OEM: What is Organic Electronic Music to You?

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Sometime in 2007 I came up with the term, “Organic Electronic Music” to describe music I was producing with bassist Nils Westdal in our project, Keston and Westdal. I’m sure that I wasn’t the only person to think of this combination of words, and in fact, a quick search reveals several artists, labels, and others using the phrase. Our use of the phrase was a reaction to our distaste for genre labeling. In hindsight it would have been sensible to define the meaning of the phrase there-and-then, instead of simply using it in a few descriptions for tracks and albums.

In any case I found myself thinking about this recently and decided that it wouldn’t hurt to define what I mean by the phrase and perhaps discover some new music that ACB readers feel fits into my definition. In my view any style of electronic music can be considered organic electronic music (OEM). Dub step, house, downtempo, experimental, or even minimal techno can be “organic” as long as the music meets one or more of a few simple criteria. Click the link to read my brief list of parameters.
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SoundCloud Group for AudioCookbook.org

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Today I created a SoundCloud group for AudioCookbook.org readers and contributors. I thought this would be a great way for readers to share what they are producing and perhaps feature occasional works on ACB. I have shared a handful of my tracks and experiments just to get started, but I’m ultimately looking for contributions from the ACB community at large. If you “SoundCloud” please feel free to share work that you have produced in an interesting or unique way. If you have created a Max for Live patch to process your sounds, made a particularly interesting field recording, or produced music using newly developed or experimental techniques; whatever it is, if it strays from the norm and sounds interesting we’d love to hear it!

Northern Spark In Habit: Living Patterns

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Many of you know that I have been working on an eight channel, spatialized sound, projection, and dance collaboration for almost two years. I composed the music entirely using my collection of analog synthesizers. I also designed an octal sound system (eight discrete channels) to spatialize the music and sounds. The performances are Thursday, June 7 at 9pm, Friday, June 8 at 9pm and Saturday, June 9th from 9pm until 6am (yes that is 9 long hours). Checkout In Habit: Living Patterns for the location and other details.

What may be of particular interest to ACB readers is how I am processing the music for spatialization. The outdoor stage is a raised 18′ x 18′ square that the audience can view from any angle. At each corner I have outward facing wedges to project sound toward the audience. Behind the audience I have inward facing speakers on stands, also at each corner of the venue (a public space under the 3rd Avenue bridge in Minneapolis by the Mississippi river across from the St. Anthony Main Movie Theatre).

Using a Max for Live patch that I developed and another that is part of the M4L toolset I am able to rotate sounds around the system in many ways. This includes clockwise and/or anti-clockwise at variable frequencies around the outer or inner quads or both. I can also pan sound between the inner and outer quads with or without the rotation happening simultaneously. Quick adjustments allow me to create cross pans to for sweeping diagonals and so on. I originally thought I could do this with one of many M4L LFOs, but found out this would be impossible. In a future post I will explain why I had to develop my own patch to do this. For now, please enjoy a sadly two channel rough mix of Kolum, the second in the series of sixteen vignettes, and come to the performance to hear it in all of its spatialized, eight channel glory.