This session took us well outside of our typical meandering ambient soundscape comfort-zone and into, well… whatever this is.
Unlike everything I’ve posted heretofore which has been mixed down to a stereo track in the Euro case, this was recorded on 5 tracks to Ableton Live. That was mostly out of necessity since we don’t have a very robust hardware mixing setup.
But after listening back to the session, I found it had a bit of magic interspersed with some pretty rough transitions and mistakes (we were tired and just messing around at this point). So I went about chopping up the session and bit and stitched it back together to take it from a 20+min recording to something a bit more palatable. I really don’t enjoy working in DAWs but I have to admit that they can save a rough sketch like this.
Session Notes:
We started with a drum beat (Intellijel Steppy with a stock sample pad from 1010 BitBox Micro), then used the kick trigger to fire off an sidechaining envelope from 4MS Pingable Envelope generator) to Plaits in chord mode. We spent a good while just trying to get the rhythm tight, not even doing any sequencing of pitch for most of the session.
One happy accident during this session was clocking Befaco Muxlicer with the kick trigger rather than a steady pulse. This was used to sequence Mutable Instruments’ Rings and it took on more of a rhythmic quality as I changed up the drum pattern. Usually I rely on a delay to achieve this type of rhythmic effect but having an inconsistent clock source is something I’d like to use more (this is a large part of the reason why I have chosen mostly sequencers with independent clock inputs).
Muxlicer was a real joy to work with in this session. I was re-patching it on the fly, messing with the clock divider/multiplier, and changing the gate repeats. At some point I was using external modulation to randomize one note per sequence although I’m not sure that made it in to the clip here. I can’t wait to use this module for more switching duties.