This album was recorded in a single take, late one winter night in Escondido. Adam Goodwin, my former roommate, had come from Berlin to tour the Southwestern United States with a loose confederacy of instrumentalists known as the Murmur Collective. These shows were the first time in years that Adam and I had shared a difference tone. While this recording marks a clear continuation of the aesthetics of Molten Lava Eyeball Fiend (2010-2012), much of the instrumentation has changed. Everyone’s favorite amplified metal cow-bat, Ms. Bovina Clovis, has long been put out to pasture and euthanized. Her characteristic bullroar has been replaced with belching, distorted homemade synths and turbulent wavelets of Penelope Gkika’s virtuosic violin shredding. The dispersive resonance of long amplified metal springs provides a broth for the stew.

Regarding the music video we made for this album — “Grand March” — I hope it is clear that the marchers are not intended to be understood as fascists. The source footage comes from the Korean People’s Army, so, if anything, the marchers are workers with an unfair despot for a leader. In that sense, they have something in common with the USA. Mostly I was thinking about solidarity with the marchers, hence painting them red and black. The non-human military imagery risks seeming to glorify technology–I intended instead to simply point to the totalitarian endgame of technology under capital. It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, especially since we kept the title as ‘Grand March’, implying the imperialist spread of liberal Whig ideals toward world domination.

Sitting around a campfire in 29 Palms, we discussed the inevitability of civil war breaking out here. Families would be ripped apart, urban guerrilla warfare would likely drag on for years afterward. “It makes me want to flee the country for Europe or something like that,” I said flatly, “It’s just not worth it.” Adam paused, and looked at me for a moment. “It makes me want to come back.”

Thank you to J Robert Oppenheimer

NUCLEAR RAPTURE is:
Πηνελόπη Γκίκα – Violin
Adam Goodwin – Bass
Joe Mariglio – Electronics
20′ industrial spring – Itself

Written by NUCLEAR RAPTURE

Album art by Adam Goodwin, Chelsea Pattee, and Joe Mariglio.

Recorded, Mixed, Produced by Joe Mariglio.

"You got it." - me

This album came together pretty quickly, out of a heap of recordings mostly made in the past 6 months. It was almost accidental. By any measure, I don't have time to record solo material. I've been working full-time as a software engineer, and in my off-time working on that dissertation which, I promise, will happen soon. And on top of all that, I've got a project with Bob Pierzak under the Mayor Tacoghost banner which is going to totally blow your mind in the spring. But somehow I've been throwing ideas around more often, and more frequently than ever, I've been hitting the record button. So there you go.

It's not just me this time, though. I've brought in a lot of my friends for support here, and I'd like to thank them here. Some of them don't even know they're on this yet. You know, I plan on winning a Grammy with this one, so I figured I'd take the money and run.

When I showed Bob the instrumentals for the album, he ignored them. Then I asked him to write a few hooks for it and he got interested. We kicked some ideas around and ended up with the hooks for "Truckin', Not Sorry", "Feeding the Spaniels", and the gregorian chants in "Colliminal Messaging". His contributions to this album might be a preview of the collaborative approach we're taking on the new MTG material.

When I asked Bonnie Lander if she wanted to contribute some vocals, she agreed. Then, instead of doing that, we proceeded to record a completely different project with Clint McCallum which is forthcoming and sounds totally rad. I sampled a bit of her voice from those sessions. Later, she helped lay down some of the hooks.

Devin Connelly was down to record that guitar cameo immediately. And he totally shreds. I'll admit, I may have chopped up his guitar a fair amount, mostly in an attempt to make it less tasteful. He told me he wasn't upset by it.

Adam Goodwin doesn't know he's on this record. I sampled him via some of our old Molten Lava Eyeball Fiend sessions. I've hours (almost a day's worth) of material from those sessions. At one point, Sam Dunscombe (who also doesn't know he's on here) joined us and we pounded some amplified metal together. It was hot.

I used a number of home-made analog synths, vaguely clever recording techniques and new custom software plugins which I'll have to document at some other time. But really, the most important new element here is I'm getting back to thinking melodically and harmonically. Don't get me wrong, texture and rhythm are still essential but, at least in this recording, I also cared about that other stuff. Having purchased that cheap detuned electric piano might have had something to do with it.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it. It's about an hour of music or noise. I hope it helps channel some of your collective energy and anger. It has mine.

The first of these is a repair / refurbish job on the Novation Nova I had as a kid. This digital polysynth is magnificently dirty sounding, and it has graced many of my early synthesis efforts (including the juvenile recordings in the previous post). Unfortunately, the knobs are cheap and prone to breaking. I replaced both rotary encoders, and easy fix. While I was in there, however, I gave it a complimentary sex change:

Before (okay, more like "during"...):

After:

The synth works much better now that its outsides match its insides. On the next revision this thing will get a second coat and wood panels, possibly with a small vertical-facing rack with some analog modular accoutrements.

