Peter Riviera
By Disposable Planet on June 29, 2024 4:33 pm
"RIviera was slender, blond, soft-voiced, his English accentless and fluid. Molly said he was thirty, but it would have been difficult to guess his age. She also said he was legally stateless and traveled under a forged Dutch passport. He was a product of the rubble rings that fringe the radioactive core of old Bonn."
The Color of Television, Neuromancer-inspired album, Track #8 - "Peter Riviera"
This week we meet the seediest character of them all, holographic puppet master himself, Peter Riviera.
Peter is a thief and a twisted dude. The gang hires him because of he is a master of illusion. He has implants, but no not your usual cyberpunk body modifications. No he's implanted with holographic projectors which allow him to concoct holograms right out of thin air around his audience. He even gives a little performance in the book where, much to Molly's chagrin, he undresses her holographic likeness in front of an audience and proceeds with a dissection. You could say his advances were denied. Well, no wonder Peter has a huge cocaine habit.
He also tries to go up against Hideo, the Tessier-Ashpool vat grown ninja assassin who makes an appearance later on the album. Big mistake, Peter.
His tune is the longest on the album and also the jazziest. Some mysterious pseudo delayed arps built from a macrosyn struck drum instrument patch echo in the background, shifting perpetually along with the heavily chopped break. This is the tune that resulted in the drunksax instrument, used throughout the album a little, which complete his shifting patterns of light and form. Together the arps and the drunksax showcase Riviera's holographic projections which dance around the listener in audio form. The drunksax patch I'll share with you (but if you're really interested be sure to grab the free bundles off of bandcamp - all the M8 song projects and instrument patches are there along with an old-school FAQ about the album written in stealth57 font).
DRUNKSAX PATCH: It's a macrosyn sawsub instrument with the color set to 40 and the timbre set to E0. A little POST:AD distortion and an AMP of 20. Cutoff of 70 with a lowpass filter and a Resonance of C0. Some decent delay and reverb and just a little chorus. But the magic is in the LFOs. Four of them all free running. One set to PAN at 30 and another set to VOL at 20 to create a little dynamic mood. Then one Random LFO set to CUTOFF at 70 with a frequency of 01 (one 16th note to create the stepwise effect) and a Drunk LFO set to Color with an amount of FF and a freq of 40. This creates a stepwise oscillating broken saxophone/clarinet vibe with an almost wah-pedal flavor that works over long pitch slides and extended held notes to foster some dark & smoky jazz cyberpunk elements to the tune.
Thanks for listening so far! More to come! Next week is Maelcum's track, the Zion dub!
The full album is here for free licensed under CC Non-Commerical Non-Commerical Share Alike with all M8 song bundles included: https://disposableplanet.bandcamp.com/album/the-color-of-television
The Full Length Album Music Video on Youtube
All character names and quotes from Neuromancer by William Gibson.
This album is entirely unofficial.
Dedicated to my folks, Ralph and Sandra. RIP and infinite love.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
