Piichom
By Earp Lug on February 6, 2026 11:16 pm
Everything in life feels kinda weird and broken, but we still have to go to work.
For this piece, I started by playing the glitchy experimental noise patch called Synth Mode 6: panic voice on my Ellitone Multi-synth. I got it to oscillate and kinda play some repeating notes, but the sound was too harsh and I wanted to put it through a filter. I used the filter in of my TD-3 bassline synthesizer with the oscillators turned off, and I selected a pattern where it played and stuttered in and out. I connected the BPM to my Volca Drum which was BPM-synced with the LFO output of my Stylophone CPM-DS2. I also took the BPM sync out of the Volca and put it into a Korg SQ-1 sequencer. I took the CV out and connected it to the pitch of one of the DS-2's oscillators and the cutoff of its other oscillator. I also took the MIDI out from the Korg SQ-1 and fed it into my MicroKorg so that the notes would be synced with that one DS-2 oscillator's BPM and pitch. Finally, I turned off the active step on all but 5 or 6 of the notes on the notes on the SQ-1 sequencer so that it would play rest notes 10 or 11 steps out of 16, set the notes of the remaining steps to I think 4 notes, and then set it to play randomly so it would randomly generate the melody in the sequence.
To perform the piece, I hit play on the sequencer with all instruments aside from the MicroKorg muted. It had a pretty fast attack but long release so it would hold the notes until the next note was played. I then brought in the Stylophone DS-2 by both turning up the drive and raising the cutoff of the oscillators. Next I brought in a really simple drum synth sequence I created on the Volca drum. Finally, I brought in the noise patch running through the TD-3 by both raising the volume and raising the cutoff and resonance.
From there I just jammed for a bit, bringing in and out different sounds and trying to find a good balance of noises in different parts of the sonic spectrum. I re-recorded this part several times until I felt that the song was tight enough - most previous recordings were longer than four minutes. Once I had it down to about two and a half, I took the sounds and started editing them in my DAW of choice, Premier Pro. I added some chorus to add texture to the MicroKorg, as the notes started to sound grating after they held for too long. I showed it to my wife, and she felt like it might be missing something.
I decided to experiment with just adding a few more randomly generated notes from the MicroKorg, so I shortened the release and recorded a few minutes of the computer's melody. I synchronised it with the track, pitch-shifted it up an octave, and then reached out to my buddy Will who likes my experimental synth tracks.
The next day Will came over, and he said that if I wanted, the track has room for a high pitched drone sort of like a song he showed me from the Portal 2 soundtrack. I recorded a few minutes of my DS-2's drone with a lower LFO depth and the rate pulling from an attenuated external sine wave oscillator in order to add a little more chaos to the sound and threw it on the timeline. We turned the volume way down so it was a barely-noticeable hum, animated its loudness so it would come in and out in time with the TD-3's noise channel, and called it good.
The day after that I slightly panned the noise to one ear and the TD-3's noise to the other in order to really make sure they wouldn't be fighting too hard for the same frequencies.
For the video, I took footage from my dash cam on my car that was recorded over the course of a few days and edited it to the music. I drive for several hours a day running errands between a few cities in New Mexico for the movie I work for, and I have a LOT of driving footage. I thought I had more, but it turns out the SD card on my camera overwrites itself every few hours. Still plenty of different images to pull for an experimental music video.
I spent a lot of time trying to massage the colors to look weirder, but in the end I just decided to keep the footage raw because I like the dashcam video aesthetic. It's kinda grainy and crunched up, and I love how it looks compressed down to standard definition and then upscaled to HD. I hope you like it too, but if not, rest easy - I'll be making another one next week!
https://youtu.be/k7dHnSsUODE
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA)