[house/Detroit techno style] Silk Purse

[rorystorm]

A few weeks ago the Korg Opsix I bought last year finally showed up and it's a fine, fine instrument. It's also quite complicated so I decided to use it to make a bunch of tracks so I could learn its ins and outs. tbh I feel like I've still only scratched the surface. I took the opportunity to do a thing I've been wanting to do for a while, which is to make a bunch of stuff in the style of early Detroit techno - Derrick May in particular, with the caveat that I know he's not a particularly great human being. Anyway, so even though there's a lot of stuff here most of them are quite short and minimal. I used the Softube T-SAR as a send for the drums to get that late 80s/early 90s bright reverb sound and mixed it using Strings of Life as a reference track so that gives you some kind of idea of where it's coming from. I used Bassline Generator for a lot of the basslines, and Beat Map for drum programming, particularly in the later tracks - something I don't normally do but also something I've wanted to try out for a while - Bassline Generator turns out to be great for housey basslines so that's something I'll keep in mind for the future.

The cover photo is the intersection of Karangahape Road and Ponsonby Road in central Auckland. Karangahape Road is kind of gentrified now but it used to be the red light district up there, hence the amusing smutty joke.

[jappe]

Pleasant listen; I like when the shakers come in at 1:29.
Focus-boosting music for studying.

[rorystorm]

Pleasant listen; I like when the shakers come in at 1:29.
Focus-boosting music for studying.

Sweet, thanks for listening!

[bitley]

Very Craigy, great ideas.

And then I realized there were many tracks — and being the sleep depravated refill programmer that I am I actually fell asleep... while hearing my iPhone play your great music — and got a wonderful half lucid dream where I played all tracks from the ultra modern never seen audio system of a black metallic Porsche Carrera without the roof section, driven on a beautiful summer day at near Turbo volume level I was discussing the mixes with someone — ah it was a great great dream

[PhillipOrdonez]

“It’s raining” is dope

[Benedict]

Full marks on the pic lol

I have a soft spot for early Acid House like Adamski. Rarely listen but when done right, there is a purity to it.

[rorystorm]

Very Craigy, great ideas.

And then I realized there were many tracks — and being the sleep depravated refill programmer that I am I actually fell asleep... while hearing my iPhone play your great music — and got a wonderful half lucid dream where I played all tracks from the ultra modern never seen audio system of a black metallic Porsche Carrera without the roof section, driven on a beautiful summer day at near Turbo volume level I was discussing the mixes with someone — ah it was a great great dream

This is amazing!

[Thousand Ways]

Very lovely stuff here.

Tainted, It’s raining, First go: the overall sound and twitchiness seem influenced more by Nude photo than by Strings of life. No bad thing. Adept reading of the Detroit “language” there. If you’d claimed that these were lost tracks by one or more of the Belleville Three, the only thing that would give the game away is that they’re maybe slightly too clean. They don’t sound like they’re from a knackered tape.

Love eyes is very nice – has some Kraftwerk/Tour de France Soundtracks in the higher-pitched pads.

It’s also nice to find some short tracks. Not because they’re better shorter, but because I get bored of the automatic assumption that dance tracks must last six or seven minutes. Wire’s old Pink Flag idea that you say something, have done with it, and then move on to something else seemed to get lost in the early 1990s.

Pierre is an excellent karate soundtrack. Love hearing the riff “straight” at the start and then again with filters. That was a real eye-opener. When you hear it unfiltered it sounds like nothing else. Then the filters come in, and presto! Sun Electric et al.

Based on the title, I worried that We didn’t start might be a techno cover of Billy Joel. Thankfully not.

Interesting to read your credit to Aotearoa on the album. I know one woman from NZ who insists on saying that she’s from Aotearoa, not NZ. But I recently met another woman from there who told me that you’d only call the place Aotearoa if you were actually Maori, and not if you were a white New Zealander. I have no idea which of them is right, or maybe they both are. But it’s good to see the acknowledgement.

[rorystorm]

Hi, thanks for having a listen and taking the time with your really thoughtful feedback!
I actually tried at first to put some of these tracks through a more lo fi tape emulation to give them an old school feel and tbh I preferred them with a cleaner sound, as you say. Production isn't my strong suit but I feel like I actually did a decent job for once. 'On The Other Hand' is probably my favourite track here, that's the one where it really felt like it came together the most.

I'm really interested in the creative limitations posed by using a single synth as the basis for a whole project. The OpSix is a wonderful instrument and even tho there's well over a hundred separate tracks on this, I still feel like I've only scratched the surface. Next year I'm planning to do another album just using it, maybe something more ambient/experimental. I'm also planning another thing in this more house/Detroit vein, using another synth. Maybe the Modwave which I haven't really played with too much yet.

