When Songs Visit
Making of Obsidian Sky: Happy Accidents & Ableton Live
Obsidian Sky
Branches reach across
Obsidian sky
I often set my poetry to music. Sometimes my lyrics are much longer verse or prose poems, but I like the idea of crafting vocal lines from poetry fragments. That’s what I’ve done here with Obsidian Sky. And this track is likely to appear alongside a new set of works I’m developing as an EP.
Listening for Songs
I spend a lot of time at Houston’s expansive Memorial Park, watching the seasons shift over our big urban Texas sky.
Wildflowers and prairie grasses spring up, hawks perch high on loblolly pines, doodle bugs and wooly bear caterpillars creep, giant grasshoppers dart and flutter and alight, 10-foot-tall spindly sunflowers (my favorite) reach for more sun…
Along the winding trails that skirt the lake and savannah, I sing and chant and dance and talk aloud to myself and run the maze-like stone stairs up the side of the massive land bridges.
If I listen, sometimes songs visit.
Obsidian Sky is created from a collaboration with my recording software’s generative processes1.
Generative music is the realm of surprises and happy accidents.
We’ve come to associate the word ‘generative’ with AI—but that’s a relatively recent tech adoption of the word (and I don’t use AI in my music).
‘Generative music’ is a term attributed to Brian Eno.
The gist is this: co-creating and / or initiating musical processes within structures that foster happenstance, randomness, and emergent, evolving, unpredictable, sonic ecologies.
This approach often uses technology a la Fripp & Eno’s2 early work with tape loops, or later interactive worlds like Eno and Peter Chilvers’s music app series.
But generative work can be live and very human, too: initiated and developed through improvisation and relational practices. Parameters are established (rules of the game) that set the conditions for work to arise.
This is often how I work, whether in live or studio contexts.
Set the conditions for the creative process to reveal itself.
The Universe participates.
Misha Music Monday perk: please enjoy a peek of the isolated vocal tracks from Obsidian Sky with some unexpected harmonies. I sing all my vox parts “by hand”—in that, the multiple layers of voices are all me; I don’t use pitch shifting or software harmonizers:
Would you enjoy more glimpses into how my sonic worlds are built?
Pretty screenshots of Ableton Live
‘In strange and uncertain times a reasonable person might despair,
but hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this’
— Robert Fripp
I’m using Ableton Live more and more these days—it’s a recording software suite that does all sorts of wonderful things, and its features include ways to make music with the software rather than a focus on capturing performance (it does that too).
Favorite Fripp & Eno Albums: No Pussyfooting (1973) and Evening Star (1975).