Blister Pop Unlimited Blog

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Sleeping With A Grease by Gossamer Horatio

I woke up this morning with a simple idea – do the OPPOSITE of what I am supposed to do and then just reverse the whole track.

Recorded, mixed & mastered 21/22 Apr 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “Sleeping With A Grease” was submitted as part of ​Disquiet Junto Project 0538: Guided Decompression. Get someone from tense to chill.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes
Random generation of one MIDI part, Ableton Live Suite 11
– to focus more on the MIDI generation and effects here, I chose a preset for Live’s Wavetable device named “Drunken Flutters.”
– added MIDI randomization of notes/velocity plus a scale quantizer and settled into a nice peaceful Hirajōshi scale meditation
– I picked parameters I would change slowly when I hit record – wavefold distortion, the amount of notes being randomized and what notes I would change in the scale as the piece unfolded
– Set up a resample audio track and I hit record, changed parameters until I ended up with a more distorted & chaotic piece – about 5 min long
– Copied the resample to a new audio track, muted the other two, reversed, condensed it down to about 3:20 in the texture warp mode.
– Added two more noisy Live devices – Erosion and Redux & drew in automation to reduce these near the end of the track
– Added Reverb and Delay, did the opposite, adding more of each as it went.

Samples
– added two slow stretched excerpts of outside birds and lawnmowers from 04/21 in panned stereo and faded them as the piece progressed

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Apologetically Horny by Modern Crochet

A short sound poem illustrating one sad sorry car horn surrounded by an uncaring and angry world.

Recorded, assembled, mixed and mastered 14-16 Apr 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “Shedding Skin” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0537: Penitent Honk. Do sound design for “a missing gesture” of vehicular life.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes –
Instruments & materials – Arturia V2, Neutron semi-modular, small modular rack, Ableton Live 11, a handful of car samples downloaded twenty+ years ago, attribution unfortunately unknown.

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This was *not* recorded to participate in Disquiet Junto Project 0501: PKD Playback, from August 2021. Record the sound of a Martian daydream, interrupted.

Instead, I looked back at the project list in March 2022 and decided to work on something for this to include on the upcoming Heatsink album.

Recorded & mixed 20 Mar 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa. Mastered on 11 Apr 2022.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

Process notes –

This is comprised of two recordings assembled together on 20 Mar 2022
– a “no-input” Behringer Xenyx 1202 mixer (fed back into itself) from 11 Mar 2022. Look for Sarah Belle Reid’s videos on the subject for more info on how that is done. This was manipulated in Ableton Live into two tracks of an approximate length of 2.5 min.
– a guitar from 20 Mar 2022, recorded by laying the guitar horizontally on a table and going at it with various preparations and effects. This was manipulated into four tracks of various lengths, which also added up to 2.5 minutes. The disruption of the wife’s hairbrush at the end was created with an actual hairbrush.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

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Shedding Skin by Slant 7

Choosing fewer musical elements can be like shedding skin.

Recorded & mixed Apr 07 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “Shedding Skin” was submitted as part of ​Disquiet Junto Project 0536: Metaphor Play. Take a favorite figure of speech as a creative prompt.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes
Random generation of two MIDI parts, Ableton Live Suite 11
– string instrument pluck (single notes, arped)
– organ sound (two notes, using chord midi effect)
– Use only delay on string pluck sound – and env follower from organ to affect delay speed
– Use only corpus on organ and env follower from pluck to impact corpus decay
– Adjust gain/attenuator of env follower as the piece goes on.
– Automate reverb, Buffer Shuffler & distortion as piece goes on.

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Recorded on a train between Boston and New York, 31 Mar 2022, between 11:15am and 11:30am by Jimmy Lem for Blister Pop Unlimited.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “mice three mice mice” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0535: Jigsaw Disjunction. Break a familiar melody into pieces and play it in a different sequence.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes –
This was recorded using Xynthesizr by Phonolynth, Eventide Ultratap, iMusicAlbum’s Soundscaper, Supergroup Audiosave within Audiobus 3 on an iPad Mini 4.

