Metronomica.blog
jamuary 19, 2025
I came into today’s Jamuary with a goal: make something mean. I enjoy blowing sounds up, but the majority of my output this month has been airier and lovelier.
So it came together pretty quickly. A pair of string drones at different octaves, bussed to a constantly modulated Rymdigare, each drone outfitted with a couple of tape machines plugins that slowed it down, and, eventually, crushed it.
Please forgive the clicks — I saw that tracks were clipping as I was recording but I was too deep into it, man. I thought that’d create some nice additional saturation, but in reality it was just a mistake.
Oh well. As I let Other Desert Cities take over completely (turning the mix of each, in dual tape mode, fully clockwise) at the halfway point of the song, whatever semblance of strings there was leaves, and the sound, in unison, begins to buck and charge, like a wave cresting and falling in a thunderstorm.1 It’s certainly pretty mean. I like how the musicality leaves, but there’s still a narrative to be told, so there’s interest beyond harsh noise.
I’m not sure why I wanted today’s track to be angry. Superficially, it’s like I said — I wanted to exercise a different side of my musicality. But I believe that there’s some part of my subconscious that wanted to come out, or at least make itself known. There’s stuff going on, you know, inside and out, and it exists outside of the rigors of Jamuary. We’re dealing with our bodies and minds, all the time, and sometimes it’s really loud in there. Sometimes I want to fight that noise with noise of my own.
I’m pretty sure Rymdigare is responsible for that, as I had modulation on the filter cutoff — when the knob reared back, so did the sound, and when the modulation turned it clockwise, everything came crashing back in.↩︎
// tags: making music jamuary