(2015) Phased Music for 32 Instruments
For a long, long time I wanted to develop a piece of music about Steve Reich’s phase shift principle.
To achieve this I wrote a MAX 7 for Live application (starting from the great Maxpatch by Akihiko Matsumoto),
which in Ableton Live generates a musical phrase from 12 tones as a continuous loop and a second, identical phrase initially time-synchronous, delay each repetition.
As a result, the second phrase shifts continuously to the first and interesting rythmic structures emerge as well as by overlaying the phrases also constantly other melody histories. A phrase shift to the next sound takes about 24 seconds.
The instruments play the first phrase and identical other instruments play the second phrase.
As instruments (a total of 32, all produced electronically) I use Grand Piano, Harp, Pizzikato Violin, Marimba, High and Deep Bells of various kinds and some synthetic choral and surface sounds.
Instruments were Ableton Live with Max, as well as Korg Karma for a few melodic and flat accents.
The song is about 17’20” long, during this time the phrases shift continuously and the variety of individual instruments appear in groups and disappear again in order to reappear in a new grouping.
Has been released by french Label Alter K on streaming platforms.
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