Father Yog-Astley (disquiet0546) by Smile Puppy

Father Yog-Astley by Smile Puppy

In the fall of 2001, I started creating pieces using Fruity Loops, like many people were doing. When I was working on this Junto in Ableton Live, using mostly the FM synth Operator, it kind of reminded me of those first few experiments and I decided to use a moniker I had given to these early experiments – Smile Puppy.

Recorded, mixed & mastered 18/19/20 Jun 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

Process notes

I decided to encode the names of cult leader “Father Yod” and YouTube legend “Rick Astley” via numerological nonsense via https://ift.tt/cLp3TFR. Of course, I misspelled “Yod” as “Yog,” so now that’s part of the code too. Let’s call that “Jimcryption.” This was a working title as well as a nod towards the decay of the analog/physical world and how the decay of the digital world equals data corruption, or something like that.

25 15 7 1 19 20 12 5 25

Then divided by 7 and kept both the quotient and the remainder
quotients – 3 2 1 0 2 2 1 0 3
remainders – 4 1 0 1 5 6 5 5 4

Then used a purported East Asian notation, Jianpu. Zeros = rests. I wasn’t altogether too careful here but I liked the results, so perhaps more Jimcryption/Jimcorruption.

Solfège: do ré mi fa sol la si
Notation: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

I am gonna go with F# for this
F♯ G♯ A♯ B C♯ D♯ E♯
1 2 3 4 5 6 7

So my tone rows are
A♯ G♯ F♯ R G♯ G♯ F♯ R A♯
B F♯ R F♯ A♯ D♯ A♯ A♯ B

I have 9 sets of two, so I went with 9/8, BPM of 86 with a “bridge” of half-time 43.

Bottom row (by 3s)
– accented the first beat of each dotted crochet 123 456 789.
– used a lower octave
– tonal with a percussive quality – FM marimba (Ableton Operator, “Metallic Noise Pluck” preset variation)
– 8th notes, no swing
– automated a few parameters in Operator

Top row (by 4s)
– accented the first beat of each of these divisions 1234 5671 2345 6712 3456 7123 4567 1234 etc.
– used a higher octave
– tonal, FM pluck sounds (Ableton Operator, “Plastic Marimba” preset variation)
– 8th notes, no swing
– automated a few parameters in Operator

“Bridge”
Touched on some “reverse-steganography.” Processed 1 photo of Rick and 2 of Yod and 13 wives and ran them through CoagulaLight1666. This produced three short grainy sound samples that were then stretched to varying degrees using Live’s Tones or Texture modes. I then sliced each raw Coag track to MIDI and superimposed the marimba MIDI into each, leaving them roughly in time with the marimba part. After that I added a Nectar plug-in to each and pitch corrected to F# maj. Finally, the entire Coag group was passed through an Ableton Delay preset, “Full Range Spatial.”

Decided to grab some 9/8 drum ideas from a book I have – “3,5,7,9 Rock!” by Don Reid – and add these in to create sections. Used Live’s “Jazz Kit” drum rack, tweaked a bit. I tried to accent similar to the marimba pattern and lower the probability of playing the hits off-accent (23 56 89).

Continuing with previous experiments with iZotope’s mixing and mastering tools, I used Neutron Equalizer, Neutron Sculptor & Neutron Visual mixer during mixing and used Ozone 9 for mastering. I mastered it twice and chose the first attempt for this Junto.

Artwork: Penn Station, NYC 17 Dec 2010, by Jim Lemanowicz

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This original version of “Father Yog-Astley” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0546: Code Notes. The Assignment: Make music that includes a secret message.

More on the Disquiet Junto at: disquiet.com/junto/

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