Inspired by The Caretaker
A software instrument designed by me.
What am I looking at?
I designed this software instrument using the program Max and it takes heavy inspiration from “Everywhere at the end of time” by The Caretaker. Quoted from that album’s description: “When work began on this series it was difficult to predict how the music would unravel itself. Dementia is an emotive subject for many and always a subject I have treated with maximum respect. Stages have all been artistic reflections of specific symptoms which can be common with the progression and advancement of the different forms of Alzheimer’s.” The album does this incredibly well and I wanted to try and mimic that artistic feat as much as possible (and also make it sound even scarier).
My goal for this project was to design a program that can receive a song and inject into it the spacey atmosphere and haunting vibe of The Caretaker’s album (I recommend quickly perusing the aforementioned album so you can understand the style I am describing). The above screenshot shows several different interfaces that each have their own creative applications. All can be used simultaneously with a single audio file (song) that is dropped into the green input object at the top.
The “Simple Sampler,” “Distant Voices,” “Cluttered Voices,” “Too Many Voices",” and “Dark Zone” units are the audio samplers that let you pick chunks of the song to loop, each having increasingly more intense, distorted, and ultimately terrifying results; the sequencer creates repetitive note sequences on top of the samples to add a bit of musicality if desire; the pink noise generator adds texture to the soundscape; the Drone Synthesizer at the bottom allows you to create reverberant, droning textures and adjust the amount of harmonics of all the notes; finally, the ring modulator and additive synthesizers are additional musical devices that, while not incorporating the song file directly, can add rich textures to the performance.
Hear real-time improvisations using this instrument below.
For the full Caretaker experience, I have used jazz and big band music from the early-to-mid twentieth-century.
If you would like to download the files to do this yourself, click here!
Louis Armstrong - La Vie En Rose
Click here to listen to the original.
Unknown sample…
Although this is perhaps my favorite piece made with this instrument, I unfortunately lost track of which original song this composition sampled (it is from this YouTube video). If you can tell me which one it is I will personally pay you $1,000,000.