Beams of the Declining Sun

by Milieu

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1.	Beams of the Declining Sun (Part 1 / Section 1) 02:00:48	info
2.	Beams of the Declining Sun (Part 1 / Section 2) 02:23:17	info
3.	Beams of the Declining Sun (Part 1 / Section 3) 02:39:40	info
4.	Beams of the Declining Sun (Part 2) 02:14:48	info

about

"After the dazzle of day is gone,
Only the dark, dark night shows to my eyes the stars;
After the clangor of organ majestic, or chorus, or perfect band,
Silent, athwart my soul, moves the symphony true."

-Walt Whitman, "After the Dazzle of Day"

'Beams of the Declining Sun' is the twelfth published recording in the open-ended Sleepbuilding catalog of generative ambient music, culled from overnight broadcasts on YouTube with the R-EW Audioholistics modular system, Open Broadcaster Software and two budget webcams. This piece runs for nine and one-half hours, and was created using the voice of the 'CSAW' sawtooth synthesizer mode in Mutable Instruments Braids (modeled after the Yamaha CS-80 from 1977) to play the Ionian scale, with a complex array of probabilistic/subdivided triggers for timing and a Turing machine-based sequencer. It was originally broadcast on April 25th, 2023.

Musically, the piece feels empty - not in a necessarily sparse or minimalistic sense (although it is still very much both of those things), but in a pastoral sense - like a landscape open in all directions, stretching beyond the vanishing point, composed of unoccupied space. Ground, distance and sky, lit by the remnants of a sun that has already sunk beneath the horizon. It is beautiful and also debilitating in its loneliness, the fullest embodiment of being truly lost and disconnected, an ocean of terrestrial space.

Following my previous consultation with the I Ching for suggestions on where to go, what to do, with 'Burned Oath,' it felt pertinent to once again ask the void for a direction. This time, the I Ching impressed upon me two clear ideas: Reduction of speed when I am able to detect a positive situation, and subsequently making progress through a dangerous situation without fear that something bad will happen to me. As with any aspects of the I Ching, there are many ways to interpret the poems, and apply them, but in this case, I feel that the key notion at play here is the sense that I am able to carry the warmth of happiness with me through the darker lands of uncertainty, that the work I'm doing to offer something constructive to the world can insulate me when the doom closes in again.

So I find myself weary at the end of long days of work, which as of late have been filled with brain-scrambling compositional chiseling and pedantic programming for what will eventually be my next significantly composed work. It is comforting for many different reasons to have these extended seas of pleasant emptiness within arm's reach, to slip into and slow down beside. The open landscape is not really so lonely after a while, only still and quiet, and it's reassuring to know that when I am fed up with wracking my brain over a microbial detail in a song that only I will notice has changed, this painterly plain of ego erasure is never too far away.

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YouTube playlist of all Sleepbuilding broadcasts: www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbcjgVJRSgeSHy00DZLB8zFFIJbIgcYjo

All prior Sleepbuilding releases to date (all FREE): campsite.bio/oscillog

For more generative ambient music delivered to your inbox automatically each month, please consider subscribing to my Vibratelepathos series: vibratelepathos.bandcamp.com

credits

released July 13, 2023

W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at and broadcast from White Pillar Workshop on April 25th 2023 using the R-EW Audioholistics modular system. Mastered by The Analog Botanist, July 2023. Text by Brian. Poem by Walt Whitman. Design by ABM&D using visual sampling of Frantisek Kupka's 'Study for Cosmic Spring / Amorpha' ca. 1911-1912. This is Milieu Music number MMD084. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2023. All nights preserved.

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Milieu Dayton, Ohio

Psychedelic electronic music, sun-warmed analog ambient and sci-fi braindance, for cats, aliens and epicureans alike.

I also release music as Coppice Halifax: coppicehalifax.bandcamp.com

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