Forget everything you have read about ADME so far. Contrary to what I promised after the third album, I have not abandoned ADME or the UPPERCASE music genre. But truth be told, I did not want to create another pseudonym for myself, so ADME now serves as my moniker for all my electronic music, not just the experimental MATLAB synth. Unsurprisingly, I have swapped genres again in an (unsuccessful?) attempt to produce lowercase music. To be precise, this album may be categorized under ambient, noise, drone, and minimalism, which are much closer to lowercase than anything I have made before. Chances are high that I will get there eventually.
Production
UPPERCASE is a concept album, as reflected by the song titles. Firstly, their acronym is the album title, and secondly, when joined, they form a somewhat meaningful sentence: “Unsound patterns of life prove evermore repetitive, yet continuously are you sensing end as beginning.” It refers to unhealthy habits, relapsing, and not giving up hope. Consequently, the album forms a loop, with the stroke of the gong from track 09 (“END AS BEGINNING”) also present on track 01 (“UNSOUND”). When listening to the album, I envision warfare, bombardments, robotics, old and modern technology, and radioactive decay.
Tracklist
01 ⋅ UNSOUND ⋅ 5:00
02 ⋅ PATTERNS OF LIFE ⋅ 4:00
03 ⋅ PROVE ⋅ 6:00
04 ⋅ EVERMORE ⋅ 5:00
05 ⋅ REPETITIVE YET ⋅ 5:00
06 ⋅ CONTINUOUSLY ⋅ 4:00
07 ⋅ ARE YOU ⋅ 5:00
08 ⋅ SENSING ⋅ 4:00
09 ⋅ END AS BEGINNING ⋅ 7:00
In technical terms, UPPERCASE differs from my previous work because I created it using only one software synthesizer, Serum by Xfer Records, which I bought specifically for this album. Previously, I had mostly used presets from other soft synths, but this time I developed almost all sounds from scratch, starting with a blank sine wave.
Below, you can see the Serum interface. Generally, you can add two different oscillator waves, one sub bass, and one noise track. A lot of dynamics come from the use of LFOs (low-frequency oscillators), which can control almost every parameter in Serum by following periodic curves. I particularly enjoy connecting LFOs to create entirely unforeseeable patterns. The synth also features a filter channel that can be applied to any of the other channels, as well as special effects, such as reverb, delay, compression, or distortion.
If you listened to previous ADME albums, you might notice the improvement in sound quality. This is not only due to Serum being more high-fidelity than my own MATLAB synth, but also because my friend Lars-Ole Kremer mixed and mastered the entire album. This further motivated me to stay minimalist, knowing how much longer he takes to mix projects with upwards of 100 audio tracks. We also co-composed track 02 (“PATTERNS OF LIFE”) because I was not satisfied with my first version. Big thanks to Lars-Ole Kremer at this point, remember the name!
On a side note, here are all 39 audio track names in alphabetical order. If you are up for the task, feel free to reassign them to their respective sounds from the album:
ALWAYSLATE, BACKBOARD, BLURB, BONGOBONK, BONGOS, BRUSHING, CHARGING, CLOCKS, DEVOLEK, DID, DOO, DOUBLETENSION, DRAGONBREATH, ELECTRONBEAM, FEEDSONVINYL, FRIDGERIDOO, GERI, HECHTSUPPE, MACHINEGUNNAR, MAGNETIC, ME262, METEOR, MISSING, NUCLEARCRITTER, PHOTONBEAM, POURINGRAIN, PURRIFICATION, REINTERFERENCE, SMOLDERING, SQUEAKS, STEAMVALVE, THROBBERDROID, TIC, TOC, VIGIL, VINYLEATER, WAAAH, WAYNELEERS, WETCAMPFIRE.
Like all my experimental albums, you can find UPPERCASE on Bandcamp.
Artwork
Lastly, the album cover is worth mentioning. I drew inspiration from the cover of “Drawing the Target around the Arrow” by CEP (Caroline Elizabeth Polachek) and aimed to create something similar but without the massive dark margin. To me, it resembled branches and trees reflected on the wavy surface of water. Remarkably, the image seems composed entirely of sine waves (much like the music), and I honestly have no idea how it was made.
So, I took a more direct approach and generated some “dark trees without leaves on white background” with Stable Diffusion. Using GIMP, I rotated the image and performed countless filtering operations, such as sharpening, erosion, dilation, and various types of inversion, to enhance details and make everything more vivid.
The final touch was inducing waviness, for which I wrote a Processing script that horizontally shifts each pixel according to the amplitude of a vertically running sine wave. The sine wave’s parameters depend on the pixel’s position, i.e., the frequency decreases and the amplitude increases from top to bottom, creating the illusion of perspective.
Once the image was finished, I could not find any ideal position for the artist and album name, so I stuck with the minimalist style and left them off the album cover.
While I was content with the result, it seemed like a one-time trick with all the manual image processing involved. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and I do not mean to insult any actual artists. However, if you have been following my artwork, you know that I particularly enjoy generative algorithms that output numerous images with minimal human interaction. Thus, I also attempted to make images similar to what CEP did, drawing only sine waves onto a blank canvas. While my previous Processing script moved pixels by following a global sine field, the updated version allowed for phase shifting, meaning that the individual sine waves would not run in phase but would overlap chaotically.
Unfortunately, I have not fully tapped the potential of the updated version yet, so I decided against it and used the version with the trees instead. The new thing is a work in progress.
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