Sacrament by Dead Names

A mausoleum of lost souls and lost selves.
Recorded December 2018. No musical instruments were involved in the creation of this album. With artistic thanks to Éliane Radigue and Jean-Claude Risset.

* * *

In "Consecration", the sound source is the human voice, or rather its resonant frequencies.

"Communion" uses sine waves which recreate the overtones typical of tuned percussion instruments (bells, gongs), as characterised by the physicist Jean-Claude Risset. Between around 13'00" and 23'00" there is a voice shadow, which is a non-vocal sound source whose amplitude is modulated by the smoothed-amplitude function of a human voice.

This is distinct from ring/amplitude modulation in that the general shape of the vocal sample's envelope is preserved, while the finer structure is lost, meaning only the rhythm of the voice survives intact, and any words are obliterated.

Tracklist