Digital Music Artist
Workflow Insights I. II. III. IV. V. VI. _software: Audible Planets, Bespoke Synth, Reaper, ZL Equalizer, Cardinal _download: 0003-quiet_colossus.wav _license: CC0/ Public Domain The post quiet_colossus appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Workflow Insights I. II. III. IV. _software: Reaper, Vitalium, Niner, Qdelay, ZL Equalizer 2, Cardinal, Black Widow Drums _download: 0002-ShortTerm-TapeLoop.wav _license: CC0 / Public Domain The post ShortTerm TapeLoop appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Download: https://johnoestmannmusic.bandcamp.com/album/soundworlds-digichip-academy-colourshards This ended up being made up from my 4 work-in-progress albums (and 2 extra tracks) from the last couple years. It is time to move on to my next long-term project, and I wanted to make sure these were all wrapped up into an easily downloadable package. For those WIP albums, I had actually already…
Welcome to a Guided Tour exploring four distinct locations across three Penturan continents. Pentura is the Capital Planet of The Weave and houses a diversity of cultures and infrastructure. This tour is a great introduction if you are just starting out with The Weave Explorer, or of Pentura itself. 0:00 Travel to Pentura 0:19 Glass Wall Gallery Lobby 3:23 Dunam Sunset Towers (played twice) 6:00…
Workflow Insights I. I was actually creating this track at the same time as SKYREST , both essentially remixes of Futurejack #2 . Whereas SKYREST went in the ambient direction, this one went for a heavier drum-breakdown direction. II. The drum beat included several layers of light percussion, some not all that audible. This is aiming to add both semi-conscious texture and rhythm. _software:…
Workflow Insights I. While I am quite committed to open-source, I did find Ardour crashing and getting in my way even more often after an update reach the point where I would no longer recommend it to people. Reaper, while not open-source, largely stays our of my way. And the older I get, the more weight I put behind music that inspires, as opposed to music that has been made 100% with open-source…
Many of us would love our art to be influential, or to reach a wide audience. In some words, we want our art to become famous. Rather than simply condemning this desire as greed, it is worth recognizing this dream often comes out of the fact that it was someone else s far-reaching art that inspired us to start making art it the first place. It makes sense. The problem is that not all great art…
Indirect Collaboration: being inspired by and drawing from each other s creations, even when we aren t directly collaborating. This is worth keeping in mind, as it is how most of human culture evolves. Check out James Burke s Connections docuseries for plenty of examples. The post Indirect Collaboration appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
As we have covered in the previous parts of this Manifesto: Creative Inspiration is the most fruitful force in the universe, and we should align ourselves supporting and empowering this force. ( Part I ) The most ecologically and societally healthy way forwards is to operate as a decentralized network of small business squads . ( Part II ) On an individual level, Following Spirit with Your Eyes…
( Part I here ) ( Previous part here ) Lateral Gradualism is a helpful framing for understanding the process of genuine innovation across society. It is important to see through the myth of single major developments bringing the entire world forwards. Genuine innovation happens in different places at different times, and spreads, combines, and transforms through cross-pollination and localized…
Workflow Insights I. After starting out the track in a similar way as the previous one, I cut up the drum loop from the first one and re-arranged it. II. I used a Voxglitch sampler within Cardinal to trigger the intro of Cloudstorm City via MIDI, passing it through some waveshaping as well. III. The playing of the Cloudstorm City intro was passed through a number of effects, and these effects…
( Part I here ) ( Part II here ) For decades we saw technology as solving the future. Through the internet, through artificial intelligence, through grand rocket ships, we were meant to reach an assured path towards some kind of world peace. Here in the future, today: we have the internet, we have artificial intelligence, and we have lots of money going into rocket ships and large sections of…
Workflow Insights I. Cutting up, layering, and re-arranging portions of my previous tracks. The central melody of this track (and the rest of the Futurejack Experimental ones) comes from a portion of The Grassworks a favourite track of mine. II. I ended up building out a drum loop with these cuts, and decided to loosen the timing of many percussive elements, not staying as strict to the grid as I…
Workflow Insights I. This track (and what hopes to be an album) was inspired by albums in the Plunderphonics genre. The difference here is that I am pulling from my own Public Domain music, so no clearance needed 🙂 II. I often don t use compressors or limiters (despite what is often call best practices). This time I felt like giving them another shot on the master chain. In the end, I decided to…
( Part I here ) I ve used the term Academy of Creative Inspiration , but we must be careful to not idealize that metaphor too singularly. Single large Academies can become isolated and untethered from the Society they were built to benefit. Likewise, single large businesses can appear connected to Society, but tend to gather an unhealthy amount of momentum. They become too slow to adapt to the…
Listen, download, behind the scenes: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/albums#design-cycles The post DESIGN CYCLES album released! appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
