Big Jupe / Varese, Writ Large

LinearLineman

318 Earths fit inside Jupiter. It’s hard to escape that. I made something as big as I could. Listening back I had to think of Edgar Varese, way back when. Imagine what he could have done with an iPad.

4 Zeeons, 2 Kronecker (thanks, @Spidericemidas, no trip to Jupiter would be complete without you), Magellan 2, World Synth, Poseidon, Micrologue ARP, and a Partridge In a Pear Tree.

Spidericemidas

Yep! That’s huge, and foreboding, just like Jupiter! You could set this against one of NASA’s videos from an orbiting probe and it would work well. Nice experimental piece 👍

LinearLineman

Thanks @Spidericemidas. It’s fun to let go of traditional ways of using music. Even synth sounds in music borrow too heavily on what has gone before, IMO.

Artj

Admirers of Varese is always friends of mine! 👍

onerez

Very nice!!!

LinearLineman

Thanks @Artj, there was a world before Wendy Carlos.
Thanks for listening @onerez.

TheOriginalPaulB

Best thing you’ve done, to these ears...

LinearLineman

Thanks for the praise @TheOriginalPaulB, it gave me some food for thought. I can understand why you think this is the best I’ve done, especially on this forum. Mostly I have made tracks that fit into genres. Jazz, classical, world, rock... with an emphasis on acoustic instruments. In a way, that is is rebelling against the techno edge flow of ABF.

If I had to say what the most popular genre is here, I would say ambient.... maybe better is soundscape, or sonic landscape. A place where synthetic sounds can play. That makes sense, cause I think the majority of forum members here simply love to mess with sounds.

I had a Gilbert chemistry set as a kid. I never tired of mixing shit together randomly , hoping for an explosion, or it’s poor cousins, effervescence and foul smells. The experiments in the provided booklet didn’t interest me much, cause they had a predictable result. I may be wrong, but I think that viewpoint is shared by many here... with more than a soupçon of tech savvy, of course.

Making this track, and, I hope, others like it in the days to come, I, actually, laid down an improvisation based on a rather mundane melodic exploration in A-minor. Then I assembled a list of sonic ingredients that sounded right for entry into the gravitational field of Jupiter. The rest was pure chemistry set fun.

There is, of course, room here on the forum for every aspect of music. The quest for more realistic acoustic sounds, and the excitement over what the SWAMs bring to the party, for example, is valid. The refinement of FX chains for true electric guitar authenticity is another.

If asked for my opinion, tho, I would have to say the musical equivalency of our ABF app hunger for sonic exploration, with some exceptions (I am thinking @barabajagal and the participants in @iOSTRAKON’s dark side thread), are not posted a lot, the mad sound scientists here keeping their Frankenstein monsters to themselves. I would also say that, IMO, ambient music is not a large enough playground for these adventures. They are, perforce, a gentler side of the experimental coin.
To go further, I think the use of synthesized instruments are generally underused and the boundaries of sound possibilities not pushed enough, relying on discoveries that are fast receding into musical history,

So, PaulB, your welcomed comment makes a lot of sense to me. The difficulty, I think, is that the attempt to create “new” sounds is difficult and tend toward the cacophonic... as with this track. These constructions, much like Varese’s adventures, are often not very palatable to fans of “music”, as aural disturbance was not the Paleolithic goals of musical cravings.

But, it is also part of art history that the boundaries of what is acceptable are always pushed, because without them art would stagnate... even if it took hundreds of years for that to happen (ancient Egypt being an example). Ultimately, art will out. The drive for the artistic new is unstoppable, and efforts by autocratic regimes to suppress those yearnings have all met with defeat.

We may not like being yanked to a “nightmarish“ musical destination, but, like all perceived real and imagined pain, they are made more distasteful by our resistance to it. It is my feeling that such voyages are desirable to clear the ground for new and exotic crops. I hope to do some farming of that potential myself.

TheOriginalPaulB

I think what appealed to me is that each timbre had its own part, it wasn’t just a piano improv with a mix of timbres layered in, plus the parts were more motivic, shorter snippets that arrived and were then snatched away before they could outstay their welcome. That made the piece more enticing to the ear, holding my interest in what might come next as the piece progressed.