music
Lenntrak Blue 88
Single
Synthwave, Chillwave, Synth-Funk
Bandcamp • Spotify • Apple Music
Join Lenntrak Blue 88 on a synthwave voyage through space as it heads toward inter-dimensional shapeshifting monolithic enemies of the 16bit era.
Composed on the Dirtywave M8 tracker. The M8 project file for this song is included with the Bandcamp download!
Picking up where 'FM in the B4' left off in 2020, 'Commuter Focus' is a return to form exploring melodically driven lofi synthwave sounds and FM synthesis.
In an homage to video game music stylings, 'Commuter Focus' pulls inspiration from a number of disparate genres, but blends them together into a cohesive package by utilizing a similar set of voices.
Tracks like 'Eggshells' and 'Exist 4 Cute' pull in classic chiptune-esque sounds and melodies. Meanwhile, tracks like 'Imbiber' pay respects to psychedelic dub music, and 'Frost Kill' explores Jazz, Rock, and DnB.
Music written during travels and commutes using Caustic 3 for Android.
Released through Lagom Audio/Visual
Vizualizer: youtu.be/LTtZIVC3e3g
New single by my side project Broken Alias out today via Lagom Audio/Visual! Music video + streaming links below. Part of an EP coming out one month from now on 3/3/2023~
Eggshells
Brief recap shots from a performance at STILLSUITE, an A/V showcase held at Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn.
I was asked to perform as part of the showcase and opted to focus on music this time around, and to give my chiptune focused project Broken Alias some attention, with Erin Wajufos (of Never Knows Better) providing some stellar accompanying visual projections. This 1 hour set was a sort of 'mobile music showcase' for me, utilizing unreleased material from 3 upcoming albums which were written and performed using LSDJ on the Nintendo Gameboy, the Dirtywave M8 portable tracker, and Caustic 3 - a DAW for mobile. I also decided to lug six of my CRT Scopes across town to display the music's waveforms (and, subsequently, think a lot about that exhausting choice).
Thanks so much to Erin and Anto who curated the showcase for having me, Erin for the custom live visuals, Dolphin Uppercut who shot and cut together this video (during the event!), and all those who had kind words or just stuck around 🕹🎵 Be sure to check out all the other talent that was a part of this fantastic live A/V showcase, as well as the host of the event, Millennium Film Workshop in Brooklyn!
Composed & produced between 2017 and 2020, Anxiety Dreams is a 37 minute gapless album that attempts to contextualize an evening of nightmares, the accompanying dysphoric confusion, and the moments grasping at lucidity. A series of ambient, melodically driven reflective moments are punctuated by intense, drum-break-driven psychedelia while navigating a disorienting landscape formed by disjointed memories of waking life.
Built through granular refinement over time, and with a large focus on the density of its textures and consistency of its motion, Anxiety Dreams oscillates between stylistic explorations of IDM, Ambient, Breakcore, Classical, Drill n' Bass, Dub, and a slew of sometimes disparate experimental territories in an attempt to weave each sonic thread into a larger cohesive patchwork.
Informed heavily by early electronic songwriting habits, a collection of personal audio recordings with emotional connections dating back to childhood are broken apart in this album and arranged to form rhythmic and melodic structures. This process often forms the backbone of each piece, while a combination of hardware synthesizers, homemade machines, acoustic instrumentation, and meticulously programmed drum-breaks help guide things into place.
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This album is pay-what-you-want. If you enjoy it, please consider supporting me by sharing it with somebody you believe may enjoy it as well. A donation with your purchase of the downloadable material on Bandcamp is very much appreciated, but not expected.
As this is a gapless album, my recommendation is to download the audio through Bandcamp and listen in your gapless audio player of choice. A gapless version of this album (split into two parts due to length restrictions) is also available as part of the album download.
Many thanks to everybody who listened and provided feedback on the many, many revisions of this album that were passed along over the years.
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When I was very young my mom would sit with me before bed and pray for me to have ‘good dreams, and good thoughts of the wonderful things made in this world’. One night I asked her to change the prayer going forward, and asked that instead we pray that I have no dreams. Sometimes we just want to shut things off for a while.
First video is a the first little track I put together on the M8.
Second video is going over some simple additions I’ve added to the M8 display app for PC. Primarily for use as a keypress viewer & overlay with some extra stuff to play with.