I found there s a tension between trying to create fully Open-Source music and creating through the Spirit-led approach. The latter often takes me through portions of destructive editing layers upon layers of transformations to original sounds. Sometimes entire track groups are exported, and then transformed, and then re-sampled. Recently, I found photography as a practice, and I m starting to…
Workflow Insights I. The majority of sounds in this track went through convolution reverb, using non-traditional impulse responses for creative sound design. There were even instances of putting entire layer groups through convolution, and then re-sampling and cutting up the result. II. This was my first time trying the Fire distortion plugin by jerryuhoo . It allows for multi-band separation,…
Have just kicked off my new site The Weave Explorer ( https://jomusic.neocities.org )! This will be a continuously updated interactive galaxy of music, starting with a number of locations on the planet Pentura. Have fun exploring, and keep an eye on the updates 🙂 The post The Weave Explorer launched! appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Original version here Music and Photos by John Oestmann CC0 / Public Domain The post The Grassworks (Alternative Art) appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Workflow Insights I. Audible Planets is still one of my favourite sound generators. II. With experience, I am finding I really enjoy resampling and pitch shifting. I really resonate with the results this workflow leads to. Unfortunately, this is a destructive process and means that sharing project files won t reveal as much about the process. That is why I am going to try including these Workflow…
_software: Strudel REPL _download: 04-INSPIRITUS_WORKSHOP_NIGHTS.wav _project: INSPIRITUS_WORKSHOP_NIGHTS-SOURCE.txt _license: CC0 / Public Domain The post INSPIRITUS WORKSHOP NIGHTS appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
_software: Strudel REPL _download: 03-THREADCHAINS_OF_THE_AWE-SPACE.wav _project: THREADCHAINS_OF_THE_AWE-SPACE-SOURCE.txt _license: CC0 / Public Domain The post THREADCHAINS OF THE AWE-SPACE appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
The role of the Artist has always been, and always will be, to follow, curate, and share Resonance. This role has always been invisible from the perspective of economic productivism. In many subcultures, calling yourself an Artist is seen as pretentious . An artistic lifestyle is rarely reinforced by funding. These reasons are why it is often hard for artistic people to be themselves publicly. We…
_software: Strudel REPL _download: 02-ECHOES_OF_THE_ARCHITECT.wav _project: ECHOES_OF_THE_ARCHITECT-SOURCE.txt _license: CC0 / Public Domain The post ECHOES OF THE ARCHITECT appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Biome Loops was essentially produced and released in 2022. After a lack of social media response at the time, I unlisted the tracks, being led to believe they were not strong enough for my brand . Similarly, Duskfire was first released in 2015, then updated in 2022 with some extra instrumentation, spoken work narration, and names connecting it to the unfolding lore of The Weave. I had also…
_software: Strudel REPL _download: 01-SUNBEAMS_OF_CONCRETE_CANOPY.wav _project: SUNBEAMS_OF_CONCRETE_CANOPY-SOURCE.txt _license: CC0 / Public Domain The post SUNBEAMS OF CONCRETE CANOPY appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
An accidental experiment, in pairing my music with photos of architecture and infrastructure I took, led to a curious resonant thread to explore further.. The post Three Alternate Arts appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
The Interstellar Peace Federation s newly formed Discovery Squad is a four-person team, specialized in finding and documenting discoveries around The Weave. Partially inspired by the grassroots Threadwalkers movement a century ago, the theory is that as the public appreciates more cultural works of other nations, it builds more incentives for *not* going to war. Our team includes: Our pilot /…
I stand quietly in the corner of Hub A1, keeping out of the way of the entrance class introduction. It s hard to believe it s been thirteen years since I was in these azure halls, overlooking this polychromatic island. I was almost halfway through my studies when I came across the Cruise Diaries of Aster Delfin in the Academy Island s Library Unit. Reading the hundred-year-old explorations of the…
The compass-shaped Central Cafe sits as a middle hub of Academy Island. A favourite hangout for students, it wafts with the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans. The cafe operates on a day-night cycle, bustling from 05:00 to 17:00, then flipping to a relaxed Third Place for the next twelve hours. Saturdays and Sundays host art shows and freeform thinktanks. Right before sunrise each day, I meet a…
The Leaf Professor stands waiting, deep inside a campus of glasshouses. Orange leaves cascade onto a village of mechatronic plantlife, all of which are wistfully rotating limbs of pseudo-solar-panel to follow electromagnetic waves rather than photosynthesis. The EM waves Morse out of matrices of vectorized wall-emitters. Mostly invisible, I can see the faintest of fuchsia glows roll across the…
Read the Manifesto here The post Manifesto: Academy of Creative Inspiration appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Binary rain streams around the digital radar dish that we are using as an arena. Enter the HoloNet. Professor Eleizer has modded an old chatroom into this, and modded his avatar into an angelic cyber, far beyond human recognition. His Prime Character, Hexadecimeleon, lizards out from a portal of artifacting glitch-textures, packet data sliced up by laser-tongue. Each chameleon eye quickly shifts,…
