[ambient/new age/industrial/soundscape] Dragonfly From The Burnished World

[rorystorm]

Very hard to put a tag on this. I've been wanting to do a cheesy New Age album for a while just as a genre exercise which is how it started off, with lots of arpeggiating sine waves and bell sounds... but then I ended up putting these beats underneath that are quite dark and Throbbing Gristle/Severed Heads electro. So yeah, bit of a mixed bag. I also mixed it really bass heavy as I've been listening a lot to the more experimental ambient end of dub techno (Variant and some of the other stuff on the Echospace label), which means maybe it's a bit muddy on the bottom end but I sort of wanted it to be a big subby bass soup.

Mostly I used Subtractor for the sine waves and Klang for the bell sounds, a bit of Humana, Europa for the strings, Synapse Deep Space for reverb. The drums were done with a combi I put together using the Ekksperimental DrumSyn which was surprisingly CPU heavy but has that early Industrial sound, put through Turn2On's Holyverb. Added some top and bottom end boost with SugarEQ across the top of each track and then mastered everything using T-Racks. Melodically, as I said, it's deliberately quite cheesy - the last two tracks were made using the chord progression from Careless Whispers and This Monkey's Gone To Heaven respectively; I don't know why I did this but it kinda made sense at the time.

[Benedict]

Howdy

Typing as listening...

Soundscape or Experimental Electronic are probably more appropriate overall as am not noting any melodic leads etc.

Deffo not New Age as it is far too strident. There is more to New Age than bright sounds, it is all about resolution - even if it is often a bit pale musically. Also, as you note, the heavier drum n bass work has a downward dragging feel.

I don't pick anything Industrial in a straighter sense (TG, 242 etc) but there is that modern 'trapped" feel that I guess is a form of Industrial in itself even tho the makers don't seem to see this from the outside as EBM acts did.

Melody arriving Infinite is nice. Gives it purpose and form. That is technically almost Berlin School.

Aah Light has a more EBM approach underneath.

It seems to me that your later tracks are the better ones. Almost like you sequenced your record upside down. Odd. Why did you choose this order? I think I would have chosen:
1. Infinite
2. Light
3. Clear
4. Star (which I find hard/brittle)
5. Approach

Nicely put together and always congrats to anyone getting things done and published, esp when working in long-form (albums etc) and trying new "voices"

[rorystorm]

Great, thanks for the feedback.

[rorystorm]

also, yeah, I hadn't deliberately gone done that road, but there is a bit of Berlin School influence there though I haven't really listened to that stuff in a couple of decades. Funny. I agree the Throbbing Gristle connection is tangential at best tho I'm actually more of a Chris & Cosey fan particularly the mid 80s albums like Trance and Techno Primitiv. When I first started going to gigs in the late 80s there was a whole electro industrial scene in Auckland that had that sound, rather than the more rock stuff like Skinny Puppy and Revco that seemed to be bigger elsewhere. A lot of those guys moved into the rave scene later on and did less interesting stuff....

[Benedict]

Aah, see I was big into the pre-techno stuff like Front 242, Skinny Puppy etc. I respect Throbbing Gristle etc but a bit messy for my melodic sensibilities. Generally, I found the re-treading that started with Techno as the core, less interesting by far.

Brisbane didn't have much happening on the tougher side of electro. There were a few earlier acts like Xero and then my contemporaries like Pure Bunk (Kilgore Trout Convention) but Bris people were into guitar bands only. A bit later there were a few people trying to create an electronic-noise scene that they tried to rope me into but what a bunch of self-congratulatory kids doing nothing new but considering themselves so clever they could put a distortion pedal on everything. Most didn't even know of TG, Psychic TV, etc. Also so vastly judgmental over everything not-them. I almost got thrown out of a show for daring to be impressed with the Spice Girls. Sad. But in reality, I have lots of records with my name on them and most of them never heard of again once their handbill went in the bin.

Did you have a reason that you put the more melodic and generally accessible pieces at the end of the record instead of that front where they might draw on a broader audience?

[rorystorm]

Interesting question - broader appeal isn't really what I think about tbh, I'm past any expectations around that. I used to really carefully consider my track order but I ended up finding that if I just did it randomly it would end up sounding just as good if not better. So these days I just upload the tracks in the order I recorded them. At least in that way the progression of my ideas provides a loose narrative without me trying (and probably failing) to impose some kind of over intellectualised framework. Damn that sounds pretentious.

[Benedict]

Not at all. All this stuff I see about separating narrative from art is what I take as pretentious. Like telling everyone you meet how you married the ugliest woman you could find so you can prove how woke you are. That just totally misses the point.

[rorystorm]

So listened to some Edgar Froese this avo and New Age of Earth by Ash Ra Tempel and yeh the resemblance is way stronger than id intended.... interesting.

[rorystorm]

on the topic of both Berlin and industrial music, the industrial band that meant the most to me back in the day was Einsturzende Neubauten (although they took the tag a little too literally). Still listen to their 80s records now, at the risk of being one of those 50 year old men getting misty eyed about the music they listened to when they were twenty. Also a great NZ band called the Skeptics who had a really interesting early take on sampling and odd time signatures, and an Ak band called the Headless Chickens - their first couple of releases are amazing and then they sort of 90s-ed out and became a Killing Jokeish alternative rock band, still good but a very different proposition, and were weirdly popular.....

[Benedict]

I saw Neubarten in Brisbland at the somewhat infamous Metropolis in the bus tunnels under the Myer Centre. Loudest show ever. I wasn't a big fan, my friend was. Was an experience.

Not sure if I recall Skeptics. There were a lot of bands mining this scene, incl Ollie Olson's band No before he came over all psytrance. Lobbed up at his Melbourne house once. Didn't stay.

I regret no longer having that record. Coulda used it in the last few days

Headless Chickens I definitely recall from 4ZZZ. Mostly tho the later jokier stuff. NZ had some really interesting acts. Many we adopted as Oz Rock but there was something about NZ that made unique acts like The Bats, The Chills etc. that were hard to classify.