Post\minimalism by Eryth

This album is a few pieces inspired by minimalist (/maximalist) composers from 60s/70s, plus one of my own. I took some of my favourite pieces and either took the original as a literal starting point, or developed the founding concepts into Eryth pieces. I wanted to play a bit more with the space between the sounds, so went for some softer-than-usual guitar tones and tried to keep the recordings as 'live' and spontaneous as possible to capture some elements of a live performance. In some I've tried to tweak the original concepts away from rigidly structured 'etudes' and into something resembling actual songs - much as the textures and rhythms of minimalism are great, I often dislike the sudden endings and lack of dynamics they often have

I've previously experimented with using various forms of minimalist techniques such as phasing and processes in interludes ('Sandwalking', 'Chiova', 'Cantus' come to mind), but here I consciously tried to not make the pieces too 'metal' and strayed closer to the 'rock' template, using my little tube amp and gentler drums, with more room reverb and as little editing/overdubs as my poor playing skills allow, to keep an element of live performance

In C, Diminished (Terry Riley)
One of the great things about 'In C' is the different instrumentation used on different recordings. I've yet to come across a guitar rock version, so this is it, and it kicks off the album in a familiar style. Taking the idea of the driving metric pulse to its extreme conclusion - with blast beats - this builds specifically on the first 5 or 6 phrases of 'In C', before veering off-score and improvising krautrock-style. I transposed to the key of C Diminished, as the original C Major simply won't do for any self-respecting rocker. The original piece is meant as a democratic exercise in collaboration, obviously hard to achieve solo, so I started with a rough sketch of moods for the whole piece, and built each layer from there, each time trying to react to the previous recordings. I had wanted to use much more varied instrumentation, but mapping out the MIDI and pretending it is improvised feels sterile, so I kept the guitar/bass combo throughout and mapped drums from a combination of pre-made grooves and some live MIDI-drums. The whole piece was recorded in one afternoon (except the final 'solo'), which hopefully captures some of the intended spontaneity

Intervals (Glenn Branca)
Inspired directly by some of the mid-period Glenn Branca symphonies - specifically No3 'Gloria' - this is a study of tone and how a few notes can shape a mood. The opening movement builds a diminished E chord from various tremolo, sustained and bass parts, building from a light-feeling tone to an almost unpleasant crescendo. By the last vamp there are 22 individual notes being played in various forms. I do like Branca's work, but I do feel he misses out on musicality at the expense of trying a bit too hard to evoke a discomforting tone - so I wanted my tribute to be more homogenous/tonally structured. I have also always enjoyed his rock-out moments, as they feel like a big 'fuck you' to any notions of holy minimalism or classical orchestration, so my piece also picks up a driving beat in the second movement, using Branca-style big 'canyon' drums. The guitars then switch to alternating Edim and G5 chords on six sustainer-led guitars, pulling out various tonal shapes, before ending on a (relatively) pure tone echoing the opening. The name comes from the subtitle of Symphony No3 Gloria - 'Music for the First 127 Intervals of the Harmonic Series'

Five Organs (Steve Reich)
Starting off identically to the Reich 'Four Organs' piece, I chose to slow down the tempo rather than elongate the length of each note. The BPM drops to a ludicrous 20bpm - the lowest my DAW can handle - and on listening through it felt very similar to a crawling sludgy doom piece. I added the guitars to follow the main organ theme, backed by taiko drums. The 'riff' itself is in 14/16, which is sort-of stable but also weird enough to sit in an 'uncanny valley', forcing you to be dragged along by the maddening organs. The original 'Four Organs' performance by Reich apparently had people banging their heads on stage crying out 'I confess, I give in, make it stop', which makes it very appealing for an Eryth piece… In the second half, the bpm rises back up, to a point even faster than before, turning into a churning off-kilter sort of chant. The organs are tracked via multiple MIDI lines, albeit through five synthesised VST instruments, giving the piece its name. The organ tones can go from soft and gentle to unpleasantly grating - in this way they reflect the tonal spectrum of typical post/sludge/whatever guitars - and give off definite 'invisible oranges' vibes. The melodies they generate are all eerily similar - cousins of sorts - and the same patterns recur now and again (I particularly like first variation and the one at around 26m46 myself), before coalescing back to the original opening blares at the end of the 30 minutes

Blinding (Philip Glass)
I'm not a huge fan of later-period Philip Glass (overdone) but his early stuff can almost feel Meshuggah-like in the endless labyrinthine repetition of pieces like 'Einstein at the Beach'. This calmer track is a cover of sorts of the piece 'Building' from that opera and 'Music with Changing Parts' - they have a great feeling of being both fast and slow at the same time. An arpeggio is played on piano (actually Glass' own sampled piano thanks to Spitfire LABS) and organs, repeating the same pattern with an unpredictable set of slight timing changes. As that undercurrent evolves, it slowly falls out of sync with itself and develops a pad-like quality, with the odd high piano note peeking through, an effect I really like. 'Building' has an improvised drone on various instruments, so I did my own version with sustainer'd guitars and bass - each line was recorded from a scale in isolation against the background only to try and keep a spontaneous feel. They variously combine/contrast to create some interesting chords. The titles reflects the 'aural washout' effect I get from listening to the two referenced pieces, as well as being a 'changing' of the opera movement's title, if you rotate the U to an N…

Petrichor (Chris Gunner)
I couldn’t resist making my own minimal composition - in this case I tried to make as 'pure' a drone piece as possible as part of my campaign to #makedronesoundgoodagain. Using the same tube amp tone settings as the rest of the album, tuning the guitar to an open Csus2 tuning and laying it on the amp itself, this is simply improvised guitar tracks where the only 'playing' is from subtle tweaks of the amp EQ settings. This emphasises certain string harmonics on the guitar, feeding back. The two left/right tracks have been minimally edited, with the various other effects in the form bass tones and resonant frequencies taken from sends of those recordings. The day this was recorded was almost biblically wet, and I'm sure the vibration of the rain on the roof had some subtle effect on prolonging the sound (maximum volume with earplugs probably helped…), so the name is a nod to the cleansing smell after rain, or indeed the silence after the drone

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