#aleatoric music

[lcatala]

I started putting music on youtube because why not (Locked Tomb fans will appreciate this one)

[elluminis]

Have I accidentally pulled an all-nighter? Yes, yes I have. But I was productive and produced the score for a 3 1/2 minute piece for solo violin, SATB choir, and percussion

[kvntkolektiv]

Put your reason to sleep.

Bannedkampf Friday is approaching. Get'cha k.v.n.t.!

kvntkolektiv.bandcamp.com/

UNLESS....!

You happen to be buying from outside the UK. Unfortunately the post office is still refusing my items because of this "cyber-strike". Of course we'll do out best but I encourage you to buy from one of our distributors ( EU Fallen Temple, US Caligari Records for Oppress. cassettes).

Alternatively you can wait patiently. I apologise for this giant palliative care-home of a country where I live

[patricia-taxxon]

machine learning art has more in common with readymades and aleatoric music than it does with the mass market media it is attempting to wear the skin of. the public won't buy it, the "author" is still a fiercely engrained concept and toying with that concept has always been an activity relegated to the realm of heady conceptual art that no one understands. if a generative marvel movie ever plays in cinemas it'll be like getting a pack of normies to sit in a theater to watch Ten Skies

[bluetapes]

blue one plus: Matt Collins

How do you make your boutique tape label's classic first release from back in 2012 even betterer?

Easy, you have the musician behind it create a completely new interpretation of the original's 'aleatoric' score for 2021.

Matt Collins' The Grin Without The Cat or The Cat Without An Outline was a strange, subtly psychedelic voyage through different modes and textures. It was electronic, but neither ambient or dance. It had abstract. abrasvive moments but wasn't noise. It left you with an uncanny and haunted feeling every time you experienced it.

The 2021 update achieves this too, with more varied instrumentation and a bracing, modern production. I always thought it sounded like aliens singing love songs, even though there is no singing anywhere in the piece.

On other, better planets, this would be pop music.

[sivavakkiyar]

American composer Ben Johnston (1926–2019), who would become the most significant microtonalist of the 20th century and a masterful composer of string quartets in the latter half of the 20th century, studied under the guidance of John Cage in the late 1950s. While Cage was already a radical composer of aleatoric music, Johnston was still composing predominantly in the neoclassical style. Johnston has often spoken of his respect of Cage as a composition teacher and praised his perceptive and insightful advice, even though he would have found Johnston’s composition approach far from interesting. When Cage took Johnston on as his student, he made a certain remark which should be framed and displayed by every composition teacher: “I will not as a teacher change any of the directions that you’re going in because I think that’s not appropriate. What I’ll do is criticize as best I can what you bring me and try to help you make it work, or advise you that I don’t think it will.”

[automaticfrenchhorn]

Today's piece is a study on storytelling. Of course, the history of music is full of storytelling, but it's not something I do often with my writing. So, today the goal was to express a real world idea through music, rather than my usual absolute music.

I chose to illustrate a kind of fear/anxiety in this study (rather than a specific story). The main metaphor here is in the melody part, which centres around E. My goal was to have this note be uncomfortable over the accompaniment, yet the melodic line shows fear and hesitation to develop anywhere, particularly upwards. Thus, this melody seems to be "paralyzed" in this uncomfortable state.

The left hand creates an aleatoric, turbluent texture for the melody, designed to be "structurally un-sound", so that even if the melody played consonantly with it, it would never sound at ease. The MIDI doesn't do a great job for the turbulent effect, even after I spent a while manually adjusting the phrasing, but I think the score conveys the idea clearly enough.

As always, these pieces are welcome for anyone and everyone to play! All I ask is that you share it with me, because I'd love to hear it done by live players!

[dustedmagazine]

Kevin Drumm — OG23 (Streamline)

On OG23, Kevin Drumm simultaneously plumbs the deep seas and tumbles through outer space. Incidentally, both environments are potentially lethal; the ocean’s pressure will squish our bodies, and the vacuum of the cosmos will tear them apart. Sounds pleasant, right? Drumm thinks the concept is worth probing. With a wry smile, he’s placed a broken-down submarine right in the middle of the album’s cover. Sadly, there isn’t a damaged spaceship on the other side, but the point is obvious: these sounds evoke uncontrolled motion, existential dread, and the ironic beauty within that which threatens our survival. To borrow a concept from Harry Sword’s tome on drone music Monolithic Undertow, Drumm has created a “sonic womb.”

