Ensemble Offspring

While the metallic canon of “Vampire” in morse code that I made two days ago wasn’t exactly something catchy that you could tap back to me, I thought it was really effective (and I’m really pleased with the rather expensive metal samples and reverb that I purchased a few months ago now!) and so today I thought I’d try to extend it with some pitched material that uses some musical material from another song from the songlist, recomposed. I don’t think this is very successful, but then that happens in composition. Sometimes you can improve things, and sometimes you have to throw them away (and usually that decision is best left for another day) – so I honestly wanted to include some material that probably won’t get into the final project.

So, why the bass flute and bass clarinet? Well, I’m imagining myself composing for core members of Ensemble Offspring, so it will include Lamorna Nightingale (flutes) and Jason Noble (Clarinets) – you can see them in the photo at the top of this post – and I was thinking that using the lowest of those families of instruments would be really effective for two reasons. One, because the percussive metal-hitting will probably result in lots of high frequencies, and so I’m thinking in two different frequency spaces, and two, because the submarine goes down low, and the destroyer is big, and these are big rich sounds that fit these visual metaphors in some way.

I will be very impressed if anyone can guess which song from the songlist this is. I’ve just taken two little elements, and the whole flute and bass clarinet parts improvise around them. To record this, I improvised in Ableton live from a MIDI controller, playing around with different samples for these instruments from a big sample library, for several hours until I was happy … or, at least, decided to abandon it for today!