An exercise in textures with Decent Sampler: The Night Ocean

Svetlovska

“I thought the little house was lonely when I saw it, and that like myself, it was conscious of its meaningless nature before the great sea.”

Lovecraft’s last published collaboration before his death a year later was this haunting 1936 story, mainly authored by 18 year old R.H. Barlow, of a mentally fragile artist, (not unlike Barlow himself), possibly losing his mind in an off season oceanside cabin.

Not explicitly part of the Mythos, yet suffused with a sense of cosmic doom despite little happening outside the mind of the lonely artist, it is easy to see why HPL thought so highly of the young man who created him. and perhaps why the mentor exercised only the lightest of editorial touches on his pupil’s work.

The full haunting tale can be read here:

www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/no.asp

Most of my instrumentation here were off-piste free Decent Sampler FX instruments, downloaded direct from the Pianobook site, ‘converted’ for IOS use by the simple expedient of changing the compressed file package from .zip to .dslibrary, then very roughly jammed out into File Players in AUM. Most of the work went in subsequent fader-wrangling: something like twenty channels of looping file players to manage live, to get the mix of textures I wanted.

Let me know what you think, folks. Always hungry for that feedback. (And indeed, feedback.)

GeoTony

It’s hard to describe some of the sounds here. The insistent fog horn, the throbbing wobble board noise… who knows ?
It’s amazing how you take sounds and make them your own 🙏
Btw I’m not sure you need to rename zip to dslibrary. It seems to work just loading the zip for me 🤨

McD

Yes. An update made the Decent Sampler zips install. There is one pianobook creator that provides RAR packaging. That requires conversion to zip

bygjohn

Your work frequently has a distinct narrative arc to it, but it’s particularly noticeable here. The atmospheres are superb.

Blipsford_Baubie

@bygjohn said:
Your work frequently has a distinct narrative arc to it, but it’s particularly noticeable here. The atmospheres are superb.

This 👆. They tell a story that feels more literary to me than cinematic. I always chalked it up to me simply knowing about your love with literature, placebo thing, but @bygjohn just confirmed this to me.

Svetlovska

Thanks all for your attention and kind words. I am more than happy to be considered literary rather than cinematic!