CZARINA 10/11/2021 CZARINA 10/11/2021

Four Experimental Composers With No Limits

Written By Jake Griffiths of ElectrodromeFM

Ever wondered what the story of an elderly stargazer would sound like on a record? What it would sound like if you made a track triggered by random bumper cars on a fairground track? What the sound of an aura-inducing migraine is? If it’s possible to create an AI plug-in that sings for you? Or what would happen if you re-interpreted 1970s BBC synthesizer production with today’s production techniques?

These are some of the remarkable projects being taken on by ambitious, focussed composers who have gone far beyond the traditional toolkit of orchestras, swells and arpeggios. Some are fun, some serious, some expansive and some intimate, but they’re all incredibly creative, inventive and focus on a single, conceptual direction. They’re not limited by traditional lines between what is an electronic instrument and what is a traditional one. And in some cases they’re going far, far beyond music into science, technology and the human brain.

“We have a hundred billion neurons in our brains, as many as there are stars in a galaxy” -

Theoretical physicist and author, Carlo Rovelli

Hannah Peel’s remarkable 10-year release career goes deep into the themes of neuroscience, physics and nature. Her latest release (Fir Wave) was nominated for a Mercury Prize at the 2021 awards, a remarkable achievement for someone writing such focussed, contemporary compositional works. Fir Wave draws on several themes seen through Hannah’s work, the reflections between nature and the cosmos, and natural forms that are found in Physics and Science. Hannah’s work was featured on Game Of Thrones: The Last Watch, drawing on what you might describe as her signature instrument - the music box, usually with hand-crafted paper feed. And her 2017 release Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia explores the dreams of an elderly stargazer exploring the cosmos. It’s a magical seven-movement odyssey taking in analogue synths and a 29-piece brass colliery band.

“You say you're dancing in the deep end

But to me, it looks like drowning

All this talk of saving, but I'm out of my depth”

Inhale Exhale - Anna Meredith

On the subject of brass, it’s possible you’ve heard Anna Meredith’s epic modern fanfare Nautilus - an absolutely outrageous combination of techno-inspired brass build ups with classical-inspired writing and electronica driven production. Anna’s 2019 album Fibs is a gem, you can’t help but smile when listening to tracks like Inhale Exhale, a track which is like a modern Born Slippy with all the uplifting swells and no lager lager lager lager lager shouting. And you just cannot beat the joy of the video for Paramour, filmed using Lego trains on a magical mystery tour of the musicians featured locked in a complex rhythmic pattern - you could have sworn the whole thing was played with synthesizers but I can see guitar, cello, drums, xylophone, clarinet and a bit of tuba all in there. The attention to detail here is absolutely stunning. Finally a mention of Anna’s most recent project Bumps Per Minute, a physical installation at Somerset House London which used the movements and bumps of bumper cars to randomly create synthesizer tracks. There’s also an online version which is great fun to try and an entire album of Anna’s own tracks built using this mechanic. Yes the music is pretty wild, but at its heart this is an incredibly fun, interesting and ultimately quite philosophical project on the nature of musical randomness and of course a deep love of the intense musical bumper car experience.

“There’s a pervasive narrative of technology as dehumanizing… We stand in contrast to that. It’s not like we want to run away; we’re very much running towards it, but on our terms. Choosing to work with an ensemble of humans is part of our protocol. I don’t want to live in a world in which humans are automated off stage. I want an A.I. to be raised to appreciate and interact with that beauty.”

