Lost Terrain - Serge Modular Explorations

[Carbon111]

Originally this was going to be a distributed CD but I've decided to release it free on the web as MP3s as well as a lossless FLAC version: http://carbon111.com/lost_terrain.html

Lost Terrain contains three audio journeys powered by the wonderful Serge Modular Synthesizer. These pieces are composed from self-generating modular synthesizer patches with a little manually-played synth added for good measure here and there. These songs are free for personal enjoyment but are not licensed for commercial use.

[Carbon111]

An overview of the elements of the pieces in Lost Terrain:

Artic-11/25
The real presentation piece in this album is Artic-11/25 as it's the most complex structurally. As an exercise, It was made with only the Serge "Creature" and "Gator" M-odules. Going into it I thought it was going to be very minimal with such a constrained palette but I was able to get a much wider selection of timbres and rhythmic motifs than I could have ever hoped.

The combination of the pulse divider and Boolean function blocks on the Gator allowed for lots of rhythmic variety even though derived from a simple pulse train - and having odd divisions as well as even ones allowed for some unexpected poly rhythms.

The Creature was the workhorse for sound generation in this pairing and I got many of the "bed" sounds, including the initial, and repeated, "rumbling drone with sonar ping" motif from this simple patch:



That was just a jumping-off point though - I added a lot of modulation from the Gator to that initial config to get those timbres.

The VCFQ turned out to be a fantastic sound source as well as being a workhorse multimode filter. The Trig input on that function block is a godsend for percussion of all types.

In Artic-11/25 there are maybe six tracks of Creature/Gator laid down.


Cenote-88
In Cenote-88, formally known as "Stumblegum" before its reworking, the Serge was used simply as a "rhythm track" accompaniment to improvised lines from an electric piano. In this piece the Serge was not multi-tracked, instead, the entire percussive section was generated from this single patch below which was tweaked with its pots through the duration of the piece to provide timbral and rhythmic changes:





Forest Area-9b
Forest Area-9b, though simpler in form both timbrally and structure-wise, used the most number of Serge function blocks. Patching on this one was much more straightforward. The melodic line that slowly builds through this piece begins as a random selection of voltages that becomes increasingly less random until about eight minutes in when the TKB is switched out of random mode and the melody becomes a repeating one.

Random pulses were used for the bird sounds and weird slow transients in the background.

A lot of long attacks on the timbres in this piece give it a weird "backwards" feel though no tracks were reversed.

[andrewF]

love artic 11/25

[Carbon111]

Thanks!

My album "Touch" is all generative modular music as well.