conosphaera : music made in someone else's bedroom
the second release of this artist spans roughly five months of creative output. starting in deepest winter and leading up to the spring of 2006. what all the pieces on this ep-length release have in common, is the circumstance of their creation. the groundwork for all of those recordings was laid while being holed up in a friend's massive loft bed, surrounded by nothing but sound-equipment and with a cat as the only company - hence the title. of course, expanding from a few basic sketchy arrangements and sounds, and mastering it in a slightly more suitable environment than someone's bed, took the rest of all those months until now the release comes to you via this label. i hope you enjoy the results.
cover art by aaron kaplan
in deepest darkest december, during the three days of real winter we get over here in the netherlands, most of what went into this track was already done. the title fittingly comes from the name of a dark and fearsome winter spirit in tove jansson's 'moomintroll' series of children's stories. those stories are populated by little trolls, kobolds and gnomes which are also cavorting through the arrangements of this piece, fleeing the frozen passage of the dark and lonely morra.
the inspiration for this piece was a feature on a belgian horrorthriller i saw on tv. the movie - called calvaire - is based on a similar theme as the classic 'texas chainsaw massacre'. a lost citydweller runs afoul of some degenerates in the backwoods of the ardennes with dire consequences. the mountainous woods of the belgian ardennes coupled with a surreal horrorstory provided a strangely beautiful and melancholic, yet disturbing, theme.
this piece has as much spring in it as morra has winter. while some of the beats and basic sequences were developed during those winter weeks spent in bed, the melody was built in spring. while immersing myself in a frequency modulation matrix to generate and tweak on this melody hours after hours, i sometimes completely lost my sense of time and locality. that sense of reality disassociation provided the title.
this track's title is derived from network tunneling - a technique used to create encrypted and obfuscated connections between different points of networks like - for example - the internet. while i was finishing this piece, i was working on creating such encrypted tunnels over wireless networks spanning my local neighbourhood. a nicely fast paced arragement with fairground melodies gone wrong.
a broadcast from the ministry of truth. a lively brave-new-world newsjingle sugarcoating the dark truths behind the propaganda-lies. mediaspin from an alternative reality not quite so unlike our own maybe. this piece has a lot of oldschool arcadegame feeling in the way how the melody is arranged and through it's use of gritty 8bit drumsounds from a cheap digital drumsynthesizer.