Download here: https://github.com/Gleix/M8DisplayTouchdesigner_Viz_and_Keypress_Overlay
This melodically driven EP explores a combination of jazz-inspired acoustic instrumentation, drill n' bass style breaks, and genre combinations that on paper ought to clash interweaving in organic ways.
This is a gapless release intended to be played as a single piece. It is exactly 1,000 seconds long.
Thank you to my childhood self, family & friends for putting ourselves on cassette tapes which I'm able to sample all these years later.
Performed live on September 9th, 2021 at Culture Lab LIC in NYC as part of a showcase put together by Never Knows Better at the Ars Electronica Festival Garden.
This performance utilizes a fully DIY modular audiovisual synthesizer, a collection of custom controllable systems built in Touchdesigner, and a CRT TV which has been modified into an pseudo-oscilloscope receiving dedicated audio & video feeds to generate colored waveforms.
Three 60Hz tones are generated by the AV modular representing the three RGB color channels, panned left, center, and right respectively. These three underlying tones, which the piece is fully built around, have harmonics which shift depending on the shape of the individual color channels in the image, with peaks of amplitude being built for each color's pixels as the image is scanned through on each refresh of the video signal. Additional waveform generators and simple oscillators are injected into the color channels and 'played' in tune with the underlying tones by dialing in exact frequencies, which at multiples of 60Hz, will also form stable scanlines in the receiving color channel.
Touchdesigner serves as a complex collection of controllable systems for handling & manipulating audio, video input, as a standalone visual system, to introduce generative elements and contained-randomness when triggering external audio elements and visual subsystems, and for general data & MIDI processing. Percussive elements, rhodes, and additional audio processing in FL Studio.
https://www.instagram.com/gleix
DIY Modular: https://www.gleix.net/modular
CRT Scope: https://www.gleix.net/crtscope
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Check out other performances from the showcase: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCILH...
Event page: https://www.xrensemble.com/ars-electr...
Thank you NKB & Ars Electronica for the opportunity.
https://www.instagram.com/neverknowsb...
https://www.instagram.com/arselectron...
Thank you Ulisespal for providing additional footage
Bandcamp • Spotify • Youtube • Lagom Audio/Visual
Via this article in Brooklyn Vegan:
“Gull is a masked one-man band that we once compared to Lightning Bolt and Battles, and Gleix is an electronic musician from Brooklyn who specializes in IDM, ambient, breakcore, and drill 'n' bass, and they've now collaborated on the new single "Prepared Breaks." As the title implies, it's a combination of prepared piano and breakcore, "though that's probably obvious and not the most.. creative title," Gleix says.
More background, via press release: "The project was spearheaded by fellow artist and collaborator Cy Fi, who shot initial footage and encouraged it to be built upon. From there, Gleix began manually cutting & warping the original footage to fit a consistent tempo. After building the audio and video in late 2017, it sat dormant for a few years. Once the idea of releasing it came back up, he was able to take some of the knowledge gained working in visuals, and add a system of real-time effects on top of it all."
Gleix also had this to say about the song, "I think it's easy to end up inadvertently working through issues while focusing on detailed or tedious tasks. You get into a sort of trance. In the more rhythmically complex pieces I've put together I might be listening to the same bar over and over for half an hour before moving on, trying to weigh what sounds best in the moment with what works best contextually. The process feels analogous to thinking about problems that exist in the present moment; thinking about what to do about them now, what decisions make the most sense given what's already happened, and how to make the transition into whatever comes next as smooth as possible. Slowly piecing together breaks is a very zen process and a sort of therapy for me I guess, despite how chaotic the end result can be."
If you're familiar with both prepared piano and breakbeats, you probably have an idea of what to expect, and this song delivers. It's equal parts gorgeous and dizzying. Check out the video below...”
I put this on Instagram a few weeks ago and figured I’d put it up on youtube as well.
“A highly condensed/quick live cover of one of my favorite Squarepusher tracks, "Theme From Ernest Borgnine." That main melody still makes its way into my head every so often and the 303 line is nuts (I think I got it pretty close!)
Sub Phatty // SH-101 lead
x0xb0x // 303 line
Mother-32 // pseudo pads
Drum loops lifted from original”
Hadn’t done anything like this in awhile - did a little livestream on 4/3 just playing with a minimal hardware set up.
