Just in time for Halloween, Caustic Reverie would like to unveil its fourth album. Drawing from elements of dark ambient, noise, and drone, Word Salad Surgery is by no means an Emerson, Lake & Palmers styled keyboard etude, but rather a nightmarish attack of Apophenia.
1. Prelude (3:08)
2. Word Salad Surgery (18:55)
3. Intermède (3:06)
4. Pareidolia (28:59)
5. Postlude (6:16)
The libretto of this piece comes from the poetic nonsense used to throw off spam filters and the like. The song consists of processed voice with some synthesized accompaniment.
A track from Stochastic Resonance was played on Dj Ichabod’s Out ov the Coffin radio show on WRVU out of Nashville. For the show’s playlist, click here.
My first two Caustic Reverie albums have had a strong element of the improvisational rather than the tightly structured, step sequencer-based compositions that I have done as TheForgotton. Caustic Reverie has been a chance for me to break out of my writing ruts, and this album was to be an experiment in generative music.
For Stochastic Resonance, I used a program called FMusic as a skeleton for the tracks. It is a composition tool that uses fractals and cellular automata to pick the notes, durations, etc. for a song. I messed around with some scales and key changes until it gave me something I liked. FMusic spits out a midi file which I then imported into FL studio. For example, here is the midi used as a basis for In Vacuo.
I made some synth patches using vsts like the Cameleon 5000, Crystal, and a couple of Krakli synths including Karnage and Etequet. I put some fairly wild sounds for each patch and when I went to play it back, it was compete chaos. See below for what this part of the process sounded like.
I then dragged the tempo down and dumped each track individually, doing some additional time stretching using paulstretch with different edge-case settings for each to get some nice artifacts and glitches throughout.
The tracks were reassembled in Cubase and I started to mix it down. The mixing phase was interesting, as I was working with it more like a sculpture than a song, muting tracks here, and fading them and out there. I added some ambiance recorded at night on the dock near my place, some pitch shifted cymbals, and even a couple of household appliances here and there.
Jamendo user Ivan1984 had some nice words to say about the Caustic Reverie album Mute. Here’s a snippet:
Mute is deafening, roaring silence and this is the closest I think you could get to that kind of transcendentalism, its’ allocative form is thus. What it represents is open to interpretation with infinite variables. For me, it feels very religious but that might be more to do with my subjectivity and not the intention or thought behind this massive track. At 41 minutes, something substantial happens, something is changing. Is this the link pin, that tenuous thread of ethereal substance? God spoke.
Read the full thing here, and while you’re at it, you can download the album in VBR mp3 or ogg.
Stochastic Resonance is the third Caustic Reverie album and it has been released on last.fm. The songs were fractally composed with the help of FMusic and then stretched, chopped, spliced, and mangled into the shape they are now. Enjoy!
The third Caustic Reverie album will be called Stochastic Resonance and will contain five tracks. There’s a companion piece to Vespers called Compline, though I’m not sure if I want to do the whole Canonical Hours cycle at this point. I’m still working on the artwork and final mixes, but I should have it released early next week to last.fm.
I usually end up messing around with fractals and other forms of organized chaos in a visual field, but this week I’ve started experimenting it with music. Through a last.fm group, I was exposed to the music of Tim Doyle, some of which were composed with the aid of a program called MusiNum.
I downloaded it to give it a try but it doesn’t seem to like the fact that I’m running a 64-bit operating system. I did have better luck with David H. Singer’s FMusic. I was initially opposed to algorithmic composition as a viable way to make art, but this is a good deal more complex than pressing two buttons to get a ragtime shuffle in DMaj. I’ve been getting into more spaced-out, minimal stuff lately, so this is a perfect fit.
One new song is finished but untitled, the other is still in the mixing phase.
Caustic Reverie’s latest album Mute is available for on-demand streaming and download from last.fm. I’ve added two more songs in addition to the title track: Vespers and Mute (Reprise).
Here’s the latest mix of a Caustic Reverie song I’m working on with the working title of Vespers. It’s a lot shorter than the other two but much more chaotic.
