GRAZpatterns, by formuls

GRAZpatterns

by formuls

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10

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of GRAZpatterns, The Great Unifying Mass, immutableimpermanence, wake, afterthedeathofego, inbetween, beforethetitrationofpanacea, arK1a, and 2 more. , and , .

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1.	pattern 1 04:18	buy track
2.	pattern 3 02:49	buy track
3.	pattern 4 03:47	buy track
4.	pattern 2 05:03	buy track
5.	pattern 5 02:15	buy track
6.	pattern 6 02:14	buy track
7.	pattern 7 05:44	buy track

about

Wandering the streets of Graz as the seasons transition from winter to spring, the city is a vibrant visual and aural network of people, architecture, graffiti, trams and tramlines, buses and bus routes, businesses opening and closing, and church bells chiming. The city is a complex of patterns.

GRAZpatterns explores seven musical patterns in an improvisatory way. Unlike in previous compositions, no additional material or audio processing was added in post-production; each pattern was performed and captured "live" using the formuls digital musical instrument. The sound structures that emerged are the result of manipulating pre-planned musical patterns by interacting with the perceived and hidden affordances of formuls. This process yielded a combination of anticipated and unexpected musical outputs that teeter between elegant tones and uncomfortable sonic distortions, structurally forming a larger complex of patterns.

This is the first album of compositions to emerge from my artistic residency at the Institute of Electronic Music Graz (IEM), which took place from March to May 2022. After the residency I returned to the UK and its political landscape; the music was performed and recorded in the UK.

***

My residency at the IEM was an opportunity to examine and reconcile the schism that had emerged between the creative audio processing techniques developed in my studio work and the inability to utilise these in live performance. The techniques explored in compositions such as "afterthedeathofego" and "beforethetitrationofpanacea" use a specific set of audio processes to deconstruct and rework improvisations performed with the formuls digital musical instrument—a synthesis-based performance environment. They rely on extrapolating extracts from a single improvisation, thus transforming limited amounts of musical material into larger compositional structures. Heavily processed, glitched, extreme time stretched and pitch shifted iterations of these extracts—often variations of the same source material—are layered together to form rich, dense textures. These techniques use studio-based tools that are typically difficult to employ and control in live performance. During the residency, the formuls digital musical instrument was further developed to enable these audio processing techniques to be used in a live performance situation, enabling the sound worlds of my studio and live practice to align. This work feeds into the broader theme addressed by my artistic research: how can we approach designing digital musical instruments that allow musicians to synthesise sounds and manipulate rich timbres intuitively and with ease?

This work was kindly supported by the Institute of Electronic Music Graz (IEM) and The Open University.

credits

released January 13, 2023

Concept, music and artwork: formuls

This work was kindly supported by the Institute of Electronic Music Graz (IEM) and The Open University.

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about

formuls Birmingham, UK

Ambient, glitchy, experimental electronic music generated by algorithms and musician-computer interaction.

formuls is James Dooley, an audiovisual artist from Birmingham, UK.

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