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Thread: Leviathant | Let Dreams Lead - out now

  1. #61
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    Quote Originally Posted by Leviathant View Post
    I am indeed in Pennsylvania, but I'm now in Philadelphia, about a half mile from the Jersey border. Bit longer of a drive, I'm afraid.
    Yea, Philly is a tad far.. I lived in New York (Long Island) all my life up until the start of 2019. It got too damn expensive. So my wife and our 2 chihuahuas packed up and moved to Chicora, PA, just outside of Butler, on New Year's Day 2019 and then moved to North Charleroi in May this year. We got no friends or family out here, but, honestly, prefer it over Long Island, especially North Charleroi. Our goal is to eventually move to Pittsburgh or just outside it. You can find an apartment in Pittsburgh for the price of what a basement studio apartment costs out on Long Island. Back on Long Island, you pay all this money for what? You can't enjoy anything anyway if all your money goes into keeping a roof over your head. I do miss playing shows. I wanted to play some shows in the Pittsburgh... until the C word came along and ruined everything.

    Nice to know a fellow PA musician/producer. When I'm doing my aggressive electronica stuff, I go under the alias Neorev, which you can find on the usual music services. I also have a more experimental side project called HΞX∆GR∆M. Perhaps one day, if you're into the idea, we could collaborate and do something different.

  2. #62
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    listened through yesterday and it was fantastic! sarah also really enjoyed it, which speaks volumes (she's very discerning about music).

  3. #63
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    Bootblacks put out the multitracks to their most recent album, and I grabbed one of the songs, deconstructed it, but got off track before I could really dive in. Probably would have spent more time on the percussion, but hey - crazy year.

    Listen to it on the Soundcloud

    I liked the tone of the original, but I was feeling more grim, and wanted to impart that into the music.

    My bits are all Poly Evolver Keyboard & Tempest, basically recorded clean. I seasoned heavily with Eventide Blackhole Reverb.

  4. #64
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    I still like to come into this thread and write a little bit about music I've put out into the public. So this time, I'll blog about Aurelia, the title I've adopted for a collection of music I wrote as a score for my friend's puppetry show, which tells the story of an astronaut rescued by giant space jellyfish, who returns to their home planet to a confused lover that's been fighting off the advances of a creep. Aubrey Clinedinst's puppets are a visual treat, but I actually didn't get to see any of this iteration of the show in person, because workshopping started in early 2020 in anticipation of an April(?) 2020 performance date, which, yeah, didn't happen.

    We had actually workshopped elements of the show in the past, at the National Puppetry Conference. In the first version I participated in, we (the musicians on staff at the conference) were asked to cover a couple of David Bowie songs as underscoring. We did so semi-relucantly, noting that when performing original puppetry, there are a lot of reasons why using original music is to your benefit. Not only because of licensing issues you could run into, but because original music might be designed more around the idea of improvisation, which is important when you have four or five puppeteers on stage performing - sometimes things go haywire. We did a second workshop another year, and this time Aubrey had asked for original music. Awesome!! A couple of the things done for that workshop were the seeds for the music that I would end up writing for a longer version of the show. I think it was closer to a half hour when we Aubrey brought the idea to me two years ago, but it was reduced to closer to 15 minutes for the 2022 performance.

    Back in February 2020, Aubrey visited Philly - they were working with puppeteer friends on something in town, and took the opportunity to get away from NYC and grind away on puppet concepts and things, but also to sit in on my process for creating the music. Which... is not conducive to active observation, really. They asked that the music be in the style of David Bowie - mostly his 70s stuff. Reader, you're this far into the post, deep in the unvisited bowels of ETS, and here is where you'll learn that I just don't listen to much David Bowie with any regularity. I know! I know! Now, truth be told, they were really interested in Melissa and I working together on this, but Melissa was neck-deep in commissions that paid actual money. This was being asked as a favor, basically. While I have big opinions about paying artists and about not working for free, when the cards are down on this one, I think my finances are in better order, and frankly it was a fun opportunity to force myself to try something different.

    So Aubrey is standing behind me in my study, while I'm remembering how much playing guitar hurts fingers. I suggest they go downstairs to the apartment they're staying in, and I'll text when I have something to share. So I'm like... standing there with a guitar. What do I do? I need to find notes, find chords. Is this too simple? Should I pick the strings individually? What am I doing, have I made a terrible mistake? Okay, 70s Bowie sound, let's get some synth in there... so I turn on my Poly Evolver Keyboard to some proggy preset, and start noodling. And I don't hate what comes out, at least whenever I manage a harmonious series of notes somehow.

    Man was it stressful. I don't make music that sounds like Sound and Vision. But having that seed planted in my brain helped me to try new directions, and after finalizing a handful of tracks, some of it even grew on me. God it was mentally exhausting though. A few weeks later, I got some videos of rehearsals, and started rearranging the music to fit the action better. Then... pandemic. Two years later, I get a new set of rehearsal videos, we've got one new puppeteer, and soon I'm doing a Zoom call with a live rehearsal and rearranging on the fly, waiting for additional footage, re-re-rearranging, and then the show's live.

    I took some time afterward to smooth out transitions, fix some little timing errors, and then I ran the whole thing through my Sound Workshop 1280b console to glue it all together. I hope. I'll write more later. No DAW screenshots this time, they're not terribly exciting anyway!

    https://leviathant.bandcamp.com/albu...dinsts-starman

  5. #65
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    I think I'm going to eke out a release before 2023. A hair over 68 minutes of solo instrumental electronic music on the theme of dreams. I got a new instrument this year, and found myself wanting to post pictures of it. But that's not what it's for! And I'm also a bit sick of the fetishization of consumerism in the music-making corners of the internet.

    All of these tracks were made live, on a single instrument. All of the tracks use the same instrument except one, actually. I did apply some sparse effects here and there (a little delay, a little reverb), and ultimately "mastered" the album by running it through the compressors on my wee little SSL console. There are one or two that aren't start-to-finish linear recordings - that is to say, for those tracks, I recorded a lot of material in one long go, and then basically cut and paste it on top of itself, mostly to get a stereo track out of a mono instrument.

    In a way, this is an evolution of an old idea, making music to play back while I sleep. When I lived in an apartment by myself a couple of decades ago, I used to set up my Kawai K3 to run through delay and reverb, and have it modulate the filter on a chord while I slept. Super basic spacey music. I would also put on music by Coil, Aphex Twin's ambient stuff, and later albums by Belong, William Basinski, and so on, while I slept. I still do this when I travel, particularly since sleeping on planes and in hotels is a special kind of exhausted sleep. It's a very basic kind of rest, recharging after what's usually an unusually intense day.

    I'm also really bad at remembering dreams. I would go years without remembering having a dream, but with a little training, I've gotten better. (It's really easy: as you fall asleep, repeat to yourself - "I will remember my dreams") I decided that rather than theme this album around music to fall asleep to, it's a soundtrack to trying to explore and remember those fuzzed out dreams, and thinking about how they affect waking life.

    Thanks for your continued interest - looking forward to sharing this shortly!

  6. #66
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    I make-a the teaser

  7. #67
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    wake up babe, new Leviathant has dropped: https://leviathant.bandcamp.com/album/let-dreams-lead

  8. #68
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    hashtag 123123

  9. #69
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    Up too late? Got the place to yourself? Get comfortable in front of your TV, pop a gummy, and play the full-length video installation for Let Dreams Lead


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