I see what you're saying about using Aotearoa to refer to, or refer to in part, to NZ. Being descended from soldiers who travelled to the other side of the world to kill brown people and steal their land means having some complicated feelings about ethnic identity. And everyone feels differently about it. Not to stray into the weeds too far, or get too political, for me acknowledging and respecting the status of Maori people I live with as the original indigenous inhabitants of the place where I was born is a good way to balance not being a racist dick with avoiding trying to score lib points by appropriating culture that's not mine.

I guess I should explain why this is relevant to my music making? So like a lot of people I have a few different directions I go in musically. The main two are

(1) dance music/techno like Silk Purse which I do under the name 4trx. This is stuff I do for fun, mostly - fun to make and fun to listen to, hopefully, and fun for me to explore sounds and techniques, and you know, I really like dancing so, that.

(2) which is my more serious art music under the name Landscape, which kinda gives away what my purpose with that is. Maori often use the phrase 'tangata whenua' to refer to their indigeneity which translates, loosely, to 'the people born from the land', and having a strong connection between the land and its inhabitants is a key part of Maori spirituality and identity. The art music I make - like the drone and tape loop pieces I posted recently - is about my own sense of place and the complexity of being both native born and a coloniser in a post colonial society. A few years ago I saw some of my Australian friends acknowledging the Native Australian tribes whose land my friends lived on when they created their work, and I thought it was a good practice to pick up on. Hopefully that makes sense and I don't sound like I've disappeared up my own Woke arsehole! I'm still in the early stages of my thinking about this and it's something I probably need to do more thinking and talking with other people about it.

Anyway, there you go, apologies for the essay.

Very lovely stuff here.

Tainted, It’s raining, First go: the overall sound and twitchiness seem influenced more by Nude photo than by Strings of life. No bad thing. Adept reading of the Detroit “language” there. If you’d claimed that these were lost tracks by one or more of the Belleville Three, the only thing that would give the game away is that they’re maybe slightly too clean. They don’t sound like they’re from a knackered tape.

Love eyes is very nice – has some Kraftwerk/Tour de France Soundtracks in the higher-pitched pads.

It’s also nice to find some short tracks. Not because they’re better shorter, but because I get bored of the automatic assumption that dance tracks must last six or seven minutes. Wire’s old Pink Flag idea that you say something, have done with it, and then move on to something else seemed to get lost in the early 1990s.

Pierre is an excellent karate soundtrack. Love hearing the riff “straight” at the start and then again with filters. That was a real eye-opener. When you hear it unfiltered it sounds like nothing else. Then the filters come in, and presto! Sun Electric et al.

Based on the title, I worried that We didn’t start might be a techno cover of Billy Joel. Thankfully not.

Interesting to read your credit to Aotearoa on the album. I know one woman from NZ who insists on saying that she’s from Aotearoa, not NZ. But I recently met another woman from there who told me that you’d only call the place Aotearoa if you were actually Maori, and not if you were a white New Zealander. I have no idea which of them is right, or maybe they both are. But it’s good to see the acknowledgement.

[rorystorm]

Full marks on the pic lol

Ha! Thanks, i was definitely channeling my inner Australian

[Thousand Ways]

I actually tried at first to put some of these tracks through a more lo fi tape emulation to give them an old school feel and tbh I preferred them with a cleaner sound, as you say.

Yes, the whole thing of emulating lo-fi when using a very hi-tech application like Reason is thorny. I've been using tape delay in Reason recently, but of course it isn't tape delay; it's a complex digital thing imitating a now-unaffordable mechanical thing.

One option might be to output Reason tracks to a four-track tape recorder. Some tracks I did a few years ago on an old Fostex four-track sound much more "alive" than those I've made entirely from Reason. The difference might just be caused by wow and flutter on the physical tape.

I'm really interested in the creative limitations posed by using a single synth as the basis for a whole project.

Love projects like this. Here's something that the late designer/photographer/archivist/researcher David King once told me, which he in turn learned from the photographer Don McCullin:

"Minimise your equipment, and carry it around in a shopping bag so it isn’t noticed. One or two camera bodies, one or two lenses. Get used to them. One or two types of film – a black and white and a colour. Get used to what they can do. Don’t get hit by the equipment; use it as an extension of your hand and your eye. I still use the same basic camera – the Nikon F2, and a hand-held light meter …"

This has just reminded me that the original Bobby "O" 1984 version of "West End girls" was made using one synth, an Emulator.

For what it's worth, what you say about the Aotearoa mention sounds perfectly fine to me, especially as it connects to your other project.