# Chris's electronic music



## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

My musical expression has changed since many of you knew me. I'm no longer trying to write for traditional instruments in classical forms but am finding broad palettes to avail myself with in electronic music. I've found creating music graphically in a digital audio workstation is much more effective than working with notation. I don't mean the piano roll, necessarily, but the way patterns are placed and arranged on a graphical score. It's not so useful for performance, but it doesn't have to be when the music isn't meant to be performed, but played as recorded. I don't use traditional notation very often anymore. It's not so useful when working with influences of _musique concrète_, placing, stretching, twisting sound samples.

From 2012 until 2019 I hardly touched music. Since last year, though, I've been able to put out a couple small albums of electronic music. A kind of deep dubstep sound that may lean towards so-called "intelligent dance music". I've also been writing ambient music. I'm still trying to find my sound, but meanwhile I figure I'll share so you can all tell me how boring it is. :tiphat:

Some preliminaries:

I tend to put WIPs on my Soundcloud:

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https://soundcloud.com/
I put finished products on Bandcamp for free: https://kopachris.bandcamp.com/
Some of my finished work is on Spotify, Google Play Music, et al. under the artist name Kopachris.

Now, really I'm not here to discuss my "intellidubstep" or whatever genre you want to call it. I didn't keep track of any of the theory of what I was doing. I made this post as an excuse to talk about the electronic symphony I've been working on for almost a year. This is a symphonic poem regarding the Grand Staircase of southern Utah. These rocks have inspired me since I was a kid. Just looking at the layers in the desert, I knew there was music within the stone.

The movements go through the various rock layers, from bottom to top. I'm about 2/3 of the way done, having gone through: Kaibab, Moenkopi, Chinle, Moenave, Kayenta, and Navajo. I still have yet to write the movements for the Kaiparowits and Claron formations. The style is mainly ambient, with plenty of drawn out chords and arpeggios. You can follow along by listening here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pabaah614q8pqf7/AAA9ids6iusEQvVLQO5mV1aCa?dl=0

*Into*: 70bpm, C

Simple flute and bass melody
Natural background with birdsong
Heartbeat tom drums
Lithophones
You sit out in the open, camped on the edge of a plateau. The wind blows. The shaman sits behind a set of lithophones. He begins hitting the stones in a rhythmic fashion and they resonate, they speak, they sing! You hear a tale of time long past, of fantastic beasts, pristine shores, wet river crossings, and great cataclysms.

*Kaibab Limestone:* 70bpm, D#

Tribal drum beat
D# and A# drones
Ocean waves
Surprise stops and starts, "fracturing"
Limestone, forming fractured cliffs, composed of the bodies of millions of small sea creatures. Under deep ocean pressure, crumbled shells became stone. Tan and silty, telling of warm, well-circulated oceans. But all that life was wiped out in a mass extinction for reasons no one can fathom.

*Moenkopi Formation:* 64bpm, C#

Focus on low registers
Flute arpeggio, "birdsong" or "crystals"
Continued ocean waves
Muddy, red sandstone with repeating patterns. Fossilized waves in the sand. Sea levels rising and falling. The deep ocean had become a broad tidal flat with no life.
This was the first movement I started working on. Originally, this whole thing was going to be for traditional orchestra and scored with traditional notation. I found I was able to immediately get a much broader range of expression from synthesizers and abandoned tradition right then. Made progress a lot easier.

*Chinle Formation:* no tempo, mainly an atmospheric drone shifting tension between C and Eb

A basin filled with flood plains, swamps, and lakes where a conglomerate of muds formed layers of shale. The stone is softer and forms sandy, crumbling slopes where exposed in cliffsides.

*Moenavi Formation:* 85bpm, F. iii - ii - IV - V - I6/4 - ii - V - vi - IIsus4 - i7 - IV9 - iii6 - ii - V7 - I

A stampeding beat, "dinosaurs"
Rushing river background

*Kayenta Formation:* 110bpm, G: i - V - IQ - IIQ

quartal harmonies G-C-F, A-D-G
Piano arpeggios over bass melody
More dinosaurs. Taiko drum polyrhythms

_(Moenavi and Kayenta's flavor text are combined)_
Red, interbedded sandstone and shale mark a gradual change to drier conditions. Mountains grew and the flood plains have become rivers and streams. Fantastic beasts, like scaley, flightless birds, roamed the land. They migrated, leaving tracks in the stream beds. Suddenly, a great dying.

