Ken Ficara

Yesterday, I made my first contribution to ImprovFriday, an online live-improvisation event that happens every weekend. It’s a harmonitronica piece called “Never Enough Time,” which doesn’t actually feature any harmonica until about a minute into the piece. It began completely by accident; I started a loop, and half dropped my harmonica mic. The looped noise of me catching the microphone was interesting, so I kept it going, building it into a percussion track over which I played the harmonica parts. The piece I posted is six minutes excerpted from about 25 minutes of source recording.

I’ve spent the last couple of months upgrading the equipment I use to create my harmonitronica pieces — I’ll write more about the new rig soon — and I’m posting a few more pieces that came out of various experiments with the new setup:

• Bits Of Brass No. 1 and No. 2 are crude experiments inspired by my reading about granular synthesis and experimenting with a granular synthesizer for the iPad called Curtis (for Curtis Roads). Granular synthesis involves breaking sound down into very tiny pieces (“grains”) and then rearranging them. These two pieces were built up by looping very small slices of harmonica, less than a second’s worth, and layering them over each other. (No. 1 uses a lot of lo-fi delay, eight bits or even fewer, while No 2. uses quite a bit of harmonica-as-percussion, ie, tapping the harp on the mic.) Doesn’t quite qualify as true granular synthesis but I like the resulting sounds. None of what you hear on these two pieces is created by a synthesizer, or treated with filters or any effects other than delay. All the sounds are bits of harmonica, looped, fed back, and layered.
• Derangement (Blues in 1/e) is just basic loops, fed through a tape-echo style delay. I played with the rolloff and decay level, allowing some of the loops to get extremely distorted, and also adjusted the delay length on the fly to match the phrases I was playing. (You can hear this in process, since it takes a little while to settle in properly; I’m increasing or decreasing the delay time as I sync my live playing with the delayed phrase being played back). This may or may not have some unintentional resemblance to the mathematical problem of derangement, which is the question of how to permute objects so that none of them have their original positions. (As the number of objects gets larger, the probability tends to 1/e, e being Euler’s number.)
• The loops in Discreet Harmonica VI (Shimmering Filters) are run through a delay with a band-pass filter applied. I manipulated the filter cutoff to get the phased/shimmery effect you hear. Then I mostly just let the loops run against each other.
• Harmonica Staccato is long loops with short bits of harmonica, breathing, microphone percussion, and risky tapping of water glass with microphone.

I’m doing a lot of experimenting right now, so I’ll probably have more to post in the next few days.

I have a few new harmonitronica pieces online, all created with some new equipment I’m testing out. I’ll write more about this separately, but I have outgrown (or rather, my music has outgrown) the basic delay pedals I’ve been using. They weren’t flexible enough, didn’t offer enough loops, or enough control over the loops, and too much of the system was mono. More and more with this music I am trying to create spaces which means I need much more control over the stereo image.

In any case, here are the newest pieces:

• March Of the Zombies
  Halloween harmonitronica. A staccatto rhythm harp, overlaid blues harp using a filter, and percussion recorded live to a loop track. This takes advantage of a new sampler I’ve been using that includes some great effects and a nice set of drum sounds, as well as an ElectroHarmonix multitrack loop unit. This is all live, including the rhythm track.
• Why Are You So Far Away (Why Are You Not Here With Me)
  A sad and simple blues figure, with overlaid harmonies. There’s no rhythm here and all the effects are various delays from an Eventide TimeFactor.
• Discreet Harmonica IV (More Music For Housecleaning)
  This is a series of minor-key figures played on a chromatic harmonica, each running in its own loop, all different lengths, and themselves allowed to repeat and decay through the EHX system. Mostly the loops drifted on their own as I cleaned house. Every once in a while I’d play something new into the system, or change which loops were recording or decaying.
• Discreet Harmonica V (The Very Long Black Veil)
  A deconstruction of the country classic. I played the melody once, straight through, as you hear it, and looped it on one track of the EHX. Then as the melody played again, I recorded harmony parts, recording sections of those into three other loops, all different lengths. I then let those decay and overlay almost at random, adding some new parts here and there. I concluded it by allowing it all to decay as I played the melody one more time. These simple diatonic melodies work really well for this; the harmonies clash sometimes, but just as often they find surprising and beautiful new combinations.

As always, these are played completely live, and edited only for length (and in some cases for level).

An email correspondent asked what I meant in my previous post when I said that Discreet Music is not boring, since it’s not something you could really listen to all the way through. Perhaps a better word would have been “monotonous,” but I stand by my statement.

Robert Fripp characterizes Eno’s definition of ambient music as “music as ignorable as it is listenable.” Muzak® is neither ignorable nor listenable, because it’s so annoying. White and pink noise machines, the sleep machines that make artificial wave noises, and many other types of generative music applications (even some of the ones Eno has worked on) are ignorable, but not listenable. They are gentle and do not intrude or annoy, but if you focus on them, you get bored rapidly, because there simply isn’t enough happening.

