KLANG - Oberheim Eight Voice
Release Trip Day #3
Chor der Oszillatoren
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If you didn’t already do so yesterday, download my sound collection for GForce OB-E. It is free – only for participants of this trip.
If you don’t own OB-E yet, try out the demo on the GForce website. If you like it, get it now for half the price.
If you just want to play around with my sounds, get one of the last free OB-EZ plugins. Just reply to todays email with the subject line “OB-EZ” and I’ll send you an activation code as long as they are available.
And of course: Pleeease share your explorations!
NOTES
Chor der Oszillatoren
In contrast to yesterday’s piece, which was a precomposed one, Chor der Oszillatoren (choir of the oscillators) is one of the free improvisations I mentioned earlier.
Sitting in front of a vintage synthesizer and just looking at it does something to my mood, shifts the focus of my consciousness. And this actually differs with any specific instrument. When I touch and play it, this fragile state starts to deepen and a world of its own opens up its gates.
I’ve noticed this for years and especially for the KLANG series of albums, I wanted to hold space for this fascinating spiritual interaction between my soul and a machine (or is it rather the soul of its creator carrying over?) to happen.
That’s why I built into my guidelines to play free improvisations with every synthesizer – no prearranged ideas, no expectations for the outcome, just being open and receptive, creating in the moment from a blank page.
This piece is exactly that. And I was surprised with the outcome. If I had to describe the Oberheim Eight Voice with one word before the experience, it would have been: Massive.
While this is still absolutely valid, the thing that mesmerized me most in its presence, was the subtle interactions between those voices. The non-uniformity. We are used to hearing a polyphonic synthesizer patch as “one sound”.
But with the Oberheim Eight Voice, it is almost as in a human choir. All the individual singers give their best to achieve a uniform sound. But being all individuals – albeit from the same species – they are ultimately failing. This results in the fascinating phenomenon that as a listener, you can both recept the choir as a unit and still can follow each individual singer throughout the piece, if you like.
This very effect is present in the Eight Voice and that blew my mind. Hence the titel of this piece. This improvisation did not feel like creating and guiding a piece of music in the moment, but it is ultimately just me listening in awe to what’s happening with all those voices.
Some coming upfront into the spotlight, evolving their sound, diving back into the sea of music, leaving space for another one… Stimulating the reverb, then dying away … to come back in with united force of all the voices and the intriguing effect of true polyphonic portamento (each individual voice sliding into the target pitch from where it left off before).
Yet all these fascinating effects are so noble and sublte, not obtrusive, but just rewarding a focused and meditative state of conscious listening with a vast world of detailed sonic textures to explore.
Especially today, I am so curious about your thoughts. Can you relate to any of the fascination about the subtleties I described or did I just record a nice “ambient track” with a bunch of chords? 😉
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!
14 thoughts on “EVS #3 – Chor der Oszillatoren”
in the borderland where consciousness steps aside and lets go of control, access to the unconscious occurs. I hear that you channel and are a tool for access to that which is greater than yourself. we can call the essence point, the spiritual.
the Creative higher self.
consciousness always wants to assess, it is polar.
here you make room for the soul of the instrument to vibrate at the same frequency as your innermost soul.
the experience and the musicality, the hearing helps a lot. 😉Essens – meditation
You best
Franz Mathiassen
Thank you very much. Your observations give words for what I feel in good moments while playing. But I guess the actual music is the best expression for that which there are no words for… 🙂
With hearing the first notes my brain was shouting at me: this is out of tune!!!
But after reading your thoughts and listening to the one instrument as 8 ‘different’ voices it starts making much more sense feels much more cohesive.
Beautifully played. Allowing the voices to breathe and evolve in their own way.
Thank you for this (new) perspective of sounds being in/out of tune.
What I did with that sound here and what your brain might perceive as out of tune is that each note does not play at its target pitch right away, but I set it up to kind of slide up to it. And every voice does this in a slightly different shape and at a slightly different speed. If you listen very closely, you’ll notice each chord starts “off pitch”, the voices ramp up slightly and after about a second, they “lock in” to a harmonically pure pitch.
I really love what you do it is very inspiring and thank you for all the gifts it’s just great !
Great to hear you’re enjoying it! 🙂
toll❤️
Danke! 🙂
With your explaination listning again to the piece gives a whole other dimension to it and more and more depth to it, layers if you want. Dissonant sometimes but in a way living and then in harmony again. Like in the big big world. Thanks again for sharing this with us🙏🏻
Great music great playing you are a great musician!
Cheers bart
I can definitely relate to your fascination with these sonic subtleties, Marius. Chor der Oszillatoren captures exactly what this piece represents to me – an intimate ensemble of synthesizer voices each with their own subtle individuality, unfolding gently to the listener. The initial ‘off-pitch’ sounds building up to the harmonically pure pitches at a slightly different pace for each oscillator actually reminds me a little of some works by Ligeti, even though your improvisation is much softer and calmer than avant-garde music generally is. Your choice of long, sustained chords for this improvisation really highlights this unique organic quality about the Eight Voice and sustains a contemplative, wistful mood throughout. For these reasons, I think you’ve created a detailed and emotional rich sound world that stands alongside the best ambient music, and it is truly absorbing as a result. Thanks, as always, for sharing!
I can definitely relate to your fascination with these sonic subtleties, Marius. Chor der Oszillatoren captures exactly what this piece represents to me – an intimate ensemble of synthesizer voices each with their own subtle individuality, unfolding gently to the listener. The initial ‘off-pitch’ sounds building up to the harmonically pure pitches at a slightly different pace for each oscillator actually reminds me a little of some works by Ligeti, even though your improvisation is much softer and calmer than avant-garde music generally is. Your choice of long, sustained chords for this improvisation really highlights this unique organic quality about the Eight Voice and sustains a contemplative, wistful mood throughout. For these reasons, I think you’ve created a detailed and emotional rich sound world that stands alongside the best ambient music, and it is truly absorbing as a result. Thanks, as always, for sharing!
People begged for years about wanting more fully analog poly synths, but it is hard to engineer them to work well. Sometimes you want the detune of an Eight Voice or a MemoryMoog, but just as often, people complain the detune is too much. Those detune issues are part of the analog polysynth experience. I’m speaking from a sound designer and player perspective making musical choices.
I listened to a lot of music on the MemoryMoog to understand this better (in comparison to my Moog One), but not as much on an Eight Voice. The MemoryMoog is often all over the place, especially ones that haven’t been serviced recently (to the point of being too out of tune). The Eight Voice embraces this because you must tune each voice whereas self contained synths like the MemoryMoog don’t really let you do that easily. Similar comments could be said about the Oberheim OB-X, -Xa, -8. I begin to think the adjustment knobs on these synths should have been placed behind a flip up panel to allow the artist to mess with them a little like you can on an Eight Voice.
Seeing your experience making Klang helps me appreciate the Eight Voice more than I ever thought I would because you can tune on your own per sound as opposed to feeling like you need a tech to do that with a self contained analog poly.
If anything, the biggest take away I have from your album is better understanding of using detune with purpose. Thanks!
BTW, when I say detune, I don’t just mean oscillator tuning, but also differences in all the other stuff (filter, envelope, etc.). Envelope differences, for example, are almost more important than osc detune and I think Chor der Oszillatoren shows that excellently.
I know synthesizers, digital & analog, monophon & polyphon. But with your project and the Oberheim 8V I really understand how special this synth is or a analog polyphonic synth where 1 voice is indeed 1 synth of its own! My only analog polyphonic is a Roland Alpha Juno. So, with all the Behringer clones around, for quite a cheap price, how would a polyphonic MS 20, Cat, ARP 2600, Model D, … would sound like? What about applying that to eurorack? Ohhh, more expensive than the B-way. Know I want to hook up my Nord Modular G2 and build something alike! Or maybe there a presets? 😉
Since suffering from Sincere Burnout a few years back, I still need daily breaks, when I close of the surroundings with music in my headphones. I have since my burnout been searching for ”good music” that suits my needs, not easy to find, since everything that’s aimed for this purpose is nothing less than elevator music. First of all this is just very beautiful, but also very easy to focus in on since there’s so much interesting things happening, in a subtle way. Finally the sonic experience listening to the full sound of this thing is just pure satisfaction for the soul. Thanks for letting me in on this journey.