(1996) Gnomadic - Entire Album. "Curiously English Electronica" - Gnomadic were formed in Bournemouth in the Autumn of 1995 influenced by a range of experimental jazz and electronic music.
This is their debut album. Founding members and influneces on the album at the time were myself, Conor Patterson, Steve Fricker and Farella Dove. Album contains additional contributions from Gavin Brockis, Bart Malpass, Bobby Bird, Ruth McGill and Dacota Fitzpatrick.
Described as a "A pleasant journey", often ambient, strange and sometimes playfully crazy, it's a mix of vinyl DJing and original synthesis in Csound. Unusual and subversive use of samplers and very fresh methods at the time of production leave it still sounding quite interesting even ten years after.
audio mp3Here's where I'm compiling new stuff that might make it onto the next Gnomadic album at the end of the year. Probably best described as mellow, thoughtful electronica. These are embryonic work in progress. I'm taking a new direction away from sampled sources with this next Gnomadic album and attempting to produce the majority of the work using just Puredata, with as little proprietry software, preset hardware synthesisers or sample libraries as possible. The goal is for it to be free as in beer and free as in using Free Open Software tools. The idea of including the entire Pd source for the album is also an aim, but actually harder that I thought due to the chaos of the creative process.
A track produced by the talented Mr Wigsta, aka Paul Neville one evening in Pokesdown, blues capital of Boscombe. Myself on classical guitar and Wigsta on Fender electric. A laid back summertime melody to accompany drinks as you float gently down the river. audio mp3
One of Kate Browns brilliant songs. Guitar and voice are real, everything else is synthesised including a piano sound I was very pleased with. Original recordings by Ricky Barlow, produced by myself in Frome, Somerset in Summer 2005. An emotional jazz/folk composition by the wonderful Kate B. audio mp3
(1993) The clouds are not red anymore. The oldest track here which for some reason stayed unreleased until now. Analysis of Gregorian chant with an Atari program called Avalon and an old Yamaha CS15 analog synth led to this piece. Somehow it aquired an outer space theme and became a homage to the moon landings of 1969. Dedicated to the brave explorers of whatever is out there. audio mp3
A "shimmering melody" effect that gently warps a melodic contour using permutes, sorts and shuffles. A puredata piece which still lacks some depth. Dedicated to my goldfish. audio mp3
Described as "classic Lo-Fi", this track contains four synthesisers built in Puredata. Randomish jazz drums done using modulo arithmetic and a very rude FM pulse synth. Seems very popular as the synth riff is quite catchy.audio .mp3
A fractal attractor playing whole tones scale with a sinewave and the harmonics (FM index) of a percussion instrument. A soothing mellow background bed for when everything is as it should be. audio mp3
Sort of sounds French or Jarresque, but I have no idea why since the idea started as a darkcore drum and bass patch with a monster modular patch. audio .mp3
Pretty rising and circling trance flavoured textures from a quite Jupiter 8 like instrument (with LADSPA 303 filter plugins replacing all the filters. Bass is the same tripple clipped cosine used in Pokesdown and the pads are an evolution of the patch used by Crystal, adding lots more audio rate line~ generators to get a smoother flow of loudness (tremelo ) and pitch warbling (vibrato). audio mp3
What happens when you take 3 parallel resonators and moog filters to build a stringlike instrument and then drive it with some swingy noise patterns while feeding the resonators blues chords? You get some hoe-down boot stomping goodness that's what. The drums are a jazz preset from the awesome Hydrogen drum machine by Alessandro Cominu et al. audio mp3
This is the first entirely AI composition by a bot called Crystal,rule based system that makes chordal progressions. audio mp3
Based on resonator techniques again but in a slightly more sophisticated way. The instrumentation is rather simple and consists of an 8 step dual saw sequencer, some random drums from the mighty pd BagOfTricks, and a complex resonator of 25 delays. audio mp3
Crystal keeps dilating and shrinking the flute melody until it fits the sequence best (gets it right on about iteration 64) audio mp3
An improved version of Crystal re-written in Perl and communicating with Puredata through [netsend] sockets. Here I'm letting Crystal roam anywhere she likes inside a keyspace without contraints on inversions but still using the 'best-next' progression ruleset. audio mp3
Techno thing, needs polishing. Only 3 parts here, brass, string and guitar which build up gradually. A global chord matrix makes a pool of possible sequences (which are always different) and the distributer guesses which intruments to assign each note to depending on its timbre (spectrum). audio mp3