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Gormenghast

by River of Electrons

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1.
The Hall of Bright Carvings 04:31
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2.
Birdroom 03:06
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3.
The Tower of Flints 01:36
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4.
Wandering Alone 01:29
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5.
The Dobbins 02:47
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6.
Bell Island 01:43
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about

Another exercise in mining the personal archive.

These recordings were early experiments with the Music 5000. An 8-voice polytimbral FM synth peripheral from Hybrid Technology for use with BBC Micros in the 1980s. (www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Hybrid-Music-5000-Synthesiser/)

These tunes were composed using the AMPLE programming language (a kind of Forth extended with music representation commands chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/docs/Hybrid/Hybrid_Music5000UG.pdf ) and recorded directly to cassette in about 1988-1989.

The recordings here have had tape noise removal, some EQing, light reverb and compression applied to them.

The first four tracks were explicitly themed around parts of the Gormenghast castle / story.

Track 5, "The Dobbins" was a rather knowing (and clunky) attempt to make an "avant garde" picture of a walk on a local piece of common land near where I grew up.

Bell Island was an imaginary exotic "tropical gothic" location I had in mind at the time of composition.

There's not much structure or sophistication to these pieces. Just rather arbitrary short sequences of notes. The main compositional "technique" is the use of fake echo.

The Music 5000 hardware had no audio effects like delay or reverb. But did allow a number of voices to be chained together with a time delay and / or pitch offset.

Playing a simple melody, then, could fire off canons or arpeggios using multiple voices / instruments.

And this technique is used extensively in these pieces. With both the delay and pitch offset changing rapidly from one short series of notes to another.

Most of what sounds interesting or good here is the result of serendipitous discoveries of such timing and pitch offsets, and instrument clusters, which worked well with the not very exciting underlying motifs, in generating a bouncy rhythm or frantic climax.

I'm not 100% sure about the cover of this. Again it's thanks to www.craiyon.com This time a rather failed misreading of "BBC Micro Hybrid Music System in a gothic castle". So doesn't look much like the Music 5000. But I like the colour.

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released August 2, 2022

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River of Electrons Brasília, Brazil

River of Electrons is an identity of artist / musician Phil Jones (AKA Mentufacturer mentufacturer.bandcamp.com ), focused on explorations of specific textures and techniques : from raw electronics to beeps of vintage computers to assemblages of small synths & home-made devices. ... more

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