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Train Dosage by Contraction America

Recorded & mixed Mar 24 & 27 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “Train Dosage” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0534: Transition Capsule. Record music to help people efficiently reorient between two zones.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes –

I took inspiration from the decompression period of 1-2 hours I would have on public trains before pandemic isolation – often spent improvising sounds on my phone, ipad or small hardware. I decided to mix train samples and some recent minimal VCV Rack experiments I did while taking the course Learning Sound & Synthesis by Sarah Belle Reid, which is something I am able to do with the the time I got back from not commuting.

The result is a wall of memory-erasing noise, the sounds that go on around us and the ones in our headphones, mixed. An imaginary pill to transition from city work life and back to suburban home life 5 times a week.

I used –
– Ableton Live 11, including the Echo, Channel EQ, Saturator & Limiter devices, as well as iZotope’s Ozone Elements for the master.
– Four tracks of manipulated freesound railway samples by robinhood76 (https://ift.tt/ifpkd9l)
– Four tracks of manipulated output from VCV Rack using bogaudio’s PGMR and VCV’s own stock VCO, VCF & LFO.

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Recorded & mixed Mar 11-13 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This original version of “Anger Issues” was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0532: Other Means. Make music about something you find difficult or unproductive to talk about.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes –

This is comprised of three recordings assembled together on 13 Mar 2022
– a guitar from 12 Mar 2022, recorded by laying the guitar horizontally on a table and going at it with some metal rods, a glass slide, a plastic bar-thing called a “triller,” an ebow, a bent piece of flat metal and then via a MIMI Fuzz, a Joyo D-Seed II and an Ammoon Pock Loop.
– a “no-input” Behringer Xenyx 1202 mixer (fed back into itself) from 11 Mar 2022. Look for Sarah Belle Reid’s videos on the subject for more info on how that is done. That was my first time doing that.
– There are also some sliced bits from an older track, a 10 Mar 2012 guitar track where I used some of Live’s random MIDI capability to then trigger the slices.

As this type of guitar/noise recording has some roots in some of my own experiments from the early 90s on 4-track, I’ve tried to simulate that by *almost* not allowing more than 4 tracks to be playing at once, along with some tube/tape settings from Live’s native devices. As the track progresses, I mix in Live’s Echo device and Live’s Hybrid Reverb device. I then mastered this by using iZotope Ozone Elements.

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Recorded & mixed Mar 04-05 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

This track was submitted as part of Disquiet Junto Project 0531: Noise Sculpt.

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

Subscribe to project announcements here: tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Process notes –
This project was a bit special to me because I sleep with brown noise and a fan and sometimes as I am waking, I swear I hear music that is not there.

This track uses an ipad recording of the same fan and brown noise which was then further manipulated with the ipad field recording app FieldScaper by Igor Vasiliev. I then simulated one of the melodies using a guitar sample I recorded in November 2013 and then pitch-shifted.

I have a standard finishing process that includes Ableton Live’s limiter and utility plugins followed by applying iZotope Ozone Elements at my discretion.

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Sphere of Influence by Lumber Mart

Recorded & mixed Feb 24-46 2022 by Jim Lemanowicz at Blissville Electro-Magnetic Laboratories of Massapequa.

©2022 Jim Lemanowicz

Process notes –
For over 950 days, since April 2019, I have recorded at least 5 min of sound a day if I chose to record at all. Ideally, this would have been every day but there have been breaks. These have mainly included random note generation and improvisation in terms of “density” in its many forms.

For this assignment, I used approximately 5 minutes of a 30 min piece recorded as “Day 952” for this assignment.

24 Feb 2022 – main recording session
– Ableton Live 11
– SonicLAB Fundamental 2 – I used this to generate random tones
– Ableton Clean Delay – I used this to embellish
– Ableton Filter Delay – I used this to embellish

26 Feb 2022 – editing, mixing and mastering session
– Warped setting on Beat
– Stretched to about 10 min and then snipped down to the final length
– transient envelope forward and very short
– these were all used to limit sound and add space
– K-Devices Shaper – this is mixed in gradually from start to finish, also serving to limit sound and bring us away from the tonal.

I have a standard finishing process that includes Ableton Live’s limiter and utility plugins followed by applying iZotope Ozone Elements at my discretion.