Holly Herndon

Dr Holly Herndon continues to ask serious philosophical questions about the relationship between technology, people and music. Her self-created AI plug-in ‘Spawn’ creates its own vocals for her tracks and was the centrepiece of her mind-blowing album Proto, released in 2019. Spawn isn’t a gimmick or something given the name ‘AI’ for the sake of using a buzzword - Holly has a PhD from Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. She has been writing and producing around the subjects of technology and humanisation ever since her first release Movement in 2012 where she started to actively present the laptop as the most advanced and personal form of musical instrument. The technology behind Spawn has been built using a ‘training set’ of data that teaches it made up of voice samples including her own. It’s physically real too - existing in a box that apparently looks a little like a portable TV. Operating at the intersection of musical euphoria and technological evolution, Holly has taken things a step further in 2021. You can now upload polyphonic audio to Holly+, a digital twin that can process it and sing it back to you in Holly’s voice. Any profits made from commercial usage get fed back in to the Holly+ DAO (decentralised autonomous organisation). This might all seem a little out there, but listen to Proto and what you’ll hear will feel familiar from modern productions that rely on autotune or multi-chorus effects, effectively replicating a form of simple AI as DAW plugins manipulate audio. And Holly+ really blows open a whole world of questions on ownership - who owns the productions made? How will performance profits be divided? Is it legal to clone someone’s voice? If you want to dig in more, skip over to the Voice Model Rights and DAO sections of Holly’s comprehensive intro to Holly+, it’s impressively deep and fascinating stuff.

“Aurelia is a type of jellyfish… jellyfish don’t have a central nervous system or brain, but respond to stimuli detected from their tentacles - so they’re almost floating through the ocean, kind of helplessly, but perhaps with an innate sense of direction…"

Hinako Omori

In 2020 I asked Hinako Omori if she’d be interested in putting together a mix for Electrodrome Extra, an additional part of the Electrodrome Radio Show where artists can create their own mixes or showcase the work that influences them. She sent back an extraordinary mix representing her album Auraelia. The mix tracks reflect seeing, eyes or sight as their main topic, representing the ‘aura’ part of the Aurealia EP - a record that came about after she’d experienced a month of having daily migraines with auras. She says “The physical reaction I was experiencing from the auras – the haziness/blurriness/partial loss of sight and spots of light surrounding every day vision – also seemed to reflect the emotions I was feeling at the time – confusion, lack of clarity, ambiguity, mixed feelings of hope and melancholy…” Aurelia is a brilliant mix of soundtrack, atmosphere and synth work. There’s a good chance you have seen Hinako in action, her work as a musician includes playing with James Bay, Ellie Goulding, Kate Tempest, KT Tunstall and Georgia on synths, and more recently her impressive production skills came to the fore in her remix of The Anchoress’s The Exchange - an incredibly inventive take on an indie rock track and a piece of music that stands on its own merits. Hinako’s music is beautifully constructed with delicate, atmospheric synths and often unsettling chopped up rhythms and vocals.

For more on these artists who are continuously pushing the barriers of art, technology and creativity, go and look up their work at:

Guest User 09/11/2021 Guest User 09/11/2021

Electron Odyssey - Your Future Awaits

After a 20-year stint in the video game industry, Electron Odyssey took the leap into the music industry last August with Your Future Awaits; a delightfully versatile album that hits in all the right ways. It is a journey, to say the least. One minute you’re jamming out to a funky, vocoder-heavy tune, and the next you find yourself immersed in a soothing, atmospheric masterpiece.

The album transitions between genres and influences in a genius way and, despite the tracks’ differences, Your Future Awaits maintains its coherence perfectly throughout. Outrun, synthpop, progressive rock, video game inspired soundtracks—these are just some of the many genres experienced in the span of 47 minutes. And each track is perfect for the role it plays. To round off an excellent listening journey, the album is topped off with vocal cameos from Drew Tyler and Megan McDuffee.

As a debut album, Your Future Awaits is nothing of spectacular. And yes, the its beautiful cover art is created by none other than Electron Odyssey himself!

About Electric Odyssey

Electron Odyssey—or Jeff Spoonhower—is an independent musician and producer living in northern Indiana. Inspired by ‘80s synth-driven pop, progressive rock, synthwave, and cinematic scores, Electron Odyssey is known to combine a variety of hardware synthesizers and software-based virtual instruments to create the perfect blend of music that feels both nostalgic and new.

