0201: Intersections I

After what must be more than two decades of attempting to properly learn Max/MSP, this holiday season I took some time out and made one more attempt. I'm very pleased to say that this time it appears to have clicked for me, and I've actually got a proper device I've been thinking about for some time. I'll go into details about the device as it continues to take shape, but it is beginning to fulfill my desires to have a machine that crawls my library of bits and pieces and re-contrextualizes and re-assembles them, creating a shifting stream of sound that can be guided or left to its own to continue churning out music on its own. A Radio Free Arcadia broadcaster and DJ, if you will. This first example was assembled from a few different sessions with the machine, including: some explorations of the intersection of ambient and experimental music with traditional Irish music and the uilleann pipes; explorations from a highly influential recording of a folk song in played on an acoustic guitar in DADGAD tuning; a collection of my own ambient demos from 2023; finally, I fed it with its own output. This device will continue to evolve, and I hope to start broadcasting live with it in the very near future. Don't forget to check out the first release on the new Offnominal imprint - Treces by Mail Order Mystics, who are myself and my very good friend and collaborator Ryan Dempsey. I suspect the next episode will involve the broadcaster being fed with that album.