 sees some rays of light through the gloom.
My sincerest thanks to all of you who have listened.
On Tuesday I will be releasing the new Logickal album, entitled Theories of the Heavens. It is a colletion of ambient drone works of a darker variety, and should be thought of as a series of meditations upon vast distances that arise between us – whether physical, psychic, temporal or magickal.
This episode is comprised of reconfigurations and reprocesses of the tracks from the album, but keeping with the spirit of the originals. I hope you enjoy these, and please do check out the release at https://logickal.bandcamp.com.
Back from a holiday in the United Kingdom – 9 days away from music making, which might be the longest I have abstained from any kind of creation in a decade, at least. While I had a wonderful time, I definitely had the need to get back to work once I returned.
This episode is made of bits from three different rehearsal takes, all bent and modified in some way of their own. I’ve been on the fence about retaining the Polyend Synth, but it does hold its own as another option for my Ambient sets. It’s still not quite earned a place in the more rhythmic material yet, but it’s right at home helping do these kinds of things.
Subscribers to my Patreon should be seeing an alternate combination of these three recordings coming to them in the coming days – hopefully before I leave the country again for a work trip to that city of music, Vienna.
Includes:
oct3-stepaside-3x // oct3-stepaway-3x // oct3-stepdown
Slightly late due to illness and Internet issues, here is a live improvisation made using the hardware rig of Elektron Octatrack, Syntakt and Digitone, sequenced by the Torso T-1. It’s been a bit since I’ve had my rig set up, but an upcoming show made me work through some of a late summer cold to get things up and running.
This is definitely a longer, slower burn of a piece, and a bit of a change of pace to some of my usual sequencing – I have the T-1 tracks focused on a single note of a single sound on the Digitone, each with a different sequence length, leading to our favorite asynchronous looping patterns. The Syntakt is supplying analog drones and some arpeggios via the SY Chip machine.
All of this leads into the Octatrack, where I start sampling, looping and stretching the patterns and let things evolve as they go. It’s not perfect, but it leads to some blissed-out moments. Overall, it was a good practice session, I think.
Recently I was going through some recent generations looking for tracks to polish to send off to a compilation, and found a series of drones where I was experimenting with alternate tonalities and microtuning. “These will suit my needs nicely!” thought I, but then the inevitable tinkering occurred, starting with a series of overdubbed parts. Experiments in the time domain followed, along with additional experiments with triggered envelopes, band-specific effects, and of course additional overdubs.
The final (?) phase of these tracks are now presented here as a mix for the latest episode of the podcast. I’ll be sharing some of the other bits from this on Patreon in the coming days as well.
A collection of explorations using Alexandernaut’s excellent Fugue Machine Rubato device. Also, feel free to check out my recent hands-on walkthrough of the device on YouTube!
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