Another project is the nearly finished Mankato which I found nearly completed in a stash of nearly completed electronics projects from years gone by. I've ordered the remaining components and plan to finish the build this month. Here it is, it's the blue circuit board next to the Nova guts:

Wow, that's upside down. Oh well...

Finally, a longer-term synth DIY project emerged when I rediscovered a control panel donated to me by a behavioral neuroscience lab. The panel will both serve as a rack for my Mankato (and some friends):

The rack has a few of these modular switching cartridges, which appear to be a way to store patch topologies. I'll be connecting these to my existing modular system as well as to the new stuff on the panel (aiming for interoperability here):

Sorry for the rotated pictures... No time to fix.

This album was lost for almost 15 years. I made it when I was still in high school. A few months ago, I received a mysterious email:

“Hey Man, You may not remember me. We only hung out one time (via M H, with F M) years ago. We got all ripped up and went to a diner in the middle of the night. Great night. Anyway, I was driving home from Maine last night and put on an old CD I wasn’t sure of the contents of. It contained he first track of what I believe was your first electronic album. I hadn’t heard it for years, and, fuck it, it brought me to tears. I really love that track. Virtuosic. Any way to acquire a copy of the album? Happy to buy it. Hope you’re well. -Ben”

This email incited a mission to identify the work, and subsequently locate the recordings. Many of my original cassettes (that’s right, cassettes) were destroyed when my parents’ basement flooded some years ago. So, my only option was to call some old friends and see if anyone still had this thing lying around. Eventually, I learned that a friend from college, notorious for his meticulously preened music collection, actually had the album in full.

This album consists of remastered selections from that material. Despite all its naiveté, I stand by it. I have made only minor edits from the original, mostly to clean up the poor quality of the recordings. The remastering process has brought me more than nostalgia — it has helped me understand the person I am now, through the lens of the person that I was then. What strikes me most about the music is its consistency with my aesthetics today. Though this turned out not to be my first self-released album of electronic music, it is certainly the oldest one I have recovered to date. I hope I’ll find more, someday.

All tracks composed, recorded, and produced by 15-year-old Joe Mariglio.
He also contributed: Field Recordings, Synthesizers, Computers, Piano, Vocals.
Jessica Mariglio played electric violin on Track 4.

Thank you, Ben, for your unexpected and flattering email. This one’s truly for you.
Thank you, Jake, for actually having a copy of this. You’re an archival ninja.
Thank you, Risky Forager Records for letting me convince you to release this. May you continue to risk everything.
Most of all, thank you, Mom and Dad, for supporting your son’s self-indulgent musical habit, despite its complete lack of commercial potential or wide appeal.

In addition to standard feedback, Warm Jets can respond to changes in its own output, which can produce semi-stable chaotic complexes.

The three stages consist of:

Fiz - (Saturation / Overdrive)
The input stage is first saturated with a well-tuned nonlinear transformation (ie distortion), which is suitable for a wide variety of source material. At its extremes, this unit can go from subtle, tube-like warmth to blown-out sludge metal. Typically I like it somewhere in between, especially when using several of these in an aux-network (recommended).

Zap - (Allpass Network / Phaser)
The second stage is a stereo cascade of 32 2nd-order allpass filters with variable frequency and resonance. The left and right channels are applied in parallel, and tuned to be 90 degrees apart. This implementation has its own multi-stage saturation, which allows for creamy swooshes and metallic vocal formants.

Din - (Delay Network / Flanger)
The third stage is a stereo feedback delay network with variable speed delay lines. The previous allpass network actually happens within the delay network, so the echoes continually experience phase shift as they circulate. Not quite as dark as tape, and not overly bright like most digital delays. The left and right channels have some cross-paths that can prevent the unit from getting stuck in a rut.

The "Wobble" knob modulates the filter and delay parameters using a filtered form of the output signal itself. The modulation happens dynamically, potentially at audio rates. When the rates are slow, this is similar to a phaser or flanger effect. When the rates are high, all bets are off. The chirping, throbbing sounds can lock into subharmonics of the audio, producing responsive flurries of sidebands.

How it sounds:
I recorded the same clip through a number of different settings on the plugin, to show some of the combinations that are possible.

