“Ups-Downs-Ins-Outs vs.Popeyes” was inspired by modern society’s ways of handling information. It guides material from a small fugue based on “Popeye...” through various manipulations, making it turn out as fragmented, refined, distorted, biased, restrained, rephrased, nervous etc. All material in the piece is recycled from the Popeye-song in a rather old-fashioned way: intervals, modality, phrasing, rhythm etc. Ive used various kinds of chains -- deterministic and nondeterministic -- to build the composition and handle sound material. Most notably rewrite-systems and markov-chains (however interrupted at times...). The piece evolves moving in and out of more or less defined musical situations -- spectral planes, rhythmic and modal structures -- and proceeding towards others.
This music was made with CM/CLM software on SGI-workstations. An improvisational approach towards the software is responsible for all the strange signal-processing techniques applied in this piece, dynamic spectrum-controlled formant-filters, strange cross-synthesis techniques, obscure waveshaping-techniques, odd reverberations, impossible room-simulation-models, physical modelling etc. etc. In particular, typical “layout”-processing, like reverb, mixing, filtering etc., are used as musical statements and musical material just as much as refinements in the final mixing-stage of the work.
The piece was realised in 1998 at NoTAM, the Norwegian Network for Technology, Acoustics & Music.
Enjoy!