SELECTED SPECTRAL WORKS

MusicIlluminations

Aug 20

Iridescent as mothen wings growing in soft cocoons
And stealing shimmering flight across the night sky
Twilight of the listening spectrum
Bundled in drifter's metachords
And migrating at all overlapping frequencies
A hyper scream of transformation
Refracts the air in sensual mind

The seventh burthened bus of ghosts
& scattered marble bellows in
Faux-skeleton w/ phantom bride
A glistening storm of visitations
A teaming gleaming burning must
Of effervescent splendid ringing
A thousand violet spectral horns

Snaking aural shrieks sans hosts
In-between & still without
Permeating all throughout
Cast difference nets of pale sums
Oscillating velvet hums
A heart to penetrate, elide
An ear alerts *potential* terror

So feet don't run away, but through it
So ballets the last ghostrider

"... in that art which once Pallas Athena discovered when she wove into music the dire dirge of the reckless Gorgons which Perseus heard pouring in slow anguish from beneath the horrible snakey hair of the maidens, when he did away with the third sister and brought death to sea-girt Seriphus and its people."

Pindar,
from Pythian 12

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As writhing & wretched, & as radiant contradiction is oscillation
Isolated, late & seething

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Missing fundamental?
Moar like missing songs amirite?!

No fundamentals
0

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“Out-of-body experiences have been documented for centuries, at least since the late 1800s. One case, recorded by French otologist Pierre Bonnier in 1905, describes a patient who felt "divided into two persons, one who had not changed posture and another new person on his right, looking somewhat outwardly. Then, the two somatic individuals approached each other, merged, and the vertigo disappeared."*

Out-of-body experiences may originate via vestibular disorder in the inner ear. One may experience "floating" or "sinking" sensations while falling asleep, dreaming or waking.

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Who doesn't know vertigo?! Physically & poetically. Psychic derealization is 'a thing'. Spectral Works indulge such feelings of alienation, suspension ... , derealization. Sinking & floating. Spiraling infinitely down devil's mucky staircases or ascending upwards eternally to brilliant blindness. Sometimes they emphasize the rational disordering of the senses. Others, poetic interpretations of what an extreme auditory disease might feel like. Yet others seek in vain to give order to the disorderly.

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The works are constructed spectrally, with sine waves at alternating pitch ratios, binaurally tuned. Doppler effects were used to simulate acceleration & deceleration, creating a disorienting auditory phantasmagoria. The waves are constructed on overtone series beginning at the lowest end of human perception & extending to the most elevated the human ear can detect. All tones are free-floating & unhinged from their fundamental tone. Indeed, one might say that I have no fundamentals.

* www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-causes-spooky-out-of-body-experiences/

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https://cliqaudio.bandcamp.com/music

bretschneider.work

The Selected Spectral Works is a longform psychoacoustic phantasmagoria. Ranging from ghastly drones to exciting dispersions of sinewy tones radiating across the all-too-human pitch spectrum, this 10-part monolith of evanescence freely interprets concepts of spectrality. Composed between 2006-2021, these spectres were chosen from hundreds of fascinating experiments.

These spectres come alive when played loud & shaping the air. Gaseous torrents of finely tuned sine waves flood the intimate listening space, encoiling the listener’s body, slithering by — & with — other restless tonal cascades that no sooner coalesce into enigmatic vibration-shapes than they evanesce back into quivering elegant lines, to reform again, suggesting some elusive figure elsewhere in the room, & to again disperse into ambiguously undulating partial waves. Unified, alien, & serpentine in motion, a frenzy of unusually supple oscillations shimmers around the ear-encrusted-skull, trickling down the spinal chord, vibrating the pelvis, feeling for a ground — unfound — & meandering on. Like a gleaming mammoth of some iridescent spectre of a serpent feeling for it’s boundaries, sinuous lines tend to writhe in unison around the given physical boundaries, & then detach into independent standing waves in some unoccupied corner, only to be quickly interrupted, resonated, & excited by some other rushup of shuddering tone-cloud. Like watching the shapes of clouds or the shimmer of light reflecting off the placid reservoir of listening, this peristaltic undulation of interleaving sonic lines suggests sonic characters never heard or felt before.

In the words of Breton, the spectres “arouse a physical sensation in me, like the feeling of a feathery wind brushing across my temples to produce a real shiver.”

Technically, Spectres are founded on crystalline pitch lattices of various ‘scales’ — so serpentine! — of up to 800 discreet frequencies, starting in the range of 3-33hz (the lower threshold of human hearing), following the partials into the most elevated heights of audibility. Sometimes all the partials are used, other times only a few are selected: prime integer multiples; Fibonacci sequences; some play 2 different sets into separate channels; & other idiosyncratic sets e.g. a fundamental chord of 6-18-19-81 (my birthday) & its multiple derivations. And so on & so on, rotating the constructed lattice to lyrically play the endless permutations of the crystalline facets, cultivating a refraction-play of tone. At any given moment up to 363 oscillators may be singing their wretched to-&-fro dialectics. The sine tones are usually clustered into chord sizes ranging between 6-20, & the distribution of the chords is iteratively played via a lyrical implementation of ‘drunk walks’ applied to each voice. The chords are selected & played multiple times a second, gradiating from one into the next, deviating rapidly & snaking through the spectrum in unnaturally expressive contortions.

Indeed, with a composition of partials so freed from their fundamentals, no one can accuse me of being impartial. The Spectres are extra-partial, or meta-partial.

Time is also, crucially, tuned to the fundamentals or subharmonics — if one cannot hear the low fundamental pitch of e.g. 11Hz with their ears, it can be rendered audible rhythmically as a rippling wave of pulses playing chords (where chord = spine = possibility for movement). Unifying time & pitch results in the streaming character of the spectral characters. The result is a scintillating cloud of harmonics gradually undulating to create myriad shades of combination & difference tones.

With such elegance of rendering fundamentals audible in time, no one can accuse me of having no fundamentals. Moreover, the fundamentals are also made audible in the higher frequency spectrum via interaural beating, it is a way of unifying the extremely low & extremely high pitch spectrum.

In nature, higher frequencies decay faster than lower frequencies — these Spectral works generally do not respect nature, as such. They are nature, extended. For better or for worse, all frequencies are given equal voice. Some of these spectral sections were also experiments in exploring what Maryanne Amacher called ‘endotonality’, with the pitch sets binaurally detuned to cultivate a rippling field of difference tones, what she poetically referred to as “ghosts”, haunting & moving through the listener’s physique. The high frequencies render the tonality exciting, emphasizing the harm in harmonics. But if the tonality is painful, it is painful in a pleasurable way. The Spectral works are as visceral as they are ephemeral.

Poetically, I interpret the meaning of oscillation to be a phenomenon of extremes. What is oscillation but the literally charged movement between polarized contradictions, crossing over the zero line many times a second, feeling at the outer thresholds of positivity & negativity? Only those forms that freely move between extreme contradictions are able to freely vibrate.

Charges of Contradictions

Voluptuousness / Evanescence

Motion / Stasis

Beauty / Vulgarity

Epic / Fragmentary

Languid / Forceful

Expansive / Intimate

Calming / Ennervating

Presence / Absence