Metronomica.blog
jamuary 21, 2025
For some reason, today’s jam felt purposeful:
I guess it’s not surprising that there’s more structure to this one than a lot of the Jamuary pieces have, as I started this one with chords. I really enjoy the raw sound of the choir here, so I programmed a quick little progression into Fugue Machine, let it play forward at normal speed, and then left it alone. Usually I’d send multiple playheads back and forth and smear the choir into an ambient bed, but today I just wanted to hear the choir unmangled.
That means I had a harmony, not just a bed, and I started writing around that. I added a piano to mirror the choir chords and a plinky melody atop it. By the time I was throwing in the usual suspects — a glockenspiel hitting two notes but spitting itself back through microloopers, other granular nonsense — there was still a grounding element to the whole thing.1
Because this song has some heft to it (compared to much of my other music this month, some days excepted), it’s easier to draw comparisons to other artists. I’m reminded of Erik Enockksson, a musician and composer whose strained voice I was always drawn to. The choir here reminds me of his work, even if the rest of the music pushes away from it. It’s always fun to back into these comparisons, like my subconscious had pulled an old bit of inspiration out of a gacha machine and let me have a look.
And then there’s Rymdigare, which everything gets bussed to, that provides the radio noise/waveshaping that takes the track apart. Other than Fugue Machine, no app on my iPad journey has given me more joy. The reverb and pitch shifting is lovely and necessary to paint the entire picture of the plugin, but the radio and waveshaper are just delightful.↩︎
// tags: making music jamuary