Back To Back
/Ok yeah, much easier to write entries when I don’t constrain this to being a dev log. Who knew?
Funny, my first release in years is scheduled for this Friday but I moved on from it weeks ago. I guess this is why I insist on referring to it as a mixtape. It’s freeing to lean into the ephemeral nature of my workflow and treat the recordings as a snapshot of how I was working at a particular point in time as opposed to some grandiose artistic statement. I don’t have “songs”, so the whole idea of a SERIES proper album doesn’t make a ton of sense. Not to mention my general contempt for the music industry overall, ugh. Without the self induced stress/urgency that comes with a formal release like that, there’s no pressing need to chase anything. I can simply make the music, release it and notify followers.
You might be wondering what’s coming next? Well, tracking has already been completed for SERIES #2, I hope to complete mixing in the next couple of weeks. In parallel, I’m working material for SERIES #3, some of which is starting to make its way out into the world. Specifically, two versions of the harmonic structure I call Hem & Haw.
Theory Breakdown:
This one made its original appearance as the untitled song at the end of [5312135] in September 2024. Like all underlying SERIES structures, this is a suite of pitch agnostic progressions defined via Roman numeral analysis. It doesn’t have a ton of harmonic motion, there’s one section that just sits on the tonic and two others, the latter of which is presented twice:
I - I - iii - I
V - vi - IV - IV
While this dataset is performed in 7s (7/4) which can be a challenge, there’s nothing tricky going on harmonically. No key modulations, accidentals, etc. At this point you’re probably wondering what the significance is. Honestly there is none, I just like talking about this shit and lost track of what I was doing.
WELL, there was a point earlier in the summer where I was planning on playing Ambient Night down in Miami (shout to Dania Sixto) and since I don’t play ambient music typically, I was trying to make informed selections about which structures might work. I figured it was good to go with odd meters, I just felt like the rhythmic essence of whatever happened would be easier to hide or subvert if I needed to. As I result of my practice sessions with that approach, I ended up recording an ambient(ish) run of Hem & Haw. This one:
That last Ambient Night never occcured though, and the event is on a bit of a hiatus. When I completed tracking SERIES #2 and went to clean up what was stored in the Hermod+, I still had this MIDI sitting in there. I also knew that the version I’d performed previously was event specific and not something I’d necessarily want on a release. So I thought - why not run it back but change everything? I knocked the tempo up to 150 with my updated rig (I’d changed out several modules since the previous run) and went back at it. After a bit of experimentation and practice, I was able to capture a pretty decent performance:
Even though these weren’t executed as such, they were posted consecutively. Consecutive runs of the same dataset isn’t something I’d ever planned on doing, but maybe I’ll do it every once in a while? Having seen it, I think it underscores what SERIES is all about in a way; anyone following me closely now knows that one of the tricks up my sleeve is running through the same dataset but changing the patch/settings to get a different result. It’s actually a kind of fun way to present the work - definitely something to consider going forward.