Download from Bandcamp

"Ground and Sky" is a session header for all music recorded for this catalog with the ARP Odyssey monophonic analog synthesizer. Years ago, before I began working with modular music, this machine found its way to me after David Tagg purchased it and found that it unfortunately did not meet whatever needs he had at that time. I offered to purchase it from him, and it almost immediately became an all-time favored machine in my studio, not just because of the sound of it, but also because of the beautiful and concise design of the unit itself. The Odyssey remains firmly in my top five synthesizers I've ever played, even though over one-hundred releases with other machines have come to pass in this series before finally issuing one with the Odyssey.

The Odyssey has been all over several albums and projects of mine, however - playing lead lines on things like "Watch the Head" and "River Mural" as well as droning away in the Workingman's Drone series and burrowing through bedrock in my Deep Earth excursions. It appeared primally on the quadruple-album "The Plucked Seed" and even shaped some dub chords on various other Coppice Halifax pieces. Somehow, I always knew it would arrive in the Vibra catalog, but the moment had to be right, and as much as I adore the Odyssey, it seems to really shine when it plays alongside other machines, rather than simply flying solo, and so a Vibra session with the Odyssey eluded me for some time.

This session came to be in late September of 2024, working with the Odyssey in conjunction with Strymon's Magneto, a four-head tape delay unit that can also function a bit like a pitch-shifter-drawbar-organ processor, sampling the incoming audio and replaying it at four different pitch iterations. It was this approach that yielded the first Vibra session with the machine, a moody and isolated piece of music in the Phrygian scale, augmented by two granular resynthesizers in Mutable Instruments' Clouds, and another Strymon machine, the Starlab reverberator.

Altogether, "Ground and Sky" feels developed enough melodically that it almost feels to me that it could not have come out of this machine, and strangely this sensation deepens when the chords occasionally emerge from this very monophonic machine and emanate a profound sense of disconnection. It feels apt to begin the 2025 year with this session, although I can also assure listeners that there are many joyous pieces already recorded that will follow Vibra 101 in this next leg of the series too.

Explorations in generative music, ambient synthesis and audioholistics.

"It's music... I think"

20/24 + 4×5 + 36,864px = V

1. patreon.com
2. bsky.app
3. YouTube
4. campsite.bio
5. milieu-music.com