North Coast Synthesis Ltd.

Dharmapala (draft version)

This track was beset with technical difficulties in the recording - in particular, I'm not sure why the top notes keep cutting out - but since it's only a draft anyway, I decided to go ahead and post it as-is. Combination of multitracked modular and the Gakken NSK-39 "Pocket Miku" being used as a MIDI sound module. Major and septimal-minor chords in just intonation, with exact quarter-octave (300 cent) shifts in the chord progression; the result is that although it's basically 12-tone, there's a cluster of many different frequencies around each of the 12 tones instead of hitting them all exactly. The chord sequence was generated by recursive substitution on "vi-IV-I-V," sometimes called the Sensitive Female chord progression because of its popularity with the Lilith Fair types. (They don't usually use septimal minors in it, of course.) The resulting sequence is hypnotically repetitive without quite repeating itself exactly. Chord voicing chosen with the aid of combinatorial optimization, and I'm still working on adjusting that to exactly the way I want it. In the final version, I plan to use the Asuka/Shinji distortion module demoed in a couple of my other tracks; but I haven't finished building that yet.

I also would really like to run the Pocket Miku's output *through* the filters on the modular, but it turned out not to be hot enough. If I'm lucky, the distortion device (which is basically just an overdriven amplifier after all) will have enough gain to act as a line-to-modular converter too; if not, I'll have to work out something else. Just for this draft I recorded the Pocket Miku separately and mixed them on the computer.