Tralfamadore

Summary

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse 5 'The children's crusade' follows the story of a man who, as a result of the damages to his mind during World War II, imagines being connected to a faraway planet he calls by the same name. He lives most of his life travelling back and forth between this planet and earth, reliving his memories from the war. 

Our minds, in their dysfunctional state, sometimes, are capable of morphing reality and creating an otherwise impossible bridge between the real and abstract, the tangible and intangible. It is therefore quite fragile , the fabric of reality and the linear passage of time that we percieve as the foundational fabric of our existence. 

Hence, this track also refers to the concept of Parousia. The idea is 'being' in the sense of the word, human being, or a being or just being as a state of existence. 

Audio 

The track is composed mostly using a  characteristic drone sound using the Behringer Crave modular synth. A patching of the synth enabled a mixture of square and triangle wave manipulations, along with modulations using the High pass filtering. The track was 'performed' using manipulations of the dials as a play along with the pre-arranged percussion and bass layers. Additional effects such as reverb and delays were automated using Ableton. 

The composition itself is richly textured, however it does have a steady beat to propel it forward and mark the important transitions. The aim was to create an atmospheric and ambient sound, richly textured but minimalistic and focused on the sound of the modular synth. 

The synth layer acts as an extra-terristrial / alien sound interacting with a more worldy sound of a wind instrument. This forms the central motif of the track. An interaction of the strange and unknown and its presence in the midst of the known and discernable.

Video

The primary tools available were Ableton in conjunction with MAX for Live. This was used to facilitate audio reactive video edits. For this track the Vizzie module was singularly used. 

Following a similar theme as the audio, the visuals are a blend of worldy landscapes interacting with an  artificial morphing between the various pixel data in the contained frames.  The idea was to create an absract representation of a real world landscape (in this case a clip of a seascape shot in Cobh, Ireland along with a photograps from Galway coast) to respond to various pixel transformations using filtering , morphing, displacement and other techniques. This , along with the inherent color layering of the superimposed image / video frames result in an abstract and interesting.   

Thanks for listening and watching!