Dérive

For quite a while this piece existed as a collection of parts that I knew I liked but couldn't persuade to belong together. The percussion had been designed months ago from my usual mixture of foley and field recordings. The rhythmic synths were already sitting in place. Individually, everything worked. Together, they stubbornly refused to become a piece of music.

This is one of those frustrating situations that probably feels familiar to anyone who writes anything. There comes a point where adding another percussion layer, changing another bass sound or automating another filter simply isn't addressing the actual problem. The issue isn't that anything sounds bad. It's that nothing has established an identity strong enough for everything else to orbit around.

The breakthrough came from an entirely different direction.

Almost halfway through the arrangement a feedback drone emerges that gradually becomes the gravitational centre of the whole piece. Once that existed, everything else suddenly made sense. The percussion had something to push against. The rhythmic synths acquired context. Even the vocal chops – which are simply my own voice processed almost beyond recognition – finally found a place within the arrangement. In retrospect it feels obvious, but I probably spent weeks trying to solve an arrangement problem that was really a sound design problem.

The interesting part, at least to me, is how that drone was built.

The starting point is one of the stranger oscillator models inside Ableton Live 12's Meld synthesizer – Bitgrunge. It's a deliberately abrasive little engine. Rather than trying to emulate analogue circuitry or pristine wavetable synthesis, Bitgrunge behaves more like a corrupted piece of ageing digital hardware. The closest comparison is probably an old home computer loading software from cassette tape, or the unstable chatter of an early modem. At its heart it's generating a lo-fi square wave, but one that's intentionally unstable and filled with digital artefacts.

On the surface it appears to offer very little control. There are really only two dedicated macro parameters. Freq determines the fundamental frequency of the square wave itself, while Mult governs the generation of sub-octaves. What's clever is how those sub-octaves behave. At low Mult settings the oscillator accumulates layers of increasingly dirty, crunching sub-harmonics. Push the control further and those sub-octaves gradually disappear until the sound collapses back towards a cleaner, simpler waveform.

By itself that's already an unusually expressive oscillator. What makes it genuinely interesting is that neither parameter really wants to stay still.

Instead of sequencing notes conventionally, I began treating Meld almost as a source of controlled unpredictability. Multiple LFOs were assigned throughout the patch, but not in the obvious "everything slowly wobbles" sense. Different modulation rates constantly altered the oscillator behaviour, interacting with one another so that relationships between parameters were always changing. Because the modulation cycles were deliberately mismatched, exact combinations rarely repeated. The oscillator wasn't generating random values in the mathematical sense, but it produced something perceptually very close. Long-term behaviour emerged from several deterministic systems drifting in and out of phase with one another.

In effect, Meld became its own evolving sequencer.

That constantly shifting digital noise then fed Corpus, where things became even less predictable. Rather than treating Corpus simply as an effect, it became another resonant system whose own parameters were under heavy modulation. Depending on where the resonances happened to land, the same unstable Bitgrunge source could become metallic, hollow, woody or almost vocal. The feedback paths created moments where tiny changes in excitation produced dramatically different harmonic structures. The drone wasn't really playing notes so much as continually discovering new resonances.

Finally, the entire signal moved through Spacebender, which added another layer of instability. Rather than hearing a fixed drone sitting in space, the texture continually folded back on itself. Reflections blurred into modulation, modulation generated new harmonics, and the whole thing acquired a psychedelic quality that felt alive without ever becoming chaotic. The feedback never quite repeated, yet it always remained recognisably the same object.

That's probably the aspect of the piece I'm happiest with. The drone sounds as though it's improvising, but almost everything it's doing is the result of carefully designed interactions between relatively simple systems. Nothing is random, but very little feels predictable.

Interestingly, the drone dictated something else that I'd normally think of as a compositional decision – the tempo.

The finished piece sits at 132 BPM, but that wasn't a number I arrived at intellectually. It simply turned out to be the point where the feedback breathed properly. Slow it down much further and the track began drifting away from techno altogether. Speed it up much beyond 132 and the drone lost something that I was unconsciously chasing from the beginning.

To be candid, I'm an old hippie. I've always loved that Hendrix approach to feedback – where it stops being an accident and becomes an instrument in its own right. Obviously this isn't psychedelic rock, and there was never any intention of recreating that sound literally. But I realised I was chasing the same sensation. I wanted the feedback to sing rather than simply make noise. I wanted it to feel expressive, unstable and slightly dangerous, even while everything around it remained mechanically precise. At 132 BPM those two worlds finally seemed to coexist. The relentless pulse of minimalist techno remained intact, while the drone retained something of that slower, post-rock expansiveness that first inspired it.

Once that sound existed, the arrangement almost wrote itself.

The vocal chops were the final piece of the puzzle. They're simply recordings of my own voice subjected to enough processing that they function more as texture than language. They don't tell the listener anything explicitly, but they reinforce the same slightly hallucinatory atmosphere established by the drone. Together they transformed what had previously felt like a collection of well-designed loops into something with a narrative arc.

Structurally, very little actually happens. New elements are introduced sparingly, and most of the arrangement consists of gradual shifts in timbre, resonance and spatial perception rather than obvious compositional changes. The movement comes from modulation instead of melody.

Looking back, that's probably what connects every part of the production. The custom percussion, the restrained rhythmic material, the evolving vocal textures and the central feedback system all rely on the same principle. Rather than constantly introducing new ideas, I became more interested in allowing a relatively small number of interacting processes to generate complexity over time.

Ironically, the most important part of the track isn't really the percussion or even the groove. It's a deliberately broken little square-wave oscillator inside Meld that spends six minutes pretending to be random – while quietly channelling a little Hendrix along the way.