Polychasia by Milieu

It's difficult for me to believe that the Vibratelepathos catalog has now reached one-hundred numbered volumes. In March of 2020, just after the pandemic began, I conceived of a series of Vibratelepathic Antiviral Broadcasts - music that would be built upon the foundations of the many years of ambient electronic recordings I'd made primarily with hardware and software synthesizers, live improvisation on guitars and process-driven work with tape machines, mixers and other sound-altering tools. It would differ from all of those things with the key focus being on building, learning and developing a modular system - a more varied and flexible system of individual machines that constituted a workflow that was completely unique to me, my studio and my creative desires.

I'd known about modular platforms for a long time before I began exploring this path, being intimidated by everything from worries about blowing circuits to spending too much money on things I didn't actually need, caving to the epidemic of "gear lust" and becoming yet another stereotype, always needing that next module to really get things going. By that point in time, I'd already amassed a considerable array of "in the box" machines - that is to say, synthesizers and drum machines that were all fixed in their design, unable to be repurposed to the degree that a modular system would be - and my plan was to construct a modular system that would be capable of fielding any sound source from anywhere in my studio and transfiguring it into something novel, thereby expanding the usefulness of machines that were otherwise quite restricted in their range. This plan would be the backbone of the whole design, with the hope that it would keep the system somewhat self-contained, not allowed to expand outside of its necessity and purpose.

So Vibratelepathos began with a handful of modular and semi-modular gear - a Cre8audio Niftycase of 84hp, with two Cre8audio modules (a simple sequencer and a dual-oscillator with two LFOs) and a home-build of Mutable Instruments' iconic Clouds granular synthesizer that someone gave me a very good price for online. These things, simple as they were, were ample to begin with, allowing me to begin transforming all sorts of external audio into new shapes, with additional modulation sources coming from my Korg MS-20 monosynth, a small CV array on Arturia's Microbrute monosynth and the CV I/O on the three Moogerfooger units I'd acquired from David Tagg's studio. It was awkwardly done, and unglamorous, but it worked, and through these seeds I was able to next determine where to go with subsequent machines - more modulators, more attenuators (never enough VCAs) and more sources of pseudo-random electricity that would bring my patches ever closer to the ideal of a hands-free patch that would simply emanate the beautiful music I wanted to hear.

As the pandemic plunged downward, and the initial five sessions were released primordially as numbered entries, I very quickly become aware of the fact that this was going to get deeper and wider in no time at all, and this Bandcamp page and subscription service were designed to make Vibratelepathos function a bit like a monthly magazine. The other side of the intent with the series was to bring something positive, helpful, holistic (with that word becoming a key reference for the name I gave my modular system) for a suffering world that was terminally online. A digital balm that was equal parts sound-utility and deep listening exercise, and something that was both lampooning and love-lettering many earlier new age albums filled with so-called "healing frequencies," audio placebos for hippies and yoga classes. I have a lot of appreciation for that world, for different reasons, and I don't wish to truly make fun of it here, but rather, offer my own take on these audio-holistics with a fair amount of self-deprecation and levity applied.

I don't want to put out records that are intended to hypnotize you, or cure a disease, or even help you sleep better. I'd much rather make music that is truly ambient, in the Eno sense, able to meet the listener wherever they really are - sitting inside a car, reading a book, studying for a test, writing lines of code, painting, hiking, cleaning, writing, in addition to all the usual applications for ambient music, like sleeping and meditating and getting stoned and forgetting you left the stereo on. Being able to forget the music is perhaps the most important part of its purpose here, just as one of my ultimate goals as the arranger of these pieces has been to create patches of electricity in motion that remain so dense with movement that I myself forget my own placement within them, and they continue on, by themselves, surrounding me.

As much an ascetic erasure of the ego as it is a grandiose exercise in engineering laziness, I often think Buddha would have really appreciated this whole approach of accumulating so many of your own decisions into a network that you can experience the output in realtime, as a passenger would, no longer requiring the distance of time and space between the artist and the art for the ability to truly "hear" your music to become clear. I've written about this a lot throughout this series, considering all aspects of the creative process as it applies to modular composition, and I feel that I've learned so many new things along the way that I really am not the same Milieu now that I was four years prior when I started out with all these ideas. Working with this series, and with modular music in general, has changed how I understand sound at the fundamental level. It has provided me with maps of all my other machines, which are now, by comparison, easily navigable, and opened the door to newer futures in mathematics, programming, sound design and (plug your rotten ears, Sam Altman) procedural generation.

As per usual, a wall of text and still nothing about the recordings now before you. Ha! This perhaps explains exactly what it is without having to explain it - a piece of music that is monumental enough to prompt a retrospective deep-dive on this entire series and its purpose. It is Vibra session 100, a milestone in the catalog simply because of what number it is, but also, like Vibra 83 before it ( https://vibratelepathos.bandcamp.com/album/a-topography-of-will ), a freely downloadable album that is intended as both a celebration of the series and a singular proof of concept piece without sequels.

What you hear on "Polychasia" exists in two parts - "Living Music" is the first, and "Evening Music" is the second. It consists of a very "classic" ambient music approach of lining up many different sound-events, each with a different runtime occupation and sense of rhythmic (or arrhythmic) time, which are designed to be harmonious with one another in any and all possible combinations. You hear ten unique voices in part one, eleven in part two, each bound to playing only a single note, with the timing of these notes each being different, sourced from esoteric sequencers using Fibonacci values, noise oscillators, extremely slow low-frequency oscillators, Euclidean patterns, probabilistic sub-dividers, Boolean gates and passive resistor ladders. It is what Eno rightly called "incommensurable" music, and "Living Music" alone runs for over nineteen hours, echoing the durational Sleepbuilding broadcasts that I've run overnight since 2022, adjacent to the Vibratelepathos catalog.

The second half of "Polychasia" is in fact the first half, transfigured by software systems that function not entirely differently from the modular system, but allow for a more molecular-level view of the composition work after the modular system has been turned off. With the first half of "Polychasia" recorded as "dry" as possible, without extensive usage of signal processors, only coloring a few of the voices slightly with a very transparent spring reverb in an attempt to present these voices very close to how they truly sound, the second half leans fully into the opposite mentality, sending these sounds through unreal spaces, altering their sense of time, and reshaping them entirely. Altogether, the full album runs for over forty-five hours, once again rendering the twenty-four hour "Sun-Day" series that I labored over "the hard way" for ten years almost comedically moot by comparison. Suffice to say, if I had a modular when I set out to make "Sun-Day" I would have simply made the Vibratelepathos catalog.

Here's to one-hundred more.

Explorations in generative music, ambient synthesis and audioholistics.

"It's music... I think"

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