Jeff has spent the past 20 years as a professional sound designer, art director, and animator working in the video game industry on critically-acclaimed titles in the Bioshock, Uncharted, Borderlands, Saints Row series, and more. Jeff co-founded the independent game studio, Resonator Interactive, and is art director on the award-winning indie game, Anew: The Distant Light. Jeff also teaches computer animation, sound design, and animation history as a professor at the University of Notre Dame.

His love of electronic music began when he was a child, in the early ‘80s, as he eagerly devoured his father's vinyl collection. Artists like Rush, Genesis, Yes, Don Ellis, and Wendy Carlos opened up his mind to the endlessly beautiful sonic possibilities created by synthesized music. A photo of Geddy Lee in a music magazine playing an OB-Xa synthesizer tipped him off to the source of these magical sounds.

CZARINA 31/10/2021 CZARINA 31/10/2021

DRAVEN - Silver Casket

*Foreword by* ***C Z A R I N A.*** *Review by* ***KIZUNAUT.***

Horror Synth has been growing more and more in popularity over the last couple of years as a subgenre of dark synth. Drawing inspiration from horror cinema, Horror Synth is informed by sounds and aesthetic of 80s slasher films and edgier, provocative visuals. Several artists in this genre have mentioned that part of their creative process is diving deep into horror cinema and reimagining a brand new score for films as they go about their composition. The visual component translating into a vast depth of dark, haunting soundscapes is what makes this genre so particularly appealing and fascinating. Despite of what the name and concept entail, a lot of Horror Synth is hyper dynamic with layers and layers of lush atmospheric sounds juxtaposed with gritty saw basses, rapid-firing dark arps and up-tempo dance beats. Notable names in the genre include Dance with The Dead, Perturbator, Carpenter Brut, GosT, and of course, the godfather of horror himself - John Carpenter. Greece-based synth artist, Draven is one of the latest to emerge in this genre.

DRAVEN is a video game and horror film composer and dark synth artist who loves to combine his love for horror cinema and metal. Just in time for Halloween, Draven's newest single Silver Casket offers horror-themed darksynth with a rather varied structure. It opens with deep bass and a piano line that sits halfway between sounding melancholic and creepy. Soon enough track quickly opens into a more traditional darksynth section, dominated by a rapid-fire gnarly bassline and punchy beats. The dark piano line hovers over the track, untill a brief pause comes in. The piano vanishes, leading to a brief section with just the darksynth bass and drums. Soon enough an additional sinister sounding synth pattern comes in, leading to an interlude featuring drums and a darkly mysterious piano line along with some ambient synths.

Following the interlude there is a section where the synth bass plays longer notes in a dark, ascending pattern, with a sinister, mysterious piano line dancing over it. The piano line gets doubled by lead synths and the bass plays a faster pattern, picking up the pace before going into another interlude featuring a vibrating, choir-like synth and sampled strings. The gnarly synthline from the start repeats, as does the creepy lead synths, leading to a new section featuring the sampled string prominently. The track climaxes in a section featuring a mix of choir-like synths and a wonderfully dark synth lead pattern, finishing off with a deep orchestral hit and a quick burst of deep bass.

Overall, the track is a very solid example of the horror synth style and an example in Draven's skill at composing high-quality dark melodies more than well-fit for a horror movie.

For more info on Draven, visit draven1980s.bandcamp.com

CZARINA 26/10/2021 CZARINA 26/10/2021

NEVERMANN - Giallo

NeverMann is an electronic musician from south Sweden. His musical ventures began at the early age of seven when he started playing the drums. Early 90s saw him taking up composing and producing, using FastTracker 2 to create scores for “no-budget movies”, mostly horror. During high school and beyond he played in various bands from ska, to rock to schlager. NeverMann started his current project with 2017’s The Tragedy of Mann EP, and has since released a slew of singles and the GentleMann (2020) and Vallmostigen 6 (2021) albums.

