dub3000

sydney set was wild. insane rhythms. loads of grime. some extended bits that sounded like vocal samples (but could have been anything, honestly). sounded at least as good as the recent ae_live 2022 releases, maybe better, and substantially new material.

great track! could go longer though, for sure.

cheers! we should be on all the services - we're on spotify here: (it should be available worldwide but please let use know if it's not coming through) also bandcamp: http://spectralgates.bandcamp.com thanks so much!

cheers! yeah, it was a bit less aggressive originally but our mastering guy pushed the kick and snare pretty hard and i think it came together pretty well. bit of a nightmare to play live but we're getting there ? thanks again!

the album this is from comes out on monday next week. we made another clip for the lead track, it's a bit of a weird one. maybe a bit like a shoegaze-y talking heads instrumental. we had to hand-code a sudoku solver, a bacteria colony simulator and a physics engine for the clip, among other things. some of the other stuff on the album is a lot more electronic, i hope you forgive the band-iness of this one.

cheers! yeah this one (and the album it's from) is already baked in, but we're heading into the studio for three days of drum tracking in a couple of weeks, will likely give something like that a go. thanks! cheers all for the supportive comments, it's appreciated.

ah sorry for the late replies! thanks for the comments. yeah the launch went great. was good to shake some rust off. this one felt right going out pretty raw and basic. a lot of our stuff is jammed out and primal/linear, but we have a new album complete and coming out soon with a bunch of longer journeys on it. yeah it was a really impossible mix, thanks for the feedback though. cheers all!

nice sounds proper harsh kick there

so... we've been sitting on this for a while now. 'spectral gates' are a sydney-based rave/doom/math two-piece. albums #1-#3 have had a bunch of local radio play and some spotify - album #4 comes out early 2022. this one is a rolling linear live rhythm freakout over an 0coast and a pocket operator beat. steve (the drummer) told me there's a 13 in the time signature. i couldn't figure out where the 1 was though, so it doesn't matter. lots of home-made DSP (delays, mostly) in here as well. we've been writing software for a much more elaborate video clip for a more conventional lead track from the forthcoming album, but we were burning out on that so we smashed this clip out in a few days. hope you like it. if you're near sydney, we're playing 21 nov - ping for details. cheers!

great stuff

Album is out now - dubby, soundtrack-y electrorock. Cheers!

Hi all. Hope you're all well. I've *just* hit the "upload to Spotify" button for the third Spectral Gates album, 'lunar', and we put a clip up for the first single 'moontruck' today. We're a Sydney-based instrumental two-piece, playing dubby electronic post-rock. Our previous album was mega sludgy, but 'lunar' has a lot of sharper sounds on it. The feature track is propulsive electro-rock. Started off as an attempt to do something like 'future sound of london - papua new guinea' but it ended up nothing like that by the time we finished. We custom developed software to make the clip (and the song, for that matter) - there's a bunch of video re-synthesis in there, piecing together frames from tilesets from old videogame footage (and there's a lot of custom software on the audio side - some of my plugins ship with the Reaper DAW, and I've ported them to other weirdo DSP platforms that we use a lot on-stage). 'lunar' should be up in a week or so - I'll update the post with links. Cheers! Happy to chat technology on this one (or provide stems for remixes, for what it's worth).

this is just stellar amazing work!

New album 'holocene' is out! Retro scroller demo here, 1987 forever: https://spectralgates.com/holocene.html Bandcamp and streaming below: It was always going to be a bit weird to follow up the completely improvised, single-day session that turned into our debut album with an actual 'composed' album, but I think we managed to get something that feels coherent with our previous stuff. Really happy with it, thanks for listening!

Fuck yes So good

Oh, and because this is the 'full release' thread - this track is from one of three upcoming mini-albums, 'Holocene', which should be out in the next month - just waiting on artwork (building a system to generatively produce album covers is slower than just making a cover from scratch, but whatever). We split the new material into mathy/doomy, upbeat/electronic ('Lunar') and experimental/dubby ('Perihelion'), to be released over the next few months.

ah man please take care (+ thanks) i struggled with this a bit because my favourite aesthetic is OMG LOUD FLASHING GLITCHY NONSENSE from 1987 and i wanted to amp that up to maximum impact but i am super aware of how rough it is on some folks. hence warnings etc. here it is on bandcamp for audio only: https://spectralgates.bandcamp.com/album/system16 (like, i have made personal ASMR videos of c64 loading screens which are just the contents of disk decompressing to the screen border colours 25 times a second. i love all that stuff.)

