Here is a piece influenced by fripp/eno and more specifically 'the gates of paradise' one of fripp's early ambient guitarsynth ambient pieces. it is also influenced by kevin shields' synth stylings and studio weirdness on 'loveless'.

story: was running late on getting a piece ready for week 12. was pretty busy and preoccupied with other stuff, then I had friday off work and a keyboardist that was trying out for one of my bands had left his keyboard, a roland juno. I wanted to see what some of the better presets on it were and found about 4 different sounds that I really liked.

that afternoon was pretty rainy but a pleasant spring rain that was steady. I ended up using the background sounds as a sort of inspiration for the melody I came up with, which ended up sounding pretty eastern and in a water theme. it was a rather spontaneous piece and another dimension I decided upon at the last minute (before the ambient idea I had wanted to do a noise piece, but I ended up not doing that) was to use some digital feedback loops on the overall mix. which added another element of texture and noise floor.

two mics were used and an ampeg and a marshall amp were the sound sources (the juno had a stereo out, one into the ampeg, the other into a loop pedal and then into the marshall). the combination of the roland synth and towards the end the alteration of the loops is the key to the track, but I did end up editing out a lot of the ambient street sounds, so this is an edit of the track which would have been another few minutes in length.

I wanted to stay above 128 kbps so here is the constraints, what is missing are some light rain, loud sirens, and some other random street sounds. I think some are still in there though so it should give you only a slightly edited version of the feel of the piece. the title is based on the chinese zodiac, 2012 being the year of the water dragon.

Tags: ambient, dragon, eastern, eno, fripp, melodic, synth, water, week 12 2012, View by:george bowles