misc

Funny that you mention that passage as it's probably the first that comes in to my mind when i think of Vineland. 'If patterns of ones and zeros were "like" patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths?' Goddamn.

Ah yes! Pynchon is my absolute favourite. What did you think of Vineland? When I read people's opinions online, it seems the general consensus is that it's underwhelming compared to his others, but I loved it. I found it to be a really sentimental, beautiful read, with Pynchon's usual silky smooth writing but just with the quirkiness turned down a bit. A lot more rooted in reality (but still with Godzilla and a load of female ninjas). Also interesting the similarities of the dynamic between Zoyd and Brock Vond in Vineland, and Doc Sportello and Bigfoot in Inherent Vice. I read Vineland after seeing the film of IV and a just couldn't help but picture Brock Vond as Josh Brolin. Anyway I've still got Mason & Dixon, V, Bleeding Edge and Against the Day to go. I'm almost saving them because I don't wanna finish all his work. Think the man's an absolute genius.

Think earlier in the thread someone suggested its could stand for Edited Live SEQuences, which seems plausible.

It is. Four people on earth like it, they are here on WATMM. five like it, five people. Six. It feels like a rubber band slowly being stretched more and more and you're waiting for it to snap but it never does. c7b2 has got to be one of the most sinister things they've ever done. I think it's incredible. The sounds have so much texture and are so huge but feel sort of constricted, makes me feel very claustrophobic. And the way it just relentlessly keeps on evolving it's fucking brutal.

Ah wow just checked this. I listened to ae_live so much i thought i'd recognise all the times it crops up in elseq but completely missed this one. I really need to go back and listen to the live stuff again with my new elseq ears

Found this snippet from the interview rob did with the quietus right after l-event was released: "This time we decided to try and get the synthesis in-board as opposed to outboard, with a big overhaul of the system and a re-design or a rethink, and that took us a lot of time. We got really busy with it, really deep." Does in-board here mean in max, or just software based? I dunno but pretty sure at one point recently they said everything was max now, can't remember where though. Also wasn't there a point in the aaa where someone said the synths on recent releases sound really thick and analogue, and either sean or rob replied that that was a compliment because it was all digital but they had tried to make it sound analogue. Something along those lines i think. Yeah, they have been doing this kind of delay modulation on almost every release as far back as Tri Repetae. The control of it has just become a lot more sophisticated over the years. artov chain is a perfect example of this. The delay just completely envelopes the track.

Same :( Cause i bought the 24bit wavs, if i were to buy this i would have spent £93 on elseqs...

goddamn my heart skipped a beat when i read that

Wow the Vonnegut, Wes Anderson comparison is something i've never thought about but i totally see what you mean. For me the simplistic writing style means that the truly profound moments take you completely of guard, and i guess i can see that in some of Wes Anderson's stuff as well.

I just can't understand this attitude at all. So are we only supposed to post positive things here? Constant praise? Doesn't that make for a really boring forum? I said multiple times i'm not trying to change any of your opinions simply writing mine (on a message board designed for that exact purpose) and discussing it with other people. To be honest i was actually really enjoying the discussion, but the idea that i'm wasting my breath because i'm not in agreement with you is a terrible attitude and suggests maybe i shouldn't bother. I just wanna talk about music yo

Oh come on man please this is just not a helpful response. Of course that's the case. But art also means we can all have our own opinions and expectations of it. I'm not calling up richard personally and telling him to step his game up!

lol ok bechuga and tunnocks i agree with you both, it wasn't the best analogy. Of course there was never any promise of what he would put out, and i'm not saying he needs to only release things that i like. But the expectation for an experimental artist to release experimental music doesn't seem unreasonable to me, it just seems natural. I guess it all just comes down to what you're looking for in the music. I can't help but be analytical (probably partly due to listening to so much aphex!), and i feel like i've heard all i'll ever hear in this track already. So from an artist like aphex, yeah i expect more!

I mean, if you disagree with the expectations that's fine but i don't think they're unreasonable. It's like if i bought a can of beer from my favourite beer company, took a sip and there was orange juice inside. Turns out the company's switched to producing oj instead. Sure it's gonna quench my thirst, but i'm not gonna get all the fun extra things that came with drinking beer. So i'm disappointed because i wanted a beer from my favourite company. The company's done nothing wrong, i'm just a little sad.

So he's built his own trap. Living in a prison of only perfection. That would suck. I dont think he needcs that pressure. All artists who make tons of tracks make a lot of average stuff. Maybe that is why we've go years without releases from him. But isn't that why the soundcloud dump is so prefect? He has a place to put out anything and people will listen to it. I'm not saying everything he makes has to be perfect or even everything he releases. But under a moniker that is cited and one of the most influential and forward-thinking acts in electronic music, this track just feels like a massive step back. If this was released by a new unknown artist i feel like we'd all think 'hey, this is a pretty groovy track', listen to it a couple of times and think nothing more of it. With the internet allowing so many people to put music out, it's more important than ever for the innovators to keep innovating. We have a slew of music at the quality of this track, but very few people will ever reach the heights that richard has before. Is it not our responsibility as his fans to push for that standard? Sorry i know this must be well annoying if you like the track, and i'm not trying to discolour your opinion or anything. I get this propably sounds like 'why isn't he making what i want' type thing and i guess it is to some extent, but for someone you look to for inspiration and awe to release something so mundane is just really gutting.

