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New album by Nathan Moody
Californian sound designer and composer Nathan Moody has released a new album ‘A Vast Unwelcome’. This album is inspired by and features our Derailer and Preparation instruments throughout. Check out the full album on bandcamp.
“I first learned of Physical Audio from reading about the process behind Gadi Sassoon’s amazing album, Multiverse. Once I discovered the team from the University of Edinburgh had started to release commercially available plug-ins, I had to try them. I love that Physical Audio develops tools that are aimed rather specifically at experimental musicians. Plate reverbs that can be made of different metals, an emulation of a prepared piano…these are complex, strange instruments that are supremely musical, and not trying to tread over the same ground as so many other software companies. Add in MPE support and wow, it’s joyous, raucous fun for days.”
“I was recording metallic objects for a sound design project, and once I started doing ultrasonic recordings with specialized microphones and doing extreme pitch and time manipulation, the musicality of the sounds led me to start creating acousmatic compositions with the recordings. The whole project was intended to be free of any specific Western musical keys, but I kept hearing intervals that suggested harmonies and melodies, so it evolved into something much more musical and rhythmic. The idea that every timbre had to come from metal – real or physically emulated, ideally a blend where you can’t tell which is which most of the time – became the main creative constraint of the work.”
“Almost every track on this album has an instance of Derailer and Preparation on it. Sometimes they’re on their own. Sometimes they’re spectrally filtered into thousands of sine waves and then re-kinked into richer harmonic relationships by wavefolders. Sometimes they are convolved with real metallic sounds, and sometimes it’s the other way around. Preparation was especially good at percussion sounds. I loved using it to create deep, massive tones with just enough harmonic content that it clearly doesn’t sound like a drum membrane. Each hit can be harmonically related to the key the song is in, but with inharmonic intervals to make it not feel like strictly melodic content.
At one point, every track on the EP was being sent through at least one instance of Physical Audio’s Dynamic Plate Reverb plug-in. While this was all replaced with three real EMT 140 plate reverbs in the final mix (I simply decided to have a “rule” that all reverbs on this album had to be electromechanical), Dynamic Plate can absolutely go places real plates can’t, and it’s become my favorite plate reverb emulator. It’s getting heavy use on all sorts of other projects. Three instances in series, each set to a fully wet mix, can get really insane, in either a chaotic or magical sense, and I love audio tools that can go to both extremes.”
Nathan Moody. California, March 2023.