Emptying the Haunted Air

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I’m well and truly back into AudioMulch, to the extent that I feel frustrated just looking at Ableton Live, and its big stupid grid of grey rectangles.

The truth is that Mulch and Live represent my two distinct tastes in music – on one side, Tim Hecker, Chihei Hatakeyama, Stars of the Lid. On the other, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Battles. I like Live because of the flexibility you get to work in the rhythmic domain, and within traditional musical scales. I like Mulch because it lets you tear apart and emaciate these rhythms, and linger between semitones. To consider these tastes of mine divergent is over-simplifying, and doing a slight injustice to the versatility of each artist, but the fact remains that the sonic territory I want to explore lies somewhere between these styles of music.

Which is a problem because, whether due to my ability of my process, I can’t make Mulch or Live do exactly what I want. I can’t turn what I hear in my head into music. I’m hoping that Max for Live will allow me to experiment more, in this regard. Mulch-style granulator effects on the send and master tracks, and a 5Combs filter effect to produce string sounds out of anything I can imagine.

Or, perhaps I will always be content to jump between these vastly different musical paradigms, forever chasing that refreshing feeling of rediscovering an old love.