FAWM: "plantscape #4 ✿ Helleborus x glandorfensis"

plantscape #4 ✿ Helleborus x glandorfensis

6 hours ago by @burrMod

Liner Notes

my fourth experiment collaborating with plants this FAWM:

Rhapis excelsa
Crassula arborescens
Dracaena trifasciata
Helleborus x glandorfensis ← THIS

for christmas, my wife got me this pocket SCÍON thing that's a biofeedback instrument. you can hook it up to basically any living organism and it will translate its electrical pulses into musical data.

last of january's snow finally melted yesterday and it was warm enough to try one of these outside. this time, i used one of the SCÍON's on-board synth engines with a Hellebore hybrid underneath one of our redbuds in the yard. decided to accompany it with an acoustic instrument, in this case an old 1950s(?) tenor banjo i got from a thrift shop in 1998 with the highest. action. ever.

recorded live to a zoom H6 field recorder:

ambient neighborhood sounds, in stereo (you can hear the roofing job going on just up the hill)
the Hellebore playing the SCÍON, in stereo
the banjo direct (from a piezo i installed) through a delay

melodically, this "plant/patch" felt more random than the others, so it was hard to predict where it was going and what to play along to, and just when i thought it would be a good point to end, it would turn around with a 3rd or a 6th or something and i needed to let it resolve. but here you go.

#plantscape #banjo #generative #ambient #fieldrecording #acousticonetake

Comments

@whispermouse 6m

I like the combination of acoustic instrument and plant synthesizer, it didn't feel like you were chasing the randomness at all, it all flows nicely. The piezo on the banjo sounds great, I'm honestly surprised.

The real question is, where did you find bare ground and green plants after the winter we've been having? PGH must be warmer than I thought! 😂

@headfirstonlyMod 1h

That raucous banjo works well. I didn't know the SCION had a built in synth; the koto-like sounds it makes pair well with the banjo. The reversed effects sound very cool too, and I had to watch this twice to fully appreciate what was going on.

You are clearly having a lot of fun with that thing and the results are intriguing and dammit, I want one. Hmmm. This has got me thinking. Rather than the H6, if one was, theoretically speaking, to run the SCION into Ableton, one could constrain the MIDI to a particular mode or scale set to a specific key, which would make it easier to jam along to. If one had a SCION, that is...

@burrMod 1h

the built-in synth actually does have a quantizer! there’s a companion app where you can specify scales/modes for each engine… i think this one was set to the first 6 degrees of C major (CDEFGA), and i was riffing in a C major scale? it might have worked better to restrict the SCÍON to CFG or something. 🤔

@nancyrostMod 3h

Hellebore and banjo pair well! I feel like the unique texture, once I sink into it, is enough of a unifying element that it doesn't feel random. There's a sort of reversed-note sound that serves as a nice punctuation.

@taruamethyst 5h

Oh I really love this and I want one of those myself but I was asking myself how this works outside. Does it have batteries? And do you have to bring a laptop with you or does it also work with an iPad or a hardware synthesiser? Really great work anyway I also love the banjo

@wynia 6h

I like the sounds you’ve matched this one to! It’s at least pretty soothing to my ears, and I didn’t think it sounded that random. The banjo adds a nice percussive and “alive” element to the serene synth plant sounds. Fun to see you out in the garden in the “balmy” first false spring for this collab.