As I make my way traveling through the early freeze in the American midwest, I've been particularly inspired to explore writing with some of the drone-y samples I prepared on the modular in the service of creating new ambient music reflective of the deeply grey environments I have been finding myself in. Here I am mixing icy, mallet-like samples from my Intellijel Plonk with longform, gently modulated low symphonic organ drones captured on the E352 Cloud Terrarium (pound for pound still the best named modular in Eurorack.) This workflow has been a very interesting and roundabout way to discover the sounds of my existing gear ... making samples out of context and trying to write with them circumstantially has reinforced my appreciation of a few of my less relied upon sources and gotten me fired up to add even more samples to the collection before its release.

In this video I'm also experimenting with an overlay of film grain in an effort to bring texture to the washed-out environment. I was somewhat shocked to discover this processing adds close to three hours to my render time on the laptop in the van ... but I'm digging how much the grain contributes to the "analog"ness of what is otherwise an entirely digital process from performance to capture.