This album is a collection of ambient tracks (2000-2014) from the albums ‘The non-affirming negative’ (tracks 6, 7), ‘Door een tragische lens’ (tracks 2, 5, 8, 10, 11) and ‘Het landschap dat belooft’ (tracks 1, 3, 4) plus one previously unreleased track (track 9). The album contains one bonustrack (2001) when bought on Bandcamp. Released January 1, 2018
Trivia on Ambient Parts and Pieces:
Incubator: built from the sounds of three rather obscure but influential (sampled) keyboards: the Hammond Novachord (considered the first polyphonic synthesizer (1938) and known for its creepy horror sound, here it is the Mellotron-like base melody), the Farfisa Compact (used by Pink Floyd in their 60’s period, here it is the bass line), and the Ondes Martenot (an electronic musical instrument from 1928 used mainly in modern classical music (for example Charles Koechlin), but also in pop music (Radiohead), here it is the lead melody at the end. It contains a field recording of the Afrikaandermarkt in Rotterdam
Epitaph (March to the muddy hole): consists entirely of acoustic fragments recorded on and around my desk that were pulled through the effects machine. An important role is reserved for the well-known (but now obsolete) white plastic coffee cup from the office
Filterfest part 2 and Fun for brains: the only instrument used on these compositions is the Korg MS-20 soft synth
Door een tragische lens part 1: this is what happens when the ADSR envelope of a sample gets compressed over time
Experimenting with the Korg Prophecy solo synthesizer (1998/1999). The recordings were made on a Nakamichi Cassettedeck 2
Take my hand:
Rest a while
Using the ribbon controller to modulate filter resonance. Sudden bursts of sound from the Korg Prophecy have the power to rip your eardrums apart; for this sample I had to compress the signal at 2:31 significantly to avoid serious damage to the listener’s ears:
You woke it up:
Korg Prophecy arpeggiated with a bunch of other synths on one MIDI channel and most likely routed through the Lexicon Vortex effects processor:
Winterleven@Climber’s invisibility cloak
The middle section of this slightly peculiar mix (called ‘Traveler’s invisibility cloak’) was created during an 11-month trip in 2014/2015 and was partly composed in a hotel in Kolkata and in the high mountains of Uttarakhand, India. Hardware used: Asus T100 tablet, Korg Nanokey 2 keyboard, Sony MDR-ED21 earphones. Software used: Ableton Live, Adobe Audition, EZDrummer demo plugin. The poem (called ‘Winterleven’) was added to it in 2024. Finally I wrapped it up in two fragments of distorted string chords taken from a composition called ‘Climber’s Lament’ from the late 90s. The cello here is a physical modelling patch from the Korg Prophecy. A little glitch from the tape head at the end of the piece betrays its analog origins:
More Byte Plantation from the late 1990s
Trapped:
Ravine flower:
The world according to Deedee:
The non-affirming negative:
Most of the tracks on this album are early Byte Plantation songs from the late 1990’s which were recorded on cassette tape and cdr. Released February 2, 2025