The settings were:
1) clean, low res phaser (manually modulated), no delay
2) low saturation, hi res phaser (manually modulated), no delay
3) hi saturation, low res phaser (manually modulated), no delay
4) no saturation, no phaser, low delay
5) no saturation, no phaser, low delay (manually modulated)
6) low saturation, hi res phaser (manually modulated), hi delay (manually modulated)
7) low saturation, low res phaser, no delay, low wobble
8) low saturation, low res phaser, no delay, high wobble
9) low saturation, low res phaser, low delay, medium wobble
10) high saturation, high res phaser, high delay, high wobble (!!!)

And finally, I've recorded a track using 3 of these puppies in an aux network:

Adam Tinkle and I have an ongoing collaborative project called Creosota. We are responsible for a wide variety of electro-acoustic disturbances.

From the Stanford event write-up:

Electroacoustic musicians and sound sculptors Adam Tinkle and Joe Mariglio -- collectively known as Creosota -- explore the visual, sonic, and theatrical potentials of projected light, vibrated fluids, and laser microphony, in works inspired by Interferometry. Interferometric techniques are best known for their use in Cold War-era spying. Shine a laser at a window, measure the displacement of the reflection -- poof, you have the sound of the conversation occurring inside the room.

Creosota are responsible for recorded artifacts, interactive installations, and long durational performance installations. Their sculpture, the Shantytown Scrapblaster, was permanently installed at the MEDIA ARTS Center San Diego in 2014. Their collaborations date back to 2005, during studies with Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Ron Kuivila, at Wesleyan University. From 2010 to 2013, they led the Universal Language Orchestra, an ensemble of elementary school-aged musical novices who improvised on, and composed for, invented instruments.

The first installment, ExpDist, is a simple exponential waveshaper plugin that also performs dynamic range compression. I intended this as a template for future builds, but it sounds good in its own right, especially on bass and drums.

For synths, we primarily used a Yamaha TX-802, essentially the tone-generator from the venerable DX7. We also used a Steiner-Parker EVI. Effect plugins were largely by SoundToys.

We are working on a new album, which is shaping up to be a bit more edgy. More on that later...

Methods

The experiment, whose source code may be viewed here examined a model consisting of complex white noise fed through a single complex pole. The modal estimation component of the algorithm, wherein the poles are located as eigenvalues of the prediction matrix, was not used. Instead, this experiment focused on the inverse filtering component, wherein the information about the poles affords the reconstruction of the complex white noise vector. A distance metric, previously used in validation tests on the total system, is defined as

$$E \left[ (x_0 - x_0 a_0 - x_1 a_1 ... x_n a_n) (x_0 - x_0 b_0 - x_1 b_1 ... x_n b_n)^* \right]$$

The RTR distance was evaluated for 200 different models consisting of complex white noise and a single complex pole, each with a unique, 10000 component complex noise vector. There were 20 different pole positions, each tested 10 times with fresh complex noise. The 20 pole positions $\lambda$ were divided into 2 angles: zero and $\pi/2$, each with 10 radii ranging from 0 to 0.9. Each test consisted of a control, where $\epsilon = 0$ and therefore $\lambda_{\epsilon} = \lambda_t$, a real case, where $\epsilon = 10e-6$ and therefore $\lambda_{\epsilon} = \lambda_t + 10e-6$, and an imaginary case, where $\epsilon = 10e-6 \sqrt{-1} = i*10e-6$ and therefore $\lambda_{\epsilon} = \lambda_t + i*10e-6$.

To test the hypothesis that the RTR distance metric is correlated with the Poincare Disc Model (PDM) distance metric, the same two complex points $\lambda_t$ and $\lambda_e$ were used to compute the following metric:

$$d(\lambda_t, \lambda_{\epsilon}) = acosh \left( 1 + \left(2 \frac{|\lambda_t - \lambda_{\epsilon}|^2 }{(1-|\lambda_t|^2)(1-|\lambda_{\epsilon}|^2)}\right) \right)$$

The result shows a 98% or greater correlation between the PDM and RTR distances. The variance is explained by the pseudorandom complex white noise vector.

In previous versions of the modal analysis algorithm performed the following regression:

$$w_{lin} = (X^TX)^{+}X^T y$$

$$w_{lin} = ((X^TX)^T(X^TX))^{-1}(X^TX)^T y$$

However, when Tikhonov Regularization is integrated into this already regularized regression, it produces:

$$w_{reg} = (X^TX + \alpha I)^{+}X^T y$$

$$w_{reg} = ((X^TX)^T(X^TX) + \alpha I)^{-1}(X^TX)^T$$

If, instead, we perform the regression:

$$w_{reg} = (X^TX + \alpha I)^{-1}X^T y$$

Current work involves this regularization technique, and explores the benefits of higher dimensional measurements for retrieving information about the forcing function. Still other current work thoroughly examines various distance measures for eigenvalue estimates in the context of forcing function estimation.