Hali Palombo (a wonderful composer & artist/filmmaker from Chicago) was in touch a while back about contributing to a project supporting rabies awareness & prevention, around the idea of capturing the sound of rabies. I immediately rooted through my archives & tracked down a recording of a particular patch I’d made on the “White” Coupigny reproduction created by Philippe Dao & assembled it into a ~7 minute piece (utilizing similar recordings from the original 60s “Grey” & “Blue” instruments) meant to convey the virus’ rapid overtake of a host organism.

The project has manifested itself as a compilation Double-CD & digital album, which releases today & can be heard/found on Bandcamp, featuring a ton of my favorite contemporary musicians including Vanessa Rossetto, Beau Wanzer, Mary Lattimore, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Clarice Jensen, Jon Mueller, & Andy Ortmann. I received a box of the CD edition in the mail, so please come up to me at a show if you want to grab one; the whole thing is great, highly recommended!

I tend to work on music in phases. The impetus is almost always some sort of concert or engagement; a deadline, essentially. While I’d been happy with the “Capitulation Engine” setup, as with all things modular, the ever-present nudge to embellish & refine was palpable, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing during the first few weeks of Winter.

The album above (partially live on Bandcamp on Tuesday, finalized today for the platform’s monthly charity event) goes deeper into a given direction; gone are the Beatkid (which has been supplanted by a more bespoke approach to clocked event-generation, working natively within the remit of “Dynamic Gates”) & that slow granular crawl from the Disting NT (at Pianos it was a folk-song from the Voyager Golden Record) but further realized here out are the controls & automations from the Faderpunk™ (of which I’m now using all 16 channels in one way or another to animate wave-shapes & the ‘harshness’ of a freshly routed drum-saturation/wavefolding bus) which of course all leads to new music & further refinement, ad infinitum.

Please have a listen, and let me know what you think; quite happy with the first/’Morning’ piece here, which arrived fully formed when I powered up & which I sat down & listened to for a good 15m while packing Alpha State NYC orders before jumping in to actively further it along. The interlude returns to those gorgeous, logarithmically-derived chord progressions (ala the “Acid Causality” pieces) & the third ‘Evening’ piece takes a more linear route into a propulsive Krautrock -tinged direction, stemming from an experiment in modulating the various rhythmic vantage-points simultaneously.

Then of course you get a mixed/mastered “board” recording of my performance at the Roulette event as a bonus track, replete with the raw video sent from my phone onto the screen behind while I played. Given that we were all on about Cybernetics & man-machine hybrids beforehand, demonstrating the kind(s) of seldom-interfered-with automations this setup is capable of felt the right thing to do. Enjoy!