Giallo EP is NeverMann’s latest release, and it sees him paying tribute to the movie genre of the same name. Italy established itself as a horror and thriller superpower in the 60’s and 70’s with giallo all’italiana, gruesome murder-mystery movies offering a stirring mix of violence, paranoia, sexuality and alienation. Offering shockingly gory deaths, vivid colors and highly aesthetic camera works, giallo movies were like nothing before. The giallo craze left an everlasting impact on the film industry, serving as precursors to slasher films which took the masked killers from the Old World to American suburbs.

Beyond their thematic and visual impact the giallo movies were notable for their soundtracks, frequently featuring heavy use of synthesizers, which was exceptional for the time. It is from these soundtracks made by Goblin, Fabio Frizzi, Roberto Donati, Stelvio Cipriani and many more that this EP finds its musical inspirations from.

It’s not just the compositions of the album that reflect these inspirations. There are no gnarly darksynth basslines here, it’s all definitively more on the retro side of retrowave. A lot of the sounds are such that they could have plausibly been used in the early 80s. There is a certain dreamwavey airiness and softness to it all. The mixes are clear, but I found some of the choice of sounds perhaps a bit thin. It does capture the vibe of early 80s soundtrack music well though, which I believe to be the intention here.

The cover art of the EP pays homage to the genre in a kind of abstract way, the yellow background being a reference to the word “giallo” simply meaning yellow in italian, a throwback to the genre’s root in pulp literature that frequently featured the color prominently in cover art. The blood spatters and the knife are of course a reference to the subject matter of the films and while the idea is good, the execution is perhaps a bit lacking. Since it all is mimicking a real physical object, I feel like it would have worked better if it was just a real object that had been photographed. Still, the inspirations come through more than well on the current cover art.

The EP begins with the gnarly arps, sinister chants and synth bells that serve as the intro to Dr. Menard. From sinister chants the song moves to a section featuring an interplay of synth arps, resonant swells and Dimi Kaye’s guitarwork that casts a waiting atmosphere. A bit before the halfway mark the song burst into life, the beat and basslines picking up speed, Dimi’s guitarwork turning into fast rhythm guitar work with occasional melodic flourishes. Dimi also gets to show his solo skills on the latter half of the piece. Flourishes of dark synth melody cast a sort of triumphant, but dark atmosphere. The song eventually fades out to the mix of dark chants and bright bells that it began with.

L’ascia Rossa begins with piano and airy synths that create a melancholic atmosphere. Soon, a dark, fast synth bassline comes in, and a knife stab sound effect leads to the main body of the track that offers a fast, dark fix of instrumental synthpop. The choruses are brighter yet have a tragic minor-key quality to them, while the verses feature the dark, intense bassline with additional layers of melodic synth work being built upon it after each repeat.

Slowly fading percussive loop and low, dark strings and woodwinds serve as the intro to Voodoo. A powerful buildup featuring a drum roll and dark, mysterious arps follows. The main body of the track consists of a slow, moody bassline and a spare beat that keeps the tempo at a lurking pace. Atmospheric arps loom in the background, and every now and then the arp from the intro makes a comeback. The track builds up elements, adding a vibrating theremin-like lead towards the end.

The EP ends with Il Commissario, which begins with sounds of thunder and sinister pads. A reverbing synth melody that casts an atmosphere of dark mystery comes in, followed by a slowly building up bassline and low, dark synth hits, then followed by a buildup featuring a moody synth arp that stays as the beat comes in. The walking-pace beat, arps that have an almost classical quality to them and the bright bells create a strong mental image of exploring some kind of old castle or mansion. Nevermann skillfully builds up and alternates between various elements until the track fades out into sounds of thunder.

Overall, Giallo EP is a cinematic treat for the dark season. Nevermann skillfully pays tribute to his inspirations while also managing to sound like himself. The tracks are full of melodies that are appealing in a dark way, and Nevermann is talented at building up the various elements that make up the four tracks. Even those who are not fan of the movie genre may find enjoyment in the dark, cinematic compositions found within the EP.

For more NEVERMANN, visit nevermann.bandcamp.com