Synth Harmony

A desultory walking jazz escapade while daydreaming of a morning stroll.  

Modest Mussorgsky pulls Claude Debussey out of the lake.  The swans look on with bemused superiority, hissing and shaking their heads.  It all ends well enough with a picnic lunch and a concluding ascending F major arpeggio.

A curtain of gloom Like evening mist of autumn Hangs in poetic brain.

  This was recorded in September 2017 as I first experimented with the four HD camera setup.  Things were not coming together easily or going well. This darkened my mood.  I must of been daydreaming of 16th century festival music mixed in with my own swirling thoughts.

Solo live improvised performance, Kurzweil K2600R MIDI module, Infinite Response MIDI controller digital keyboard.  I put on the walnut veneer on top of the keyboard since I was so very tired of black metal.  Yes, that's a Korg NanoKontrol sitting on top where I change my sounds, connected to a Mac Mini running Plogue Bidule which makes everything work like magic.    

My mind goes wandering in Chinese gardens Where sacred lotus flowers bloom in vain I'll never see or touch those crisp, white blossoms, Nor thrill to rustling bamboo in the rain.

They say the secrets hidden in thick bushes Can only be revealed to emperors. Not even they can see the garden in its fullness Until their road has ended, life has run the course.

--excerpt from "Chinese Gardens" by Liilia Morrison   With the foot pedals under my feet I was mixing in celestial voices, cascades of bamboo percussion, and a panoply of spacey sounds from virtual synths Rob Papen's Blue II and Spectrasonics's Omnisphere.  Underneath that is the electric piano sound from the Kurzweil 2600.  

  No poem for this one.  What happened?  How did I get into this strange night club and what's wrong with that bass player?  I try one door after another, dreaming of my escape.  There are strange robots dancing together in this room.  Door slam, this room is better.  Someone has discovered triple meter.  A side venture into blues, the robots grooving along.  Perhaps I'm in New York City walking on the sidewalk above a subway grate feeling the steamy hiss.  Cue the movie music, very late night edition.  Off we go to a final cadence in dissolving tonic tonality, a final fizz.