Drumm originally posted these multi-dimensional meanderings on his Bandcamp page in 2022. The transitory emanations are singular within his extensive catalog, and thus the sounds begged for a physical release. Enter Christoph Heemann with his Streamline label and the mastering expertise of Drumm’s longtime pal Jim O’Rourke: the ghost in the machine is now alive and it has scratched its sinister signature into vinyl.

Situating any new release within Drumm’s oeuvre is an arduous task. Between his overflowing Bandcamp catalog and his physical output, he has hundreds of releases. Drumm’s vast body of work is also a multi-dimensional continuum, morphing based on his chosen tone generating apparatus. He delivers barely perceptible hum as seriously as he does meditative drones, agitated mechanical clatter, and punishing harsh noise.

Drumm can be withholding regarding the genesis of the material he releases, and this is the case with OG23. It’s clear, however, that he’s harnessed electrons to do his bidding. The tones slide around like multi-hued oil droplets on water or condors drifting on atmospheric air currents. Sounds enter the field of perception, alter course, and then disappear like whisps of vapor. As one element vanishes, more appear. Mid and low-register swarms provide a scaffold-like hum, like a fleet of airplanes performing a flyby or the rumble of a distant factory.

OG23 resembles aleatoric or generative music in the way its tones worm around and vanish. Drumm’s established a sinister calculus and dialed in the parameters. The fractalized patterns use his framework to writhe and take on new forms. Each of the side-long pieces corrupts Drumm’s algorithm with its own unique mutation. On the A side, a flock of robotic birds explores the Starship Enterprise engine room, whereas on the flip, the passerine beings search for home within the humid air of a subterranean cavern. Drumm is the mastermind behind both scenes, reveling in the strange harmonies he’s set in motion.

Bryon Hayes

[nelson-riddle-me-this]

COLUMBO THOUGHTS:

s1e2 "Death Lends A Hand"

Okay so kinda big deal bc I'd skipped this episode in my dedicated series watch I started last year! Not on purpose, but the way I was watching e1 & 2 of season 1 were lumped into one big video file and so I forgot it existed. So really delightful to return to early Columbo and with an episode that was new to me!!

SPOILERS BELOW (for this episode and the other 2 Culp appearances)

As far as performances from series favorite Robert Culp this might be my fave of his! Like he's always exceptionally good at being mean and stern and being annoyed with Columbo, but something about the intensity of this feels different.

With how methodical and premeditated Culp's other two murders are, this one being a 'crime of passion'/manslaughter surprised me. Also THE SLOW-MO GLASS BREAKING AND HER FALLING!!! Like it's visually so cool. And very novel. The overlay shot where we see what Culp does after killing her, but as two different reflections in his glasses on an unmoving face - is very cool. It goes on a bit long, but it's very cool and I expect would be especially novel for audiences in 1971.

The score is by 4-time early Columbo composer Gil Mellé. It's got the spooky quasi-aleatoric spacey murder music thing, and a definite jazz flavor. Both me and the jazzer friend I watched it with were a bit thrown by the sudden capital juh-Jazz that starts when Culp gets into his car after killing this poor woman. Not that *J*azz is inappropriate for that moment, but something about that specific cue undermined the shock and weight of the sequence before. Maybe that's what they wanted, but I doubt it. I hear the blu-ray set that's out has versions of these episodes without music. It'd be a fun project to rescore some of these and fix some of those things that bother me.

Loved the detail of Culp knowing the name of one of his P.I.'s kids - just the sort of detail that helps a story feel 'lived-in'. I was shocked by Columbo playing up the astrology and palm-reading stuff LOL. The show depicts that sort of thing from time to time, but I don't remember Columbo himself hyping it outside of this. Of course it's part of the act to lower their guard, to make them think he's a fool, and as an excuse to get what he's really after (in this case examining the killer's hand and ring).

