I was asked by my friend Captain Credible if I wanted to be a guest musician on a few of his Jamuary jams.
So he brought some sketches he had made on his Polyend Tracker Mini while taking the ferry between Nesodden and Oslo, and visited my studio. I don’t participate in Jamuary myself, but I thought it would be fun to play on some of his jams, and also use the opportunity to try out some filming techniques.
Jamuary is an annual artistic challenge where electronic musicians commit to posting a raw, unedited “jam” of music online every day throughout the month of January.
This can be super valuable for people who either get stuck in a rut not able to finish their tracks, for people to get over the hump of daring to post stuff online, or for people who don’t have enough time for music in their life.
This is not the case for me of course as I have almost too many ongoing projects and plans, but for me this little jam meetup also served as a bit of a lighthearted jam session in contrast to my more “serious” projects which is my work as an artist.
Well, as mentioned Daniel (Captain Credible) had made some stuff on his tracker while commuting, so we used that as starting points. We listened to the patterns and made a sort of arrangement – “Ok, play the intro, main part two times, then I’ll do a solo, then we do the outro”.
Many Jamuary videos focus on small dedicated setups, so I also thought it was a nice challenge to just bring a few hardware pieces and see what I could get out of them.
So for the first jam I used two instruments. My Endorphin.es Shuttle System, which is a Eurorack modular system, and Snowgrains which is a granular synth instruments I have programmed for the Critter & Guitari Organelle-M.
I start off by playing some granular sounds sampled (I think) from the melody in Daniel’s tracker. Then I come in with the modular. We sent midi from the tracker and then I am tweaking the sound while the notes are playing. It gets pretty out of hand and is charmingly out of tune.
I think might be my favorite. It was also a good opportunity, to go really crazy with my 360 camera, hehe!
For this one I am using only Snowgrains. I am switching between the granular sampling of the main beat, and the subtractive synth, mostly playing a wobble bass controlled with midi by the tracker.
I am mostly changing octaves and filter cutoff on the bass, and bringing the granular in and out. There is an LFO on the granular start point so it sounds a bit different every time I bring it in.
Few things say Jamuary jam more than using a Volca, but I haven’t seen too many Volca Modular users around. This time it is not being sequenced by the tracker, but I am receiving clock to synth the timing.
I am mostly on abstract percussion duty here.
Also look at those tiiiiiny patch cables!
If you are interested in learning more about Daniel and his music I suggest you go watch the episode of Talking with the C.O.U where Daniel is the guest. We get into very nerdy interesting things.
You can watch the episode on the Center of the Universe Youtube channel.
That was fun. Three casual jams with a friend. I recommend it.