Yesterday I worked on another version of “circular melodies” as I call them. These are inspired by endlessly rising canon or ‘Canon 5’ by Bach and the further thinking about it as ‘formalized’ by Douglas Hofstadter (this is well summarized here). It’s a boring proof of concept with a simple bassline, that you can listen for good 7 minutes down below. The track goes through 12 minor chords twice. It still got me thinking about the harmonic tensions that are somehow absent from such an endless circulating melody. It becomes more like an atmosphere then real harmonic movement. So I wrote short note:
linearity circularity
is there a peak?
is there a tension?
uniformity give me some contrast,
give us some error!
at least polarity and some chaos.
Then this morning I woke up and started thinking about a possible beginning to the performative version of the project: I heard it in my head – a long slow ambiental build-up, including space echo, delays, arpeggios far away, reverberated, white noise washes, deep pulsations, digital noise, smooth, beatless, rising, building to a climax… and sharp CUT! which then moves to an extremely dry odd-time noise&glitchy break-beat, without a slightlest sight of reverb.
I than quickly sketched the following ‘glitchy breakbeat’, which I consider a test how glitch+clicks could work together with more traditional sound drum programming:
An excerpt from the notebook:
Circular Ode:
Curent working environment:
