Circular Reasoning by Esoteric Music Machines

TL/DR: This 5 track EP is the result of a really fun collaboration that I did with The Tuesday Night Machines. We both used the same instrument, the Gotharman Tiny Little Deformer, as our primary sound source and transformer. I hope you enjoy it.

The long version, in case you’re interested:

In early July 2021, Felix from The Tuesday Night Machines proposed that he and I work together on a project where we would collaborate on developing some sonic material using the Gotharman Tiny Little Deformer. I really admire Felix as a musician, and as an educator – his YouTube channel is a great source of information about the fascinating and frequently mystifying electronic instruments that he and I are both interested in.

The Tuesday Night Machines YouTube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/c/flx04

The Esoteric Music Machines YouTube channel is here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF24pznKRxeXH9IxZshlPZw/videos

The Gotharman Tiny Little Deformer is here http://www.gotharman.dk/ld3_mkii.htm

I said I’d love to take part. We live on different continents, so Felix suggested that we each generate a minute or two of material to start with, and then trade the material back and forth several times, with each of us processing, slicing, deforming and recombining the material we’d received in that round on the TLD. Over the next couple months, we went through four rounds of exchanging and transforming sounds. At the end of the process, in early September, 2021, we each put together our track(s): Felix created one elegant and varied 18 minute piece, and I put together five short ones.

Felix proposed that we release the material separately, but with the same title, and related cover art (which he created). Circular Reasoning is the result, with the title being a reference to our process of transforming the material and handing it off repeatedly. You can find his version here https://nightmachines.bandcamp.com/album/circular-reasoning - listen, purchase, download and enjoy.

I really enjoyed working on this project. Instead of trying to develop my own ideas, each week or two I’d get a batch of new material, and then I was free to find a way to slice, edit, filter, modulate and transform it. Each new batch of material was a challenge: OK, now what are you going to do with this? Working this way felt lighter and more playful than just being alone in my room working out my own ideas, and playing out my typical patterns and habits.

At the end of the process, we both had the same collection of sonic elements to work with. Putting the pieces together felt like building mosaics out of little fragments. I was delighted to see how different his and my final pieces turned out.

Since one of our objectives was to showcase and explore what the Gotharman Tiny Little Deformer can do, I wanted to make a few comments about how I used it on this project, for those that may be interested. I often took Felix’s material, found rhythmic loops or phrases in it, and then sliced those into beats in the TLD and played variations on them by using a MIDI keyboard with an arpeggiator. I used the Novation Ultranova, but any keyboard that can send arpeggiator data via MIDI would be able to do this. I sliced the loops using peak detection on the TLD, then used its “chopkey” feature to spread the slices across the keyboard, one per key. Once I’d done that, I chose a BPM, and then played chords on the Ultranova. The arpeggiator would produce a repeating rhythmic loop using the slices that corresponded to the notes on the keyboard that I was holding down. To get a different loop, I would play different keys. To play in different time signatures, I would just hold down different numbers of keys. This is a really powerful way to rapidly generate many musical ideas, rhythms, melodies and textures.

To transform the sounds, I mainly explored the possibilities of the analog filter in the TLD, which in my case is the VCF2 that includes low pass, band pass and high pass options, along with mysterious “G-Ray” distortion and feedback. (There are currently ten different analog filter boards that can be installed in the TLD or its big sibling, the Gotharman Little Deformer 3. You can switch out filter boards to change the sound.) In my final tracks, you can hear sounds that resemble electric guitars, cellos, and squawking noises – none of those are what they sound like; they were all created with the magic of the transformative filters and other effects in the TLD.

The track “waves and particles” is where I let the Glitchshift and Granulator effects in the TLD run wild. What sounds something like an electric guitar shredding chromatically is really the glitch shifter desperately trying to isolate and match pitches in the chaos of sound that I’m producing in the TLD.

I used one of my favorite aleatoric approaches to working with the TLD on this track. I took chunks of a track that Felix had sent me to work with, sliced them with no attempt at finding the downbeat, and then used the “randomize” feature on the sequencer to play back the slices. I also created random CV tracks, and assigned them to filter cutoff, resonance and pitch.

I want to mention two really special features of the Gotharman sequencer: Probability and Morph. The Probability feature let me create a dense forest of random sounds, and then reduce the Probability that any given note would play, thus creating less dense but always-different results that don’t repeat. The Morph feature let me create two completely different sequences for each voice, and then morph between them. The TLD has 16 parts, 8 voices, and 32 control voltage sequences. The two sequence layers for each of those can even run at different speeds.

Turning the Morph Sequence knob – which, like all the parameters in a Gotharman machine, has 512 values – let me explore interpolated variations all along the continuum between the two sequence layers. I created a few different voices, with different sound engine parameters and different sequences to morph between, and then muted the voices in and out while morphing the sound engines and sequences.

After that, I assembled the tracks in my DAW (Samplitude Pro Studio 2) and added some compression and reverb, and in one case (the noisy high percussion sound in the track ‘circular reasoning’) some band pass filtering.

I hope you enjoy the final results of this project. Check out all of Felix’s recordings and videos – he has a lot of stylistic range, and I’ve never yet found a recording of his that I didn’t like.

I hope this project gives you a sense of how powerful and wide ranging an instrument the Gotharman Tiny Little Deformer can be. Gotharman has just released the immensely powerful modular Urano synthesizer/sampler/sequencer, but the TLD/LD3 remains in my view a powerful, concise, feature-complete workstation that I’ll be exploring and enjoying for many years.

Thanks, Felix! And thanks also to Bob Ostertag for some mixing/mastering advice, along with years of inspiration.

I like esoteric music machines - quirky or visionary little boxes of wires and circuits that do strange and unpredictable things. Gotharman, Ellitone, Gechologic, Phonicbloom and Prof. Ieaskul F Mobenthey are some of my favorite creators. There's also a YouTube channel with the same name exploring some of these devices.