Ray Milland is fun to see, though part of me thinks he's not quite right in the role. He's not especially sympathetic somehow, which is maybe why they brought him back as a killer in "The Greenhouse Jungle". Some really great comic moments - Columbo complimenting Culp as being a 'man of purpose and intent' and immediately walking into a _closet_ is HILARIOUS. Lots of fun moments too with him snuffing out the golf instructor our victim had an affair with. I also thought it was hilarious that the golf instructor kinda lamely admits that he's not even really good at golf, pulling in women is the only thing he's decent at. Which like wouldn't be so bad if we felt he was a thoroughly charming person. But like it reads less as 'local rich women can't get enough of this studly golf instructor' and 'well I'm not really interested in the golf anyway, and at least he's not my husband - so I guess it's exciting enough. I can tell my bookclub friends I slept with my golf instructor and then I'll be cool.'...

The 'gotchya' is effective and satisfying. The mechanics of it are a bit paint-by-numbers. But this was so early in the run, it probably wouldn't have seemed so if I'd watched it in order. Still, the 'trick the killer into searching for evidence and catch them in the act of that' is worn. But also there's only so many ways for this all to play out!

Good episode, good early Columbo. Also shoutout to the victim cuz how she confronts Culp at his beach house is SOOO SATISFYING!!

[gnosk]

Aleatoric music and video games are so perfectly suited to each other and it's such a pity that 98% of games with a "dynamic soundtrack" just crossfade into a more intense mix of the same track in combat situations

[klausie]

yeah um actually the music i make is aleatoric yeah no im not just banging a keyboard and making sounds at random no um its actually poetic and meaningful

[lcatala]

Made a new tune! (dark ambient, lofi, minimalism, noise, aleatoric): https://soundcloud.com/lcatala-764003175/music-you-might-hear-in-a-particularly-spooky-horror-film

Some day I'd like to compose a horror soundtrack for someone's small indie project (like an itch io video game, or a digital horror youtube video)

[patricia-taxxon]

this is genuinely aesthetically coherent in a way i believe AI is truly incapable of being. stable diffusion doesnt make "bad" art, it makes a kind of non-expression that human artists have tried and failed to emulate for dozens of years. it is more comparable to aleatoric music and readymades, not your average mediocre comic man.

have you ever actually tried to make a work of art for which literally none of its parts seem aware of any of the other parts? it's really hard, it's not something you can arrive at with incompetence.

AI really has made people forget sometimes people just do whacky art like that

[ecotone23]

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[patricia-taxxon]

I'm I wrong to think techdog is barely generative? It seems like u just composed loop based music but the loops and synth patches had some randomization. Its still 90 percentage humman composed cuz u composed the loops. Its not able to take itself in new directions. It just jitters around the composition u made. Not a diss tho. Techdog is one of my favorite albums ever.

yeah, that's an inaccurate characterization of the music and also generative/aleatoric music as a whole

[crushingdeath]

JON COLLIN + JACK COOPER + VISIT ME

Tue 11th Feb 2025 @ The Blue Moon Doors 8pm, tickets £10 adv from here

JON COLLIN

DIY beyond-guitarist, Jon Collin, is a creator of music and non-music based on accidental sounds, droning strings, frictional forms, and natural sonics. Found in a third place, triangulated from post-Takoma guitar and free improv, Collins creates some kind of sonic equivalent of Jim Ede-style arrangements of high and low forms. The brains behind essential Swedish minimalist label Early Music, and formerly of tape project Winebox Press, he's released a plethora of essential releases on these labels and beyond, as well as collaborations with Demdike Stare, Bill Nace, Sarah Hughes and James Toth. https://joncollin.bandcamp.com/

JACK COOPER

Best known as the driving force behind the shape-shifting folk-pop-jazz unit, Modern Nature, Jack Cooper works across a wide range of musical forms. From singer-songwriter to improv guitarist, to aleatoric contemporary composer, he is a bottomless well of musical ingenuity. What will we get from him this evening? Great question! https://modernnature.band/

VISIT ME

Wandering organ, lurching loops, and processed buzzing vocals. Devotional hauntology drifting between Cambridge and Cornwall. Most interesting recent addition to the Cambridge musical milieu? We reckon so… https://visitme.bandcamp.com/