Gbloink! Albums
The Great Grimpen Mire
"You see, for example, this great plain to the north here with the queer hills breaking out of it. Do you observe anything remarkable about that?"
"It would be a rare place for a gallop."
"You would naturally think so and the thought has cost several their lives before now. You notice those bright green spots scattered thickly over it?"
"Yes, they seem more fertile than the rest."
Stapleton laughed. "That is the great Grimpen Mire," said he. "A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!"
Something brown was rolling and tossing among the green sedges. Then a long, agonized, writhing neck shot upward and a dreadful cry echoed over the moor. It turned me cold with horror, but my companion's nerves seemed to be stronger than mine.
"It's gone!" said he. "The mire has him. Two in two days, and many more, perhaps, for they get in the way of going there in the dry weather and never know the difference until the mire has them in its clutches. It's a bad place, the great Grimpen Mire."
"And you say you can penetrate it?"
"Yes, there are one or two paths which a very active man can take. I have found them out."
"But why should you wish to go into so horrible a place?"
"Well, you see the hills beyond? They are really islands cut off on all sides by the impassable mire, which has crawled round them in the course of years. That is where the rare plants and the butterflies are, if you have the wit to reach them."
The Great Grimpen Mire is the result of me playing with an early (pre 1.5) version of Gbloink! on Windows 3.1.
The sounds are from an original 8-bit SoundBlaster card and fed through a cheap echo FX unit. This gives the three central pieces a squelchy kind of sound as all the chords and instruments are fed through the same "slap-back" effect. Tracks are further muffled through having been recorded initially onto cassette.
The last track, Poisonwood wasn't originally part of this set. In fact, it's the first ever recording from Gbloink!, made in around 1997. Recorded, untreated, straight onto cassette, this track is so early that Gbloink! didn't even have major and minor scales at the time (hence its chromaticism).
Poisonwood is dedicated to the memory of my friend Argi, who was the first recipient of one of my original "unique" (as in, only one copy ever existed) Gbloink! tapes (which this piece began.)
Baubles
The Gbloink! "christmas album". All tinsel tinkles and flickering firelight.
Tracks 1-4 made with gbloink! 1.5 sometime around 1997 - 1998. Again through the same cheap FX unit, this time with some mega flanging on Tinsel part 2.
Jan 21st, 2001
An improvisation in my basement flat in Brighton on the evening of January 21st, 2001. (Sunday, if I remember correctly)
Gbloink! + SoundBlaster Live! soundcard.
If you don't have time / patience to listen to it all, the stand-out tracks for me are B, D, F and H.
Dalloway
Three tracks culled from three different sessions
While the rest of these longer sessions are OK; in their entireties, they're pretty long and don't offer much over Jan 21st, 2001 which to me is the definitive exploration of gbloink! 1.8 using the SoundBlaster Live!
Each of the three did have its more striking and interesting movements, though, so I've gathered those three movements here.
- Dalloway forces high-pitched pads and panpipes into an almost unbearable drone. Too loud for the digital recording it clips awkwardly on occassions. Yet achieves a kind of harsh digital sublimity, somewhere between noise and new-age.
- Gbloink! vs. Gbloink! is one of several attempts to use Gbloink! with other music generating / sound-making software. Although in this case, the twist is that a Gbloink! improvisation was recorded, and then a second improvisation was recorded over the top. It's basically two Gbloink!s playing together. Note that at one point the underlying recording was restarted so there's a about a minute's worth of repetition at the beginning of one of the tracks.
- This Paluscran was originally the "Nifts" section of a longer improvisation (also called "Paluscran"). The rest was forgetable, but in my not so humble opinion this is probably the best, most interesting and ambitious piece I ever produced with Gbloink!
Eel Pie Island
This fairly ambient collection was improvised in one session around Feb 2001 in my basement flat in Kemptown, Brighton, using a non-released version of Gbloink! (in development between versions 1.5 and 1.8). The soundcard was a SoundBlaster Live, which is why this has great sounds.
Why "Eel Pie Island"? No idea. At the time I sat down to improvise this I seem to remember having three sources of inspiration:
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At the end of 2000 I had received a wind-up radio for christmas. Its inventor Trevor Baylis, was famously a resident of Eel Pie Island itself - a small island in the Thames, often connected with various 60s and 70s music scenes. The island's name was probably far more of an inspiration than the music normally associated with it.
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I was reading Haruki Murakami's "Wind-up Bird Chronicle" with it's strange, tragic, dreamy atmosphere. And haunting image of a guy who chooses to spend time sitting alone at the bottom of a well. And Kamakaze submarines and Boris, the Manskinner.
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And there was something about a photo of Horseshoe Crabs in Chesapeake Bay. Weird and a prehistoric.
In contrast to The Great Grimpen Mire with its intense green gloopiness. Eel Pie Island is all desolate mudflats at sunset; long, picturesque stretches of melancholy with ocassional flocks of rattling and scuttering percussion - interjected by phases of very LOUD and violent, mechanical clanking. In one sense this was a pretty lazy and minimal piece to produce. Each track is typically a single mood elongated to 8 to 10 minutes. However, it's grown on me a lot over the years. Now it's one of the Gbloink! recordings from that time that I pull out most often to listen to. Especially the easier tracks 2, 3 and 5.
Tape
An old tape of Gbloink! from early 2000s, probably recorded in Brasilia.
Sound quality is what you get from an old and unprocessed tape. Consider the texture a "feature".