Mount Pluvia
By Earp Lug on February 14, 2026 4:28 am
This week's song was fairly simple. I played a single note on my Casio SA-1 into the delay in my Stylophone CPM-DS2 and turned it up until it began to self-oscillate. Over the next two minutes and eighteen seconds, the sound began to distort and then fall apart into distinct resonant tones before I faded it out.
I played the same note a second time, and this time it fell into slightly different tones. I synchronised the recordings, and panned one all the way to the right and the other to the left so that the tones would sort of bounce back and forth with eachother.
I then played some ambient notes with long Attack and Release and a really low Cutoff in my MicroKorg and synchronised it with the other droning sounds.
Finally I recorded some more of my DS2, this time with a really long LFO rate. I set one LFO to a complex stepping pattern, and the other to something like a double sawtooth. I cranked up the Delay, but not to the point that it would self-oscillate, and added a small amount of Reverb.
After adding all the tracks to the same timeline, I animated their levels so they would come in and out at different times to give the song more texture.
For the video, I was initially planning to take footage from a balloon ride on Valentine's day, but it was too rainy so I filmed some footage of one of my favorite mountains instead.
I slowly zoomed in and out multiple times from both the front and the back, and used them to mark the beginning and end of the video.
I combined multiple takes by using the Lighten Opacity setting, and then isolated each track into either Red, Green, or Blue (the three primary light colors), and overlayed them. It created this great effect that I experimental with in Scrapnel, but to a higher degree.
The mountain footage, even slowed down from 60 frames per second down to 30 wasn't quite long enough to fill the full video, so I sped the two clips up slightly and added some additional footage of raindrops on my windshield that I recorded while waiting in the Taco Bell drivethrough. The footage was recorded in HD but as I'm editing at SD, it was especially zoomed in. I slowed it down to 30 frames per second as well, overlayed it, and this time isolated the colors to teal, magenta, and yellow (the secondary light colors) before using the Lighten Opacity setting. I like how it looks like abstract shapes floating through space, and it adds a nice bridge between the similar ending and beginning.
My buddy Russell and I were talking about "play" and not taking your work too seriously. They like to juggle, and they don't push it further than they would if they were just playing.
I was trying to convince them that you can play in the video edit, and what do you know, I did just that for this week's video. Is it good? Is it bad? Who knows, but I had fun playing around with it at every step, so it's a success in my zine.
Originally this track was going to be titled its running time, but I had the idea to call it Mount Pluvia after I finished the video, so I can save that other title idea for a future song if I want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F1R8j05Koc
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)
