The Warrens by cmcavoy

"The Warrens of Magic dwelt in the beyond. Find the gate and nudge it open a crack. What leaks out is yours to shape. Open yourself to the Warren that comes to you - that finds you. Draw forth its power - as much as your body and soul are capable of containing." from "Gardens of the Moon" by Steven Erikson

A series of improvisations hastily recorded in February 2018 while reading the fantasy novel "Gardens of the Moon". Steven Erikson created a deep magic system in his Malazan novels ("Gardens of the Moon" is the first of ten). His magic users draw energy from one of several Warrens - each of which supplies a flavor of magic - chaos, light, dark, fire, there's 27 listed in the Malazan fan wiki, which contains over 5000 pages.

The idea of drawing and shaping magic from an outside-of-reality place is common in fantasy literature, but Erikson goes much further in defining it. It strongly influenced these recordings. Each track in this collection is a mixture of one of three core instruments - the Ciat-Lonbarde Plumbutter 2, Teenage Engineering OP-1 Mutable Instruments Clouds and Make Noise Morphagene. Each instrument represents a sort of Warren-like source of sound (magic?). PB2 - earthy shamanistic, OP-1 - clean, bright but with a fairy-like mischief, Morphagene and Clouds - slice and recombine sound in a chaotic mix.

This album mixes these sound sources in different combinations, recorded directly to 4-track cassette with minimal editing. The PB2 creates some very high frequency noises here and there, I chose to leave them in. The track "Tiste Liosan" contains a classical music sample from local FM radio, I don't know what the song was so can't properly attribute it. Apologies to the artists.

Modular synthesist, lofi improviser.

https://www.youtube.com/user/cmcavoy