Introduction#
There is a folder on my PC that I have been filling up for some time. Inside, there are no “songs” in the classic sense, but attempts, mistakes, and late-night sessions spent creating a single sound.
The truth is, I often find sound design much more stimulating than traditional composition: spending hours creating a patch or distorting a sample until it becomes unrecognizable is the part of the process I prefer. This EP was born exactly like this: without the anxiety of structure, but with the total freedom to merge with the machines.
String From Scratch#
The recording captures a moment of purely technical improvisation: my left hand on the MIDI keyboard searching for melodic fragments, while my right hand worked frantically with the mouse on Serum parameters.
The listening experience is a journey from the raw to the refined. It starts from the barest essence of synthesis , a crude Saw wave, and, minute after minute, you witness its sculpting in real-time. I wanted to leave everything intact to let you hear how, by manipulating filters and envelopes, the initial digital aggression softens until it transforms into a complex and evocative string section.
I want to fill this gap#
The title is brutally honest and self-explanatory: this track exists because I felt the need to fill a numerical void in the tracklist. I had four finished pieces, but I wanted 5 in the EP.
If the first track was study and synthesis, this one is pure instinct and collage. I dipped directly into my personal sample pack, fishing out sounds and textures I already had in the drawer, and started working in a sort of ‘stream of consciousness’. There was no map, no starting idea, and not even a precise destination. It is an unpretentious track, born by assembling puzzle pieces in real-time for the sheer pleasure of seeing where they would take me.
Remember that the greatest composer was gay#
If the other tracks look inside the computer, this one looks at the wall above it. Hanging there is a framed picture with the frontispiece of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, ‘Pathétique’. It is a constant reminder of his greatness which, as I wrote in the SoundCloud description, ‘reminds me that I am nobody’.
Technically, this track is an exercise in desktop musique concrète: I completely banned synthesis. Every rhythm and texture you hear comes from the manipulation of physical objects I had at hand: pens, metal balls, office junk.
On this carpet of daily reality, I inserted samples of the ‘Pathétique’, treating them like ghosts. I placed them in the distance, distorted and muffled. It is a mixing choice that reflects a physical and psychological reality: physically, the picture is partially hidden by my monitors; psychologically, that distortion represents the distance I feel towards the unreachable greatness of the composer.
sex on water#
For me, water whether from a river, the sea, or simply inside a glass is one of the most stimulating sources for sound design. This track is a pure technical exercise born from a very domestic recording: the running water in my sink.
The challenge was to extract all elements of the composition from that single source. I didn’t limit myself to using the samples as percussion or textures, but I used them as the basis for actual synthesis.
The melody, for example, is generated via spectral synthesis: I used the spectrogram of a segment of the recording as a ‘map’ to generate the sound.
For the final brass, I utilized wavetable synthesis: the water sample was transformed into a cyclic waveform, allowing me to play the ‘movement’ of the liquid as if it were a powerful synthesizer.
Leck mir den Arsch#
The title, quoting Mozart’s famous canon (and the celebrated scurrilous letters) to his cousin, is already a clue to the irreverent approach of this track. The raw material is untouchable: a recording of the “Catalog Aria” (Madamina, il catalogo è questo) from Don Giovanni.
Here, the work was not of synthesis, but of editing and recomposition. I didn’t rearrange the opera in the musical sense of the term, but performed brutal audio surgery: I ‘chopped’ the orchestral and vocal parts to destroy their linearity.
I moved ending sections to the beginning and anticipated codas that were supposed to arrive later, creating an acoustic paradox: the harmonies and themes are the glorious and recognizable ones of Mozart, but the temporal structure has collapsed and been rebuilt. It is the classic meeting sampling, maintaining the solemnity of the original themes but in a completely alien context.