The basic conceit here is to take spectral processing – translating a sound into an FFT for all-at-once real-time processing – out of the domain of just doing audio restoration and into something creative and fun. This seems to be an EQ, right? One that is apparently very into pastels? And I also admit that I’m wary of plug-ins these days that boast lots of “smart” features to try to dumb down conventional audio tools that work perfectly well.īut look closer, because Smooth Operator is actually none of that. Okay, I know what the first glance at this looks like. Perhaps more than any other works, Tenth Vortex (2000) and Eleventh Vortex sound like musical necessities, far transcending.Smooth Operator is a unique new way of reaching out and sculpting sound at the spectral level – and it’s terrifically addictive and creative. In Eleventh Vortex (2001), pitch zones appear on the horizon much as a colorful school of fish passes by an underwater film camera-a glorious moment that may never come your way again. And here the old phrase really applies: "Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got till it's gone " As such, when they do appear they are absolutely stunning events, made all the more beautiful by their ephemeral apparition. The nigh obsolete organizing principles of pitch and meter appear only as secondary phenomena, produced by particle replication. Roads is a timbral continuum between dry/metallic and wet/submerged soundscapes. And in this sphere of quantum sonics, rolling marbles and beads of sound operate according to an inner logic seemingly dictated by the very medium of particles, added to sheer invention. There is almost the feeling of watching grainy (no pun intended) black and white footage of a previously uncharted universe. These works have an overall dusty palette, infused with noises of a white, gray, and sandy persuasion. But, unlike the pop song, these are intricate, dense miniatures, so chiseled that one could easily echo Arnold Schoenberg's observation on the brevity of Anton Webern's works as reducing "a novel to a sigh."Īnd sigh Mr. Operating at this level, it is no surprise that, of the 13 pieces presented here, the average duration is around three minutes-a succinct unit of expression, which, according to the composer, is one of the most important form durations related to the human time scale, as evidenced by its prevalence in popular music. Roads literally inhabits the micro time scale, editing particle by particle, caring for the acoustic space each will inhabit, its amplitude, its frequential components-selecting each grain as it may contribute to a mass, to a spiral, a burst, an upheaval, a wisp, a breath. He passes handfuls of sonic particles through his fingers much the way a child plays at the beach, in wonderment over the falling grains of an overflowing bucket of sand. The microsonic level, unknown to note-based musical traditions, introduces immense complexity and even new paradigms into the already vast world of musical organization. The macro (how points, lines, and clouds are structured into compositional form) seems of more subdued importance to this collection of works, though it clearly has its place. The title of this release, POINT LINE CLOUD, speaks to the multiple time scales of music that preoccupy the composer-the micro (individual points or sound particles extending to the threshold of auditory perception), the sound object (lines or tones, morphological events), and the meso (sound object groupings, phrase structures, clouds). With this new collection of microsonic compositions, he has placed his pioneer's flag squarely into the infinite dunes of sonic particles. Though a few musical visionaries such as Iannis Xenakis have theorized on this plane from afar, only one explorer has trekked through it in a 31 year relentless pursuit of discovery. The scientific realm imagined by these Greek prophets meets today's philosophical realm attained by quantum physics on a plane of deep mystery. It was posited that these innumerable primary bodies stream eternally through the infinite void, only to whirl together, collide, and unite, in order to generate objects in the complex world. In the 5th century bce, a group of Greek philosophers, called the Atomists, put forward the proposition that all things are composed of tiny indivisible particles.
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