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Koala Sampler Experiment 290224A – Distress Call

A fun little piece that I whipped up on Koala Sampler using nothing but a few audio snippets from early 70s TV commercials (the very first thing you hear, in fact, is an absurdly stretched out sample of Joanne Worley laughing in a laundry detergent commercial). You would never know. The end result is a dive into ambiguous cosmic horror. Who (or what) is making the distress call? Who (or what) is encountering it? That’s up to the listener to fill in the blanks.

The dispassionate computer voice is wink to Alien and 2001, and all the other great scifi films in which cosmic terror is met with cold machine precision, offering absolutely no comfort to any accompanying humans (or the audience!).

This was my first stab at anything remotely narrative (some of my early Elektrodoom tracks had hidden narratives, but nothing overt).

‘Distress Call’ is now up to something like 200 plays now on SoundCloud, so I’ll probably do more of these since people seem to enjoy them.

BONUS QUIZ: Somewhere in there is a very brief sample from Blade Runner. Can you find it?

Granular Experiment – Polyend Tracker (Purely For Pleasure ) 2024-03-12

The Polyend Tracker Mini is a magical little device that’s forcing me to approach music in a different way. Typically it uses very short samples in an almost multisampling context, but here I’ve pushed it to use longer voice samples from my ever-growing library of 70s TV commercial snippets that I’m preparing for my hauntology project.

The ‘Uh huh!’/’Cool clean taste’ bit is from a 1971 Certs commercial, and it’s deliciously mangled using the PT Mini’s granular engine. ‘Purely For Pleasure’, believe it or not, is taken from a 1971 Butterfinger commercial! The laugh you hear was from a CB radio transmission I captured over the holidays. The broken melody is just a Euclidean sequence I used to fill out the bar.

Anyway, it’s a fun little track that is a harbinger of weirder stuff to come. Stay tuned, space cadets!