Price  £12
About the Music...
Void is an album of 6  different but dramatic synthesiser soundscapes. It has more in connection with what’s going on in the visual art world than with the formalised popular music the general public is fed on today. It has slowly taken shape over several years. The idea for it really goes back to the early seventies when synthesisers were very new and people freely experimented with the new sound world it could produce. Manufacturers claimed that this new revolutionary instrument could produce any sound imaginable! Well, that’s a little exaggerated  but it certainly added a big new palette of sounds and possibilities  to music and money making. Such was the level of interest that record companies desperately to cash in wanted anything synthesiser to sell. So the catalogues, for a time anyway, were actually healthily diverse in electronic musical styles. In my early record collection I had some quite abstract synthesiser albums by people like Water Carlos and Morton Subotnik.  Synthesisers were originally built for the academic community keen to experiment with electronics. Moog and Buchla synthesisers supplied the  need . They were amazing and revolutionary. As some time has passed since those heady days I found myself wanting to explore this whole abstract area again, and see what I could do, but this time using some of the latest synthesiser technology. Even though I know well that today largely abstract soundscape albums are deeply unfashionable, I just had to do this one.

Void is a collection of extremely dynamic and dramatic synthscape tracks that really mean something to me. It’s far from being just a clever abstract academic exercise in playing with technology. It’s a kind of expressionist sound painting on a big canvas. The musical ideas flow through turbulent and quieter sections, passages of contrast, harmony and some surprises. I’ve used everything I know to produce a hopefully interesting and  exciting synth experience. It has taken a long time to produce and I’m very pleased with the sound and the flow of it. I think it was certainly well worth the gamble and the effort. I know in this world it won’t sell well but it’s offered here just for those few adventurous types who would like something truly different and exciting in their music collection. This is an album that really needs to be played loud sitting in front of a reasonably good big stereo-sound system!

The track “The Tank” in fact was recently played (2011) in an electronic music concert on a large 8 speaker rig arranged in a cube installed primarily to play Stockhausen’s “Octaphony”. The track was created around an analogue acoustic model of a large metal tank, which, in a series of episodes, was altered in size, shape  and material struck and brushed by various ‘things’ including a rapid analogue 8 x 4 step sequencer and processed extensively.  The performance was well received well by the mainly classical-electronic music based audience. I also though it sounded pretty good diffused over the 8 hi-quality large Genelec speaker cube and some quite physical deep bass support from 2 big 21” sub-bass woofers.
Technical stuff...
Some material was originally generated by my acoustic modelling synthesiser was recorded some time ago on analogue tape but I’m glad  I didn’t have edit this album with a tape splicing block and razor blade! Sound processing was done both digitally, using a wide range of processing devices, and analogue  using  tape and my modular synthesiser..

The sound processing  in parts is unusual, playing around with changes in the stereo width movement, the phase and distance to some of the material. There are places when it quickly goes  from almost mono, or mono distant, to a claimed “wider than the speakers” like a partial surround panorama. The sound’s phase alteration even attempts to cause a sound be at the back of or in your head. If you sit in front of the speakers in the traditional recommended triangle formation with left and right equidistant from your ears the idea is that you should, at least, get some kind of strange weird effect when they appear. To be honest I’ve found these effects are dependant on the sound system, speaker positions, the room and the listener. The speakers certainly shouldn’t be too far apart or too far away. The opening rise and fall phrase of track one before the first drum beat is a good section to demo  any weird effect. Volume should be at a comfortable level but not loud in order to get the full dynamic of the following drum entry, which exploits the full largely forgotten range of CD or FLAC format with no compressor used.  If you get anything strange, great, if not, not to worry. There are quite a few different spatial effects which appear from time to time throughout the album but notably in tracks 1, 2, 5 and 6.
Void  
CD011 Tracks :-

1).   “Tight as the Drum”
2).   “Arctic Flow”
3).   “For whom the Bell Tolls”
4).   “Sea of Storms”
5).   “The Tank”
6).  “Lava Flow”
10min. 30sec.   MP3 excerpt (128Kbit/s)
9min. 40sec.     MP3 excerpt (128Kbit/s)
8min. 38sec.
11min. 22sec.  
15min. 32sec.   MP3 excerpt (128Kbit/s)
6min. 53sec.   
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Download Price  £8
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