Unsubscribe by Ned Rush

Hello everyone and welcome to my new album which is out now. https://rudenhs.bandcamp.com/album/unsubscribe

I made it in roughly 3 to 4 weeks throughout August, so it's very raw. Whilst this is technically my 9th solo album (I think), it's the first I'm releasing under this name, because I wanted to do something different with the release format, which is why I've invited you to this event, to take part.

To start with, you can stream it for free on Bandcamp or you can buy and get loads of extra fun things like bonus tracks, artwork made in collaboration between myself and the highly talented James Hayball Art, a commentary, plus the Ableton Live 9 files. If you don't own Ableton, I apologise for that. You could always take the files to someone's house who has Ableton Live and listen to them there. I'll make sure that the files are both Suite and Standard compatible.

Now I know stems are fashionable these days, but this is more than just a sharing of a bunch of project files. This is an invitation to take part in an extended listening experience as well as a sharing of ideas.

Whilst I was making YouTube videos this year I started to gravitate towards some of the stuff I was doing in them and thought I'd actually use bits of them for making music (I wouldn't normally. Most stuff I do on YouTube are ideas I don't think I'll ever personally use). I also thought it was a good excuse to make a record by imposing rules on the whole process, such as strict limitations, and the exclusion of things. This has brought me to sharing the pieces in this way, so you're welcome to dive in and explore these limitations and how they produced the results. You can listen to them in your own way, tweak them, or pull them apart and throw them in the bin. You could even swap out the sounds I used and put your own in to completely change the entire timbre of the tracks. That'd be cool actually.

The rules and boundaries are in abundance. For example, every track has been made on one midi channel, using only one sound per track, and very often, using only one midi note, C3 in most cases, so you could easily press this note on your keyboard and hear the whole track. I also used one instrument (Sampler) for all the tracks, and I tried as much as possible to use no audio effects. Sure there may be some dynamic processing cause you need it, and maybe a delay on one track, but no reverb, distortion, no time based effects and no VSTs. All the sounds are designed in many many instances of Sampler, using one sample per song for all the elements in the music.

Most of the effects that are used are midi effects, so all the complexities and approaches to percussion and harmony are going on before the sounds without any traditional sequencing or composition. Instead, there's deep midi processing, parallel triggering, midi filtering, creating sequences using arps and scaling, all macroed into a sort of performance submix. With this, I decided to go deeper into something I've always been interested in of using generative approaches to create musical things, so whilst there's riffs and melodies here and there, there're also many chance elements and random events, which is really the main reason for offering out the song files.

The problem with making generative music is that it's very hard to know when you've recorded the best take, especially when you've put in potential for many unexpected events, and whilst I've captured takes, jams, performances of each track, they are in no way the definitive version, so I invite you to extend the listening out into your own personal definitive version by opening up the song files, hitting play and exploring what's going on, remixing as you go, or just listening to it do its thing. Every song is happening in one midi clip.

The samples vary from drum loops, to field recordings, to sounds of me and my mates when we were drunk. They are then stretched, squashed, sliced and sprayed into music. Everything you hear on each track is just one sound, the beats, bass, chords, melodies, all one sample.

So with a mixture of random events and hardcore granular design, expect an eclectic mix of glitch, ambient, noise, breakcore, musique-concrete, electro-acoustic, avant-garde and good old fashioned experimental electronica, as those of you who know from watching my YouTube videos, I like to go a bit "out there".

Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading and taking part.

Computers + Instruments = Me