I have finally released a new EP titled Unrelenting Introspection. You can listen for free on Bandcamp.  It’s only 14 minutes long. It’s xenharmonic dark ambient drone, just some non-commercial personal art.

In celebration of the release, I will fulfill a reader request that I got back in 2022, when I released my first EP, The Stars Stirred. The reader asked me to talk about it. That reader is probably not here anymore, and now nobody is asking for it. That means the time has finally come.

How I got into composition

I’ve talked a bit about my history of music tastes. Let’s just say I had a lot of distinct musical phases. The one phase that finally convinced me to try creating music, was when I got into xenharmonic music.

I was following the Xenharmonic Alliance, a creator space where people would routinely share music. Most of it is very non-commercial and weird. It feels like the barrier to entry is not that high. And if you’re interested in a particular genre—say, microtonal pop—there’s only so much to find at that intersection. You have to make it yourself.

So I had a particular interest in drone music—especially dissonant, harmonically rich drone. You just can’t find very much of that in the xen space (and can be hard to find in general). So I thought, I could make it. How hard could it be?

Software

When looking for music production software, the main thing I wanted was low-level control of timbre. I wanted not just to make the music, but to understand the underlying math. So, I taught myself to use Csound. Csound uses a programming language to generate sound, and I believe it’s taught in some electronic music production courses.  By using Csound I am hardly making it easy for myself, but I am satisfying my inner math geek.

I first tried it in 2019, but had a hard time, so I gave up. I came back in 2020, armed with Richard Boulanger’s “An Instrument Design TOOTorial” as well as Sound on Sound’s “Synth Secrets“. I also switched to Blue, a janky front-end interface for Csound.

I composed three tracks, and then I stopped. I assumed that if I ever looked at it again, I would hate whatever I made. Later in 2022, I listened to it, and I did not hate it. On the contrary, I loved it. I still feel that way now. So I decided to put them online.

Before publishing, I used one other piece of software to master the music. Mastering means adjusting the balance and volume to make it presentable, sort of like adjusting the color balance of a photo. I taught myself some mastering basics, and used Reaper to make adjustments. I’m sure I’m not very good at mastering, but whatever, it’s fine.

Approach and tuning

One way I think of music is as a mapping from math to feelings. If you’re good at musical composition, you can perform the inverse map, figuring out the math you need to evoke a target feeling. I don’t pretend to be so good as that. I follow the easier method: I just try things, and see what feelings they evoke.  In other words, I compose by ear.

Early on, I decided that the entire album would be in 18edo. This is a very unusual tuning, even within xenharmonic spaces. 18edo is considered a “bad” edo, because it does not have a good approximation of the 3/2 ratio (aka the perfect fifth). The 3/2 interval is 702 cents, and the standard 12edo approximates it at 700 cents, pretty much right on the mark. 18edo has intervals at 667 cents and 733 cents, neither of which is very close. But I like the beating texture created by bad approximations, and having two slightly different options adds so much color.

Xenharmonic composers tend to dabble in a lot of tunings, but I committed to just one. I took influence from the artist Deja Igliashon, who often sticks to a single tuning on each album. Also, at the time, their latest album (“UNFERTILE”) was in 23edo, another tuning that also has two “bad” approximations of the perfect fifth.  Igliashon had some writing about what made it compelling and I guess it inspired me.

“The Stars, Stirred”

This was the first track I made. I wanted to have slowly shifting drones, but it’s hard to do that in Csound without writing a bunch of specialized instruments. So my solution was to have overlapping drone notes. Drone 1 enters, and fades as drone 2 enters and so on. I still do this all the time!

The track follows an ABCA structure, modulating the key in each section. The modulation goes from I to #V to #IV to #I. Since there are two distinct approximations of the perfect fifth, I can use one approximation when modulating, and the other approximation when returning. That way, the beginning and end of the track are off by a single step.

My favorite part of this track is the modulation between sections B and C (around 1:48). That is, of course, the moment the stars stir. Or are stirred. One of those two.

“Every Pathway”

The second track I made was “Every Pathway”. At this point, I had found Csound’s bell function, and went crazy with it. Bells are honestly great though, definitely the most interesting musical instrument.

“Every Pathway” uses a scale-based approach. I tested out various scales in 18edo, and I liked the pentatonic scales. “Every Pathway” is essentially a sequence of three pentatonic scales. Within those pentatonic scales, I took an aleatoric approach, which means I used random number generation. I just used Excel for this purpose. Certain notes (the lowest ones) are not randomized, to give it some structure.  The probabilities are weighted to avoid repetition. In the last section of “Every Pathway”, I also randomized the rhythm.

The idea behind the title is that to me, the bells sound funereal. So it’s like, all paths converge on the same ending. But the titles are just meant to be abstract and evocative, you can interpret them however you like.

Multiple people have told me this is their favorite track, I’m guessing because it’s the most mobile.  Personally my favorite is “Beyond the Pond”.

“Beyond the Pond”

I made this one after learning about FM synthesis from “Synth Secrets” and getting excited about that. So the whole thing is wall to wall FM synth.

FM synth posed some distinct challenges, such as generating inaudible near-zero frequency waves.  Early on, this had an adverse reaction to another section of code, and generated an oscillation in the master volume.  For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what was going on, and it was an interesting effect but I couldn’t reliably reproduce it!  I kind of liked it but it was also very weird and inconsistent.  I eventually identified the bug and removed it, RIP.

But even after the effect was removed, I had these associations with the piece.  It was like the world went wobbly, like we’re actually looking at a reflection in a pond.  So yes, I named this track for a thing that I didn’t even include in the track.  This is why it’s best not to overthink the titles.

I have a hard time doing post-hoc music theory analysis of this one.  I mean, I have all the scale degrees written down but some of them do not appear to be standard chords.  I can tell you that at the beginning, it alternates between the sharp fifth and flat fifth.  The middle section modulates to #IV, and follows something resembling a i-bIV-bV-VI-i progression.

Cover Art

The EP’s cover art, as well as all the other art on my Bandcamp page, is just recolored closeup photos of origami. The spiral is a physical object, specifically this one. I’m not much of a visual artist except in the medium of origami, so that’s what I’m going with.

Unrelenting Introspection

So here we are, three years later, and I have composed three more tracks to put into a new EP. I am a very slow composer. It’s because I tend to pick it up and put it down over and over. (I also compose stuff that does not get published.) Are you curious to hear about the process behind “Unrelenting Introspection”? Subscribe so that you can hear me talk about it in 2028, when I release another two minutes of music.

Bonus, for FTB fans! Did you know, I’m not the only FTBlogger who has made ambient music? If you remember Tris Mamone from many years ago, they lost interest in blogging but continue to be active in music.  Tris takes a great deal more influence from Eno’s Music for Airports, as well as liminal spaces and vaporwave.  They’re also way more popular and prolific than I am (and I’m happy for that). Check it out.