Love the video but pretty dissapointed by the track. It's just so completely average. As an old unreleased track in the sc dump, that's cool, but as the single for a new ep?! Maybe this is where i'm going wrong, but i view aphex as one of the musicians at the forefront of electronic music because he puts out stuff that makes you think "This is aphex twin and it could only be him". The stuff is to such a standard that you know that it couldn't be anyone else. But with this, i could totally imagine just stumbling across it while browsing bandcamp or something. I get what some of you guys are saying about how if it's a good tune you should just enjoy it regardless, but is it wrong to hold someone of rdj's caliber to higher standards? I dunno just thinking out loud. Still looking forward to the ep though.

I'm not really feeling 5 to be honest. I'm in complete awe of the other four but for some reason 5 just isn't working for me, and i can't put my finger on why. It just feels a little bit lackluster or like something's missing. I dunno hopefully it'll grow on me in the future.

Its mostly for the MSP portion. For drums and pulse-shaped generated sounds I'll use a lot of math transform functions to shape things (sine and cosine functions with clipping at different chunks) to shape things in tables. Filters or any sort of recursive system that you have set up that transforms values by the input that came before it will have some math heavy parts where you're having to play with feedback and feedforward values. In the tutorials there is an example of a strange attractor generator that illustrates this. Also in general there is a lot of rational expression and scalings that need to be done in regards to the MSP portion. Even after years I still get messed up with which situations you have to convert stuff to frequencies to periods, and vice versa. You could get through a lot of MSP without understanding math but knowledge of trig seems really fundamental if you want to do anything complex with signal processing. It really depends what you use it for. Nice! Thanks for the info

^ wrt to the maths side of things, i've got a good understanding of a variety of areas cause i need it for my course, but i've yet to use anything complex in max, and struggle to think of situations where i would use it. You got any suggestions for things i could try building that would force me to use some more advanced maths? Besides, it'd be nice to apply it somewhere other than in an academic situation as well

Yeah i messed around with some conway stuff a while ago using the ensemble that comes with reaktor, newschool i think it's called, but it just felt like if a drew some random shapes and hit play, it'd spit out some crazy idmy beat. I couldn't shake the feeling that it was kinda cheating or something. Maybe if i built one myself i'd feel differently. Plus i didn't get that in depth with it so i'm sure there are avenues for more control over it. It's definitely a cool method though and i like just watching the cells evolve. I dunno, i'd usually advocate the learn-as-you-need approach, but with max i think the tutorials were invaluable. Even if they were about something i thought i'd never have use for, just the act of familiarising yourself with the conventions and processes of the program helped hugely. But i get that they are time consuming and sometimes pretty dry. I've been using max for about a year and a half and probably 6 months of that was just doing the built in tutorials (i'm slow), so it's definitely a big time sink. But then again this past month the program has just completely opened itself up to me and i've finally started making things i like. It's insane how suddenly you go from building the most mundane pointless things, to having all these crazy ideas for things to build, that you can actually carry out because you made all those boring things, slowly building up a variety of little techniques. The exponential learning curve that i always hear people banging on about definitely deemed true for me.

^ Damn dude that's some fascinating stuff. Really shows how max is just as much about imagination and ideas as it is ability. I feel that because I used a daw for so long before beginning max that the methodology of it is just engrained in my mind, so I often end up emulating techniques that could just be done in a daw. And that's completely against the point of max. I really need get out of that mindset. Anyway, thanks for the insight.

Try augmenting the stuff you're already doing with some lists and zl modules - mnth/nth, stream, slice, etc. This lets you corral random values into more meaningful ones without adding too much complexity to a patch. This sounds good. I spend a lot of time building huge squids of patcher logic that produce cool sounds but are unpredictable, and i struggle to refine them down into something that can be used in a track. I'm sure anyone learning max has this problem though. I'll have a look at the objects you mentioned, thanks. I think i understand what you mean but i'm more asking about the process of the sequencers themselves; how are they triggering events at the times you want them to?

Nice one, will definitely check them out. Thanks! Hey entorwellian, i finally got around to reading the first musimathics. Really great read. I especially enjoyed the composition and methodology section, fascinating stuff. So thanks for the suggestion and i look forward to getting into volume 2. I was hoping to get some ideas from anyone about sequencing in max. I've been messing with a few methods for a while now, and produced some stuff i'm fairly pleased with, but the sequencing tends to feel either too static, as if it were just done on a piano roll, or too nooodley and aimless. A couple of methods i've tried: - Using a metro and counter to loop through a certain number of steps, and then a sel object with the step numbers as its arguments, sending the bangs from the sel to trigger different elements. Then messing with how the counter runs, e.g. direction, which step it starts on etc. This usually feels static and boring though so i gave up on it a while ago. - Having a metro sending a bang at the beginning of each bar and then using del objects to delay the bang, triggering the events in each bar. This one seems to be more flexible with more opportunities for interesting stuff. However i find that when deciding the time by which to delay each bang, i'm often just choosing random numbers until it sounds good, which i guess isn't necessarily a bad thing but feels a little lacking in control. So yeah just wondering what methods you lot use? I know it's a case of just experimenting with the stuff i've worked out already, and refining them so i have more control, but i'm still curious to hear how others approach it.

13x0 step is so good. Love the section after funky disco time, those synths in the background are so prickly

I get this too. By the time I've finished an elseq I'm itching to fire up max. Incredibly inspirational stuff

lelseq