Music, sound, and other noise. Welcome to Edition 138.
Almost there:
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2021 was a year. Inspired by my downstairs neighbor who decided that 2020 would be a good time to spend hours a day practicing his sax (not unlike this viral tweet from February), and with a new "home office" that doubles as what used to be my music-making space, I spent most of my free evenings out of my studio, banging away on the piano in the other room.
I have nothing but slightly more agile fingers to show for it, but despite my neglected electronics, I feel OK about it. And I can now play a very rudimentary version of Corcovado.
shout out to the G-d, Tracey Thorn
And, in fact, I managed to push an album out the door. It is called Defunct International Airports; it is available now on Bandcamp. Here is a brilliant wikipedia entry on defunct international airports.
What to expect: a return to 70/140bpmish breaks with a touch of post-club woozy ambient.
You can also pre-save the record on Spotify [distrokid] using this link (it will help with playlisting and such). January 4 is the release date on streaming services.
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VCV Rack (modular synth rack emulator in software format) [vcv rack website] pushed version 2 and can now be used as a VST plugin. Though if you know what a VST plugin is you probably know what VCV Rack is. There's been some drama over the years with the main developer but it is an incredible piece of software to see if ‘modular is for you.’
I never got tooooooo far down the modular rabbit hole, but I did purchase Madrona Lab's excellent Aalto synth four years ago to explore synthesis. It's a great soft synth, and they have recently released SUMU, a "spectral analyser/synthesizer" that "tracks individual sine wave partials of a sound horizontally through time."[madrona labs website]
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A big year-end shoutout to the lines community and in particular the thriving norns community of musicians coders and builders [norns.community]. There's a standalone website now that does an amazing job of bringing together the various community contributions.
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Magenta studio uses AI and neural networks to generate MIDI patterns.[plugin website] Yowzers!
“Magenta Studio is a MIDI plugin for Ableton Live. It contains 5 tools: Continue, Groove, Generate, Drumify, and Interpolate, which let you apply Magenta models on your MIDI clips from the Session View.”
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There's a lot of hype in the hardware community around the new Roland SP404 mk2 [roland website], the sampler which has become synonymous with lofi hiphop. mayaewk is one of my favorite 404/lofi performers. [instagram]
In a classic 'always curious, sometimes cheap' approach, I dug around and found a few 404fx emulation racks for Ableton. It's not the same, of course, but it's fun to take them for a spin:
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Thanks for reading! Submissions welcome.
-Matt
“Japanese artist Mika Hirasa produces narrative illustrations using a fusion of embroidery and applique”
Matt Pinto is a musician and designer based in New York.
2021 release: Defunct International Airports out now.
2021 listening list due out the last week of December!