This is a truncated version of a 15 minute piece I made for my Grandmama. Full video below.

I started with my original experimental musical instruments, a Stylophone playing into a Korg Monotron Delay. The first note is extremely long because I was trying to figure out what was going on with the Delay, as it wasn't giving me the feedback I was expecting. I started my musical career by manually holding a note on the Stylophone and bringing up the volume until it starts feedbacking in the Monotron, but it took me a second to realise that the feedback knob was turned down too low. Once I fixed that, I brought my note back in and back out, allowing the feedback to drone into noise.
Once I got the noise drone, I moved onto my Roland TR-8 set to 40 BPM. I turned up the sidechain compressor that the noise was feeding into, and brought in a four-on-the-floor kick drum. I programmed the next notes to have a slow house beat during the recording, and added a reverb and delay step on the 5th and 13th kicks. This allowed for a hypnotic effect once I brough in a clap on those beats, kind of like an eastern chant or something.
Once I was happy with how the drums were playing, I moved onto  my MicroKorg. I played a single note with a super low cutoff and resonance for a long period. It was running through my looping pedal, so I recorded a few seconds of it and let it play throughout the rest of the piece. The pedal went into a reverb, compressor, and chorus pedal, which allowed for the note to have a bit more body.
Next came my midi keyboard that I had plugged into my Behringer Crave and Neutron. They were synced to the drum machine in a weird way. The TR-8 only has midi sync out, so I synced it to my Volca Drum which I then used the sync out function to sync my Korg SQ-1 using a very long headphone cable. I then turned off all but every 4 gates on my SQ-1, and connected the CV Gate output to the Tempo input on the Crave. I turned on the Arpeggio function on the Crave, and turned on the Hold function from time to time throughout the song. Linking the midi out on the Crave to the Neutron allowed me to create a drum-like effect by turning the attack, decay, sustain, and release way down. I set the LFO to be pretty slow, and used a touch of the Mod Depth to bring the notes in and out. I did something similar for the Crave, except with a much fuller filter that allowed the notes to really hang and glide.
After holding the note to play indefinitely, I moved on to my Sonicware Liven Ambient 0. I had an experimental patch created for a NAPKiNEAtER live show that I hadn't used, and I messed around playing it with an extended delay. It was set to have a pretty quick LFO that gave it this UFO-like feeling, and just enough attack and release to keep everything fluid. I noodled around on it a while because I just wasn't ready for the recording to end, and I wanted to keep everything dynamic.
Once it was time to end the recording, I played a final little solo with the Crave/Neutron combo, then slowly turned down the different instruments by ending the loops, reducing the feedback, and bringing out the drums.
This recording is pretty out there, but it has been extremely therapeutic for me to listen to when I'm feeling particularly sad. I finished the mix a few days later, mostly separating out all the tracks and cleaning up the low end, as well as separating the Neutron and Crave tracks to become stereo once I had turned up the feedback on the Neutron. This process took a while, like I only finished it on the following Wednesday.

For the video, I recorded some video wizard stuff by pointing a camera at a TV and then using a video mixer to mirror the horizontal/vertical axes, and then mixed it with a second version of the video with additional color processing added. I was able to play the visuals to generally match up with the music, but I knew that I also wanted to add a video element that would come in during the rough parts where the visuals don't match the music as well or glitch out or something.
For that, I thought about how my Grandmama used to have a friend who would go rock hunting out in the middle of the desert. This other woman knew the desert so well that they never got lost, and they would be out in the middle of nowhere all day until that woman's family would pick them up. I decided to trust my best friend Trevor S to do something similar, so we went on our own adventure. He shot whatever felt right to him, and I offered suggestions, but fully trusted him to follow his own vision for the camera work. It was really nice.
I then mixed the footage from both together into the final edit, and overlaid the Video Wizard stuff with the color opacity to marry the visuals together.

[youtube]https://youtu.be/qLBLse4Oh84[/youtube]
https://youtu.be/qLBLse4Oh84

Tags: experimental, funeral, in loving memory, psychedelic, synthesizer, week 29 2026, View by:Earp Lug