I find working on these sounds surprisingly fascinating. It makes me quite aware of the geometry of LFOs and oscillators. It connects with the Pythagorean character of music making, I suppose, particularly in the digital realm where everything is number… Circles and triangles and squares etc. interacting in cyclically cycling cycles. Stacking them and combining them in different ways leads to some surprisingly non-linear results; surprising because there’s not a lot of use made of random LFO waveforms.
I see them as streamlined, micro-compositions, miniature, non narrative and abstract, with fundamentally very solid structures based on the LFO interactions. It can take a surprisingly long time to find something that strikes me as finished. It’s a pretty intuitive process, but sometimes I have a very vague impression of some imaginary entity that might make such a sound, which is a sign that it’s done.
I’ve always been drawn to the patterns of tree bark, since discovering the music of Morton Feldman years ago, and these irregularly cyclical sound specimens have something of that quality. More to follow…