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Original Music

Digital Download

cc:me is an hour and seventeen minute long continuous electroacoustic composition commissioned by Elaine Whittaker for her Cc:me art installation, which premiered in March of 2012 in Toronto. It’s available to the public for high-quality download at Bandcamp.com. You can listen to it for free by clicking the Play button at the top of this post (Flash required). This version is slightly modified from the installation version: it has an extra 5 minutes at the tail, allowing the piece to end rather than loop continuously as it does in the installation.

Listening Notes

Because it was originally composed as an ambient accompaniment to a physical art installation, listening to the piece as a stand-alone composition for its full duration can be an extreme experience, primarily due to its length and slow pace. The piece evolves through 7 episodes, with the opening theme resurfacing and subsiding, before restating itself in its entirety to bracket and close the piece. Episodes transition into each other gradually and seamlessly, evoking a journey through a highly textured landscape with significant auditory events as landmarks along the way.

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Amongst the 3 dozen or so musical sketches I’m working on, this one has bubbled to the surface, mostly because my Mom asked me for a copy, which has encouraged me to take this one closer to completion than anything I’ve done in the last little while.

DOWNLOAD: New Symphonic Movement I (free download for PERSONAL USE ONLY)

It remains unnamed at the moment, though its working title is “Humble Beginnings” simply because it arose from a single, late-night improvisation of a very unique and texture-rich instrument from the German company Native Instruments called ‘Massive‘. Add a little Orchestral percussion and you have something interesting.

Once I started to get into it, I decided to highlight some of the hidden textures and emergent melodies within the texture using standard orchestral instrumentation – cellos, violins, oboe and clarinet, a little french horn. All of this courtesy of Edirol’s Orchestral plug-in. Finally, the Steinberg Grand Piano (de rigueur, and frankly a little overdone in this version – I will be cutting it back with great prejudice: it’s sounding a lot like my old stuff and the ‘Auger Sound’ is getting on my nerves), and a really cool violin sample using my wife’s cheapo Chinese-made violin for an oriental violin solo melody near the end. I call this instrument the “Shing Jea” violin, after Jeremy Soule’s Guild Wars Factions soundtrack (click here for a little sample on YouTube).

Anyway, here’s the first, unmastered cut. Because of the intense dynamics, you have to be careful of your speakers – I will be running it through a compresser and equalizer and other things to get a better loudness ratio before it’s finalized.

Enjoy.

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