Valley Girl by Madalyn Merkey
My 2014 record, Valley Girl, was inspired by the agriculture and landscapes of Oakland, California and its horizon of rolling hills. The peaks and valleys of the album's landscape are made of fifteen computer generated tones that cycle through melodies driven by ambisonic surround-sound locations to define space.
Computer tones were treated with phase-modulation of triangle waveforms to control the duty cycle of the sine tone. This created a prickly crispness and coiled release that enabled frequency registers to shift back and forth with various levels of control. I used my voice and vocal harmonizer with a midi arpeggiator to make a gated succession of notes in a more controlled frequency range.
The computer material was recorded live with the addition of silence to accentuate vocals as a separate entity. The voice was then placed in the silences - or valleys - between melodies.
Madalyn Merkey
Tracklist
| 1. | Archipelago | 9:17 |
| 2. | Meridian | 2:12 |
| 3. | Aggregate | 9:30 |
| 4. | Arpent | 10:31 |
| 5. | Pluto | 10:14 |
Credits
Mastered At – Center for Contemporary Music, Mills College
Music By, Mastered By, Cover Art By – Madalyn Merkey
License
All rights reserved.
In 2015, Merkey translated the pioneer electronic music text, Due scuole di musica elettronica in Italia (1968) by composer Enore Zaffiri (b. Turin, 1928), from Italian to English.