“Discreet Music” is not like that. It’s non-intrusive, but if you do listen to it (and I have been listening to it a lot as I work on covering it; the version linked to in my previous post is only the first of many approaches to it) you keep hearing new things. It’s fractal in that respect — no matter how closely you look, there is more to see.

Meanwhile, I slipped out between sets at the Greenwich Village Bistro on Sunday night to browse Bleecker Street Records, where I found the 2008 reissue of (No Pussyfooting), which could also be called the “first ambient recording.” It preceded Discreet Music by two years and is the first recording of the kind of looping music I’m doing now. (Yeah, yeah, Steve Reich, Different Trains, etc. No doubt a huge inspiration to Eno, but not the same thing at all.) I’ll have more thoughts on that in a day or two; it’s stunningly beautiful and a reminder that sometimes “remastering” really does mean something.

Finally, here’s “Low Blood Sugar,” my latest harmonitronica piece, nine minutes of very noisy loops, including harmonica, synthesizers, guitars and filters, all played live.

Benoît Mandelbrot died on Thursday. I hadn’t realized the founder of chaos theory, the man who coined the word “fractal” to describe a concept he had discovered, was still alive. Fractals haven’t even been around for 30 years? But yes, that’s right; his original book was published in 1982.

For me there are two essential concepts in his work. The first is that many things do not get simpler the more closely you look at them. His classic statement of this insight was the question “How long is the coast of England?” If you measure it with a yard stick you’ll get one number. If you measure it with a foot-long ruler you’ll get another, larger number. If you measure it microscopically, you’ll get a much larger number. You could say that the length is, actually, infinite, getting larger and larger the more closely you measure.

What makes it even more interesting, though, is that he defined a class of functions that produce that kind of complexity. The most famous of those, when graphed, produces the famous “Mandelbrot Set.” The images of this set, usually brilliantly colored, are incredibly complicated and beautiful, but the function that produces it is very simple:

f(z) = z² + C

That’s it. That’s all you need to do to create those gorgeously complex pictures. You pick a constant number (C), and run the function over and over. You compute f(C). Then you take the result, and put it back into the function, computing f(result). You do that over and over (or better yet your computer does it for you) until either the results start shooting off to infinity, or stabilize at a single value. (Meaning, F(Z) = Z, so the results stop changing.) If it stabilizes, you put a point on the graph for C, because it’s in the set. You can color that point depending on how fast it stabilizes. And you do that enough, and you get those gorgeous pictures.

Breathtaking beauty and complexity, from calculations you could do with a pencil if you just had enough time. This is an illustration of one of the core principles of my atheism: Some of the most beautiful things in the world are created not by deliberate intention, but by the endless repetition of very simple processes. Glaciers, forests, ocean waves, clouds, light on water — they are far too complex to create intentionally.

Which brings me to generative music. Music is much simpler than nature, for the most part, and obviously you can create very beautiful music intentionally. But you can also create very beautiful and complex music from very simple pieces, if you loop them repeatedly and feed them back into each other. One of my favorite examples of the latter is Brian Eno’s Discreet Music.

It’s more than 30 minutes long, but it’s created from two brief musical phrases (something like seven seconds for one, and eighteen seconds for the other). He had both phrases in a synthesizer with a recall system (the EMS Synthi A, an early sequencer) which played them repeatedly. Since they were different lengths, they combined in different ways every time they looped.

He treated them with an equalizer to change the timbre of the notes, and then fed them into a long tape delay system. (A literal loop — five feet or so of tape.) Then he let that all run more or less unattended as he answered the phone, did other things, and occasionally injected something new into the mix. 30 minutes of that recording filled the first side of the classic album.

The result is beautiful and soothing and never boring, and I have loved it since the first time I heard it a quarter-century or so ago. (Come to think of it, I think I bought that album the same year Mandelbrot wrote his book.)

And today, perhaps in unintentional honor of Mandelbrot, I recorded a version of that piece on harmonica. I played the two basic phrases on a chromatic harmonica (the melodies themselves are very simple diatonic pieces in C or G minor, depending on your viewpoint), using an octave generator on the harmonica. I recorded each of them into a separate loop, leaving lots of space around them. I started both running, and fed them into a ten-second loop with a very long decay time. The two short phrases immediately started interacting in unpredictable ways, and it was very soon recognizable as “Discreet Music.”

Rather than modifying the loops with equalizers or a synthesizer, every once in a while I would play the phrases again, higher or lower on the harmonica, or with different settings on the octave generator, or with different embrochure. Those fed into the long delay and became part of the mix. The piece is (arbitrarily) about 15 minutes long, and for at least half that time I was just sitting and listening to the loops.

The result is not perfect (small flubs playing the phrases, or playing them a bit too loud, in a few spots) but I like it a lot. The original is better, but hell, this is all harmonica. And it was performed entirely live; what you hear is a direct two-track recording with no editing at all, other than fading it in and fading it out.

There’s a lot more to hear at harmonitronica.com, ranging from ambient pieces like this to very aggressive blues riff sampling to some lighthearted pieces. There’s even a political piece, and a gospel song, and I will be posting more pieces in the weeks to come. And stay tuned for the next time you can see some live harmonitronica.