An enormous pipeline twins out from the back of DigiChip Monastery. I hadn t had time to discover it the first time I was here. I had just met another student, Telon, who has insomnia more chronic than my own, and we decided that midnight exploring was better than not-sleeping. Thick monitoring windows forged into huge concrete pipes flash azure across our faces every ten seconds or so. Something…
In the game of DigiChip, Data is the element of everything digital. A converted planetarium on the rocky Western Beach houses the Data Lab. Its interior dome no longer dotted with stars of night sky. These days, digital beings and structures manifold entire worlds transform across in holofield curvature. I slow my way through neon haze, dueling Data students and their polygon cybers. It is not…
The Grassworks is a lush green plain, populated with the mossy silhouttes of mech-frame ruins. Weather Drones sail about the sky, weaving atmospheric rain for most of the year. Wading the field is a breath of respite from a strange past. Originally called the Robotworks Lab, a decades-former student created the Weather Drone experiment, planning to release them only for a three-week revegetation…
After a few years, I m bringing back the storywriting attached to my world-building albums. You ll see I ve now replaced the DigiChip Academy videos with the story versions. The rest of the album (and hopefully future albums) will continue this! For accessibility purposes, I m also putting the story text on each track s page. The post Storywriting appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
*note: this video was originally from 2022 so the end card is out of date. I do still have a Patreon, but you can follow me on Mastodon. Finally I found the graveyard where my grandparents lay, Slain by the Saint who had once held this land in safety. It wasn t just them: rows upon rows of graves for forgotten people from our surrounding villages. They rested here now. I wept for my grandparents.…
*note: this video was originally from 2022 so the end card is out of date. I do still have a Patreon, but you can follow me on Mastodon. Father, forgive me. I had not been able to end this land s curse. Not today. Though she had not killed me either, when my consciousness returned I was in the fortress gallery. The paintings I had heard about hung here: beautiful brush strokes of the local…
*note: this video was originally from 2022 so the end card is out of date. I do still have a Patreon, but you can follow me on Mastodon. The inner chapel was small and dark, though clusters of flickering candles illuminated the outlines of a shattered altar and broken pews. I could not see a crucifix. I was startled to see a knight in black armor kneeling at the altar s steps, their armor bound by…
*note: this video and track was originally from 2022 so the end card is out of date. I do still have a Patreon, but you can follow me on Mastodon. When I first arrived at the gardens surrounding the fortress inn chapel, I found it filled with silken merchants bartering wares to sell back to their towns. It quickly became clear that a market that consists only of merchants and not of layfolk is the…
Update 5 Feb 26: Within 48 hours of writing this, MoltBook crashed and burned . Fortunately, as I wrote below, it was still a great thought experiment of what could come of true socially-networked AIs and even if it never does, how we should act remains the same. Seeing MoltBook emerge over the last couple days shook me a bit. Of course, I only found out about it on my phone, in bed, right before…
Grab it at https://johnoestmannmusic.bandcamp.com/album/disk-drive-ambient The post Disk Drive Ambient EP now released! appeared first on John Oestmann Music .
Audible Planets was previously used in creating times , but due to upfront perceived complexity and CPU strain, it hadn t been brought back into the workflow up until this track. This felt like the right time to explore it, and use that exploration as creative fuel. It turned out to be easier than expected after reading the manual on the GitHub page . This time, a brand new patch was created from…
Back in the 90s, Aphex Twin used the term Ambient to name an album filled with drums. That fact gives permission for percussion-driven tracks like this one to emerge on an EP already branded ambient. It is understandably not ideal for everyone especially for those looking for a more pure ambient throughline. On the other hand, one effective creative practice is to listen to where the track wants…
This one took longer than it might seem. I m constantly reminding myself not to be scared to strip out elements if it makes the music more potent. _software-used: samplv1, AmiSampler, Vitalium, ZL Equalizer 2, REEV-R, QDelay, Ardour _samples-used: MechSounds _download: DDA02.wav _project: DDA02-SOURCE.zip _license: CC0 / Public Domain dedicated The post DDA02 appeared first on John Oestmann Music…
There is something about the repeated mechanical sounds of old hard drives that are surprisingly nostalgic. Yet, like other sound-keys, they unlock and pull us back to an era when operating systems GUIs were forced to be smart with screenspace, and tended to menu out in well-organised ways. Feeding a long sample of pink noise into Convolution Reverb will stretch out an input sound into a long and…
Professor Hildr Raystrom welcomes me to her pitch dark arena. My eyes trace the dimly lit outline of her outstretched hand, up brace-wrapped arm, and to the huge thundercoil looming behind her. With a sudden snap of her fingers, blue and fuchsia lightning bolts scream out from the coil and into electrogenerators, previously cloaked in shadowed boltwalls. Arena awakens with floodlight and…
_download + project: https://johnoestmannmusic.com/digichip-duel/ The post DigiChip Duel Deconstructed appeared first on John Oestmann Music .