Ostracon Debut Excerpt: Entropy Procedure

Here’s an excerpt from the fourth track on our upcoming Ostracon album Unauthorized Modifications. The full track was released last September as a give away for the In/Out Festival, but since then it has been remastered.

Entropy Procedure (Excerpt)

Ostracon Debut Excerpt: Particle Agent

Here’s a nearly two minute long excerpt from the third track, titled Particle Agent from our upcoming Ostracon debut, Unauthorized Modifications. The following description of the album from the press release offers insight into how this album was produced. (Photo of Graham O’Brien with Ostracon at the In/Out Festival in NYC, courtesy of inoutfest.org)

Ostracon is producer John Keston (AudioCookbook.org) on electronics and drummer Graham O’Brien (No Bird Sing). No keyboards are used in their music. Instead, Keston uses his custom sequencing software and hand manipulated light controllers to convert projected video signals into a stream of generative melodic structures. During their performances and recording sessions the visuals, electronics, and synchronized drumming are interwoven creating ephemeral structures that are familiar yet never repeated outside of each composition. O’Brien’s percussive statements firmly place the work into a non-linear landscape, grounded in an impossible to categorize igneous crust. UNAUTHORIZED MODIFICATIONS includes six pieces recorded and mixed at the former Flyte Tyme studios by Adam Krinsky. The the tracks, interspersed with angular melodic passages, sound mysterious, organic, and periodically invoke dystopian imagery.

Particle Agent (excerpt)

GrainMachine Release and Example Sample

Recently I have been working hard on getting my Max for Live instrument, GrainMachine, ready for release. It’s just about ready to go. I can’t name a date just yet, but I can tell you that it will be available as a free download. Here’s an example sound that I created with the instrument to go along with an example Live set I’ll be including with the release.

GrainMachine Example Sample

Granulator Experiment Part 3

In my third example of using Granulator I started by manipulating some of the Granulator parameters manually during the recording. I followed this up by improvising on the keyboard to create an abstract landscape of metallic tones. It might sound like it, but no processing was applied before or after the Granulator instrument, or to the snow globe recording.

Granulator Demo Part 3

Granulator Experiment Part 2

For my second experiment with Granulator I used the same Three Wind-Up Snow Globes recording, but changed many of the settings including seting up velocity sensitivity so that I could play the grains expressively with a MIDI keyboard. Here’s an excerpt from what I played. Once again, no processing was used other than what is built into Granulator.

Granulator Demo 2