Triassic-Jurassic extinction: a minor second descending a minor second, F#/F to F/E

*Navajo Sandstone:* 75bpm, Eb:

Desert sounds, wind
Rising in brightness, pad rising from bass to ethereal
I-V chord progression with repeating pentatonic melody
The land has become a desert. Towering straight cliffs ranging from red to white formed from sand blown by the wind. At the top of the cliffs you'll find massive dunes frozen in time.

*Wahweap / Kaiparowits* - _no sketching done yet_
Massive mountains made of mud. Gray and plain looking, but full of life. Terrifying birds and tyrannical lizards roamed the land. Until a sudden cataclysm wiped out all but the smallest creatures. A rock from space crashed into the Earth!

*Claron* - _no sketching done yet_
Breathtaking natural ampitheaters filled with neverending hoodoos that will trick the eyes. Pink to orange limestone, soft and brittle. Beautiful towers, turrets, and crenellated ridges so intricate only nature could have created them.

I will try to post here again when I have more progress.


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

I have added a movement to the piece:

*Solar Corona*
As the tale concludes, you notice it has grown dimmer. Evening approaches, as though the sun is setting in all directions, but you see the sun above at mid-day! Suddenly, it's gone, replaced with a bright ring of light, with whisps coming off all around. This lasts a few minutes before the mid-day dawn and the world is light again.

And alas, after over a year, here is the full work that I will be uploading to my distributor, in 24bit/48kHz FLAC: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8cmv2w2xffn30v/The Grand Staircase.zip?dl=0

These last few movements were composed spontaneously, without prior sketching and goals, and ended up with simpler structures based on repeating chord progressions.

Wahweap beings with a simple F A E G ostinato over I - V progressions in A with a simple melody. Kaiparowits is another simple melody over G F# D B, with the piece ending on E.

Claron is based on a repeating I - V progression in the sub-bass, in D major, with a D pedal point (pad). The V- IV - V - I progression enters the scene with arpeggios above. We change to I - IV - V - I for the rest of the piece.

Solar Corona is more fluid, in G. Color is added with a G7sus4 chord before transitioning to the tonality of A. You'll note I refused to label the keys as either major or minor. For this piece I tried to use color freely and switched between major and minor.


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

I've made a piece of musique concrète, perhaps more in the tastes of the discerning connoisseur of avant garde music. Presented with "graphical score":


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

Kopachris said:


> I have added a movement to the piece:
> 
> And alas, after over a year, here is the full work that I will be uploading to my distributor, in 24bit/48kHz FLAC: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v8cmv2w2xffn30v/The Grand Staircase.zip?dl=0.


This is on streaming services now and you can also stream or download at my BandCamp page: https://kopachris.bandcamp.com/album/the-grand-staircase


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

A second musique concrète piece:

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https://soundcloud.com/kopachris%2Fpripyat

I've decided to work on a series of these pieces, all themed around the 1986 Chernobyl Disaster. In this case the background is a sample of speech synthesized by a free source online, but granularized and slowed down. The speech is the opening to the Wikipedia article on Pripyat, Ukraine. The rest of the samples in the piece, I won't go into. Here is the first sketch for the album, simply a list of titles:

Intro - 1986
Pripyat
U-235
CS-137
Chain Reaction
Elephant's Foot
Evacuation
Exclusion Zone
Red Forest
Reclamation
Recovery


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

I am now up to four pieces in the set. I've been putting them on SoundCloud as I go.

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https://soundcloud.com/kopachris%2Fsets

The fourth piece in my set will be Caesium-137: Shorter than U-235: infectious, deadly.

And the sixth will be Elephant's Foot: Warm, decaying, deadly, hotter than hot.


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