Cheers! We ended up having a ton of success with this one - loads of Sydney radio airplay, a bit of action on Spotify. Then just as we were about to start gigging to support it everything went into lockdown. So we ... recorded another three albums worth of music from home. We're just about to start putting some of it out. Rather than spam a whole new thread for it, I might post some of it here - this is the first track from the new batch, 'system16': Note: serious amounts of strobing in this one. Editing the second half of this was a huge pain in the butt.

Hi all! Our new album is out! It's post-...something, dubby, distorted and weird. One track got tons of terrestrial airplay; another seems to be getting picked up by a bunch of blogs. One guy I know says some of it sounds like Tool, but I don't hear that myself. It's grubby and strange and full of cool drumming and custom DSP code and modular gear used as a *conventional instrument*. We recorded the whole thing in a day. I hope you like it! Cheers. Album link: https://gyro.lnk.to/SpectralGates Background: SPECTRAL GATES is a collaboration between Steve Allison & Daniel Arena (who also perform individually as Scruffamudda and Daniel Arena's Musical Entertainment Cube). The duo create energetic, ethereal and apocalyptic electronic beats, dub and post-rock. In late 2019, after a seven year break from playing together in bands, they went into a hacked-together DIY studio space for a day and came out with the bones of a self-titled album, scheduled for release on streaming services and Bandcamp March 31: "I'd just finished getting my recording rig sorted out again following some sessions for other bands, and it felt silly to pack it all away again in storage without doing some more tracking. Somehow this led to a one-day unplanned recording in a rehearsal room with me and Steve Allison - nothing written in advance, the very slightest amount of prep (most of which we discarded), and a terrifying mountain of instruments and equipment. Just, like, three of everything. Loopers and synths and mess. Angry homemade digital. I think I had ten different ways to make a guitar sound more distorted ready to patch in. Going in I wanted to capture some of the sheer exhilaration of making a terrible racket with friends. There's nothing like letting a guitar just feedback, barely under control. The air takes on mass and menace. Infamous noise pioneer Lucas Abela joked in an interview about one of his public installations that experimental music is a lot more fun to make than to listen to, and I was expecting this would go the same way. Maybe we'd capture a bit of that. What I hadn't counted on was that Steve and I would find something musically coherent from the first seconds of recording, and we kept gravitating back towards sanity in the sessions. The literal first thing we recorded survived through as track one on the album - this big, dubby, distorted thing that just rolls and flows and makes sense, and most of the album grew out of this apocalyptic cloud of electronic tension. Three minutes into a totally improvised piece that's working, you get this terror, you have to figure how to land this crazy machine before the wings fall off. We got a few good landings on tape."

almost certain that it's deliberate, although there should be a toggle to disable it. the specific bug i reported is a bit subtle - there's a MIDI command to reset all CC values to default, and this should (in theory) cancel out any CCs that are being traced, but that's not what happens. i'll nudge the bug again at some point.

Reaper tries to play forward the last registered value for each CC when you restart playback at a later point, and in this session it was glitching params that were meant to be left as default. It's deliberate behavior but wasn't working well with the provided MIDI sequences. I hacked up a JS effect to drop the first few MIDI messages on playback start which hopefully let the group move past that blocker.

i am ten years deep into Reaper MIDI (and I wrote some of the JS fx on there) - PM me, maybe I can help. (or email dan @ remaincalm.org ) you want to add a MIDI/midi_logger plugin the very end of the track that's sending to your G2, hit start/stop from an empty MIDI section, and report what shows up. i can also suggest a good set of vanilla MIDI device options in case some of them are in a weird state now.

this is stunning stuff. great work, all. can't wait for the next layer.

yeah I mean i dont what so start some gender discussion but i seems his rougher, metallic 90´s stuff he uploaded ( the first 90 tracks ) is mostly for men ears ? does someone know girls who listen to ventolin or 73 yips ? just curious My girlfriend put me on to Ben Frost's latest album, I reckon that's almost more menacing than RDJ's industrialish stuff. Yeah I'd agree. I saw Ben play Aurora live and it was so loud that it caused me to hallucinate. i heard he started bringing actual guitar amp stacks on stage with him, was that one of those shows?someone told me he was using a lot of clever guitar vst amp trickery to get by before that, sounded convincing though yeah I saw him live last week and he had a pretty huge guitar amp rig set up, but it fucked up halfway through his set and he threw the guitar down on to one of the monitor wedges, not sure if that was part of the performance :P Lots of fucking ridiculous bass waves in his set! Yup, it's sitting on a display thing above the record player amp in her loungeroom. I haven't heard it on vinyl yet though! ben frost albums rule, and live show is crazy good/intense. so much sub....

This thread is too long to see if someone else has thought of this, but - Has anyone else figured that the numeric gaps in the song titles might be *stuff that was already commercially released*? He probably has it all mixed in together?