Another excellent zoom from the Fractal Foundation’s astoundingly popular show.

This is currently my favorite zoom for the Fractal Foundation. That’s an audio sample of the dryer in our basement that leads from the first part of the song to the second.

This is the video for Peacock. To my eye the visuals don’t go through as many changes as some of the other fractal zooms I’ve worked on, so the biggest challenge for me was to write music that could keep interest flowing and growing in the piece as a whole.

GETTING STARTED
This one went through some pretty radical changes before I finished it. It started as a simple Navajo flute over 6/4 drumming, but when I added a nice brooding atmosphere with the Nord synth, things started to fall apart around the edges for me. I tried to fudge it by adding a serious and spacey delay. The second part is a radical shift from the first, with a gnarly low bass holding up the heavy guitar. In this cut you can hear me trying out solo ideas, some of which actually made it to the final version. This is Cut 3:

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GETTING A GRIP
On this next cut I’ve chopped out much of the flute, but didn’t yet have the heart to kill it entirely. I added a simple guitar line in the first part to try and hold the piece together opposite the synth atmosphere. And I tried putting a vocoder in there, with the words “Infinite…and everywhere.” It’s too hard to distinguish the words, though, and I can’t figure out how to turn down the vocoding effect on the Korg. In the second part, I livened up the solo a touch and threw on a rhythm guitar to add sparkle. This is Cut 5:

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GETTING IT DONE
Finally I tore out the flute entirely and replaced it with some spacey high frequency atmosphere from my synths. With these fractal pieces I’m always trying to go for more organic instruments, but I usually end up right back with the synths no matter what I do. I only kept one instance of the vocoder, just for kicks, which is found just before the transition. And I really didn’t change too much on the final solo, except to try and record it in one take. This is the final cut, Cut 9:

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As usual, I’ll upload a video with the zoom soon, so you can see the music in context.

This is Hypermeshy, the very first fractal soundtrack I ever made.

And this is the video for Featherino, so you can see the music in context.