The elements for The Mouth Of Hell video came together over the last two weeks. Since it went up on Vimeo yesterday it has been viewed over 2100 times as of this writing. This is the most successful Atomic Shadow video ever thanks in large part to the support of Synthtopia and Matrixsynth blogs. The largest percentage of views came form their sites. Thank you guys. FaceBook was a dismal third place and there have been 3 total views from Twitter links.

I thought it might be interesting to take a closer look at how something like this comes together. If you haven't already seen it, here is the video.

The main backing track for this was an experiment with an iPad app called Stria by apeSoft. The product description at the app store explains that Stria was a composition by John Chowning. Synth obsessed readers may recognize the name of the man who who invented FM synthesis and that should give you a clue about the direction this app takes. It can do multiple sine wave (up to 240!) frequency modulation, as well as simple wavetable and additive synthesis techniques.

The great thing about the app is that there are a variety of well thought out sliders that make it simple to tweak and experiment. A lot of us have a bad FM aftertaste because we remember the Yamaha DX-7 and it's spiteful user interface. High marks to Alessandro Petrolati for making FM fun. The idea for the app, and Csound programming, is credited to Eugenio Giordani. Search apeSoft at the app store and you will find Stria, iDensity and iPulsaret. The other apps offer tweakable granular synthesis fun and like Stria always yield interesting results. Keep your eyes peeled for their upcoming VCS3 app!

I recorded some sounds that I made with the app and set about looking for sounds to compliment the first track. I went to my Kontakt instrument, Panoramic Wave Generator (see the product page above for details). I use the PWG quite a bit because all of the basic samples are ones that I made and I find that if you experiment with outboard effects and tuning you can come up with some wild soundscape material. 

After editing the resulting recordings together I realized that I had the basis for a rather unsettling track. But it needed something else. One of my favorite ways to make sounds is to start with recordings of things that I find happening in my daily life, and then to warp them in to new sounds. The human voice is capable of so much nuance and subtle tonal shading! Recordings of people talking can be processed by changing speed, pitch, reversing, and applying effects. I have been asked how I made the sound of these tormented souls and now it can be revealed. It began as a 40 second recording of a baby crying. 

To make the video performance I wanted the piece to have a definite ending place. Sometimes when I perform for a video I get too lost in the moment and noodle around too long. So for this video I recorded the Stria/PWG track to an Akai cassette recorder and some moaning/howling sounds to the Pioneer reel to reel. Both tape decks were bussed to outboard effects units. I made a random, growling bass sound on the EMW200 mini synth that was feed in to a Strymon tape delay pedal. And then, for the final element, I made three loops of moaning and howling and loaded them in to the Roland Sp-404sx sampler. The 404, EMW200 and Akai cassette deck are part of my ongoing experiments to build a performance system. The Command Center is not at all portable. Since found sounds are so important to what I have been doing, the sampler looks to be the best way to bring these sounds out of the studio.

During the performance I used the onboard effects on the sampler and then ran the output of the 404 through a Korg KP Quad.  I like the Quad because you can chain 4 effects, turn them off and on, and adjust them in real time. I spent a great deal of time adjusting effect settings, making notes of where I wanted to play the sampler and which effects to use, syncing the tape machines, and so forth. I wrote a "score" that was posted off camera on a clipboard with clock to keep The end result it a product of how I felt the day it was recorded. By the end of the day I was down, sick and miserable, with a bug that I had gotten from the same baby that provided the crying that was used in this piece.

Well it has been something like four months since my last post. The holidays are hectic and I barely got City Of Chrome And Glass released before Thanksgiving and Christmas started swallowing chunks of time. On the Saturday before Christmas my mother passed away and that holiday was taken up getting across the country to the funeral. Arriving back home after that experience I found that I just wasn't feeling very creative. After spending several weeks going to the doctor for some back pain issues that have gotten worse over the last year, I finally started working again.

The first thing I finished was a piece that I called Magic Cave Lighting after a phenomenon from science fiction movies. You know how people go in to a cave on an alien planet and they can see all around for a thousand yards? That is Magic Cave Lighting. The piece was composed over a couple of weeks. It was edited together using multiple tracks of sine wave generators and effects.

I decided to put the track on SoundCloud and enable a complementary download. I used the download to test how much Twitter works as a way to spread the word about a new piece of music. I discovered that "not very well" is the answer. With over 3,000 Twitter followers the track was downloaded twice in 24 hours. It has risen to 22 downloads after posting links to FaceBook that were then picked up by Matrixsynth. It has been online for 12 days and has now been played about 350 times.

So as a way of getting your work out there I think Twitter works well if you have a record contract and fans in the hundreds of thousands. A certain number of people who follow Atomic Shadow on Twitter are mostly looking for a follow back, which I almost always do. Sadly a good number of them then turn right around and unfollow you as a way to boost there number of followers-to-following ratio. Sort of Internet bottom feeding. Luckily there is a site called Unfollowers.me that allows you to see all of these stats and take appropriate action. I only follow people that I discover who seem to be like minded or are doing something that looks interesting to me. I have discovered some really interesting artists on Twitter.

I do have a small, active group of twitter followers who share my videos and posts. Their support and encouragement is the only reason that I still spend any measurable time on Twitter. Without this small, core group of people I would do just as well to delete my Twitter account and focus on some other social "Notworking" efforts. It seems that Twitter is going to move in the "pay to promote" direction that FaceBook adopted soon after going public.