Putting this online has been on my to-do list. Via the youtube description:
'“One of two pieces originally premiered at Lightbox in NYC as part of the Creative Code Art festival last November. "Aurora (Migration)" is an extra wide real-time render that was performed utilizing a controllable particle system with a collection of processing effects chains. It's also a variation on previous performances with a similar system.
The music in this piece is "Pretend You're Not," a track curated from a collection of live ambient rehearsal recordings made in the run up to a live performance at Avant Gardner in February, 2020.
Thank you to the space, organizers, and all involved in the Creative Code Festival:
Lightbox: https://lightbox.io/
Creative Code Art: https://www.instagram.com/creativecod...
New Media Art: https://www.instagram.com/new_media_art/
Never Knows Better: https://www.instagram.com/neverknowsb...
Ix Shells: https://www.instagram.com/ix.shells/
Erin Wajufos: https://www.instagram.com/erin_wajufos/
Extended Reality Ensemble: https://www.instagram.com/xrensemble/”
Available on Bandcamp.
I put together a Vaporwave track for the intro of my next video synth demo and ended up finishing a full version. This track (released as Gleix) is a vaporwave remix of the track Stickerscrub Symphony (Bandcamp) (Music Video) which I released under the alias Notorious D.K.C. in 2018.
I’ve just released my chiptune cover of Maneater by Hall & Oates!
Check it out on Spotify, Bandcamp, and see the music video below :)
1/12/2021 edit: So - in December I came across a demo somebody made on Youtube of a Japanese synthesizer. At the end of the video they do a brief little jam with it which inspired me. I kept wanting to hear it expanded and I made a quick song using it and built some accompanying visuals. After putting the video up the person who made the demo video that I sampled in this project, who I very prominently credited up front for this personal, unreleased, non-monetized project, made it abundantly clear through a barrage of comments and DMs that they were opposed to any use of his demo video that isn’t explicitly authorized, so this is gone now.
I've never understood that sort of mindset and, to be honest, I think that sort of thing is everything that’s wrong in the creative space. After they saw the posts (two weeks after I posted them and tagged them?) I was immediately bombarded with “This is illegal!” (it’s not) “All rights reserved, you can not use this!”
What this was is a fun personal project that I did, sampling their demo video, because it inspired me. If they’re unhappy with seeing their demo video re-contextualized, fine. But the aggressive bombardment of comments and DM’d threats due to a personal project that sampled some synthesizer demo footage, which again, was prominently credited to them right up front, is a massive bummer. It was needlessly aggressive, and that sort of mindset and approach discourages collaboration, drives people away from your work and the thought of engaging with it, limits exposure, creates an air of self-importance, and breeds creative isolation imho. This is a net negative for everybody involved. Nobody was making or losing money on this one-off, unreleased, short personal project.
While I don’t know the exact reason that my sampling of their demo video was such a massive issue for them, it’s their right to ask me to take it down and I tend to try and take the path-of-least-resistance, so it’s whatever. Just a bummer.
Super excited to be a part of this event coming up on November 12 - 15th. I’ve got two pieces being debuted, “Ablation Cutie” and “Aurora (Migration)” this Thursday, the 12th between 8pm and 9pm.
Those in NY can come to the festival at Lightbox in Manhattan, and those outside of NY can take part virtually in Sansar & watch the pieces streamed on Twitch!
Put together some footage of my install at last years Cityfox Halloween festival.
Around this time last year I was given the opportunity to put together a themed composition with synchronized lighting for the "Lobby of the Lost" at the Cityfox Experience Halloween Festival at Avant Gardner here in Brooklyn.
The 30 minute piece moves through a series of dark atmospheres, anxiety driven percussive moments, ambient textures and (given the room's theme) some eerie circus-type melodies. The music is accompanied by a collection of sequenced strobe lights, chandeliers, wash lights, and glowing gowns that surround the room.
Both the music and the lighting sequence were written in Image-Line’s FL Studio. The lighting sequence, written in a series of 14-bit MIDI triggers and automation envelopes next to the music, is sent in real-time via a loopback into Derivative Touchdesigner where the data is processed and sent out as DMX values to each of the fixtures. A simple previz system was also built within Touchdesigner to visualize the lighting data during the sequencing process.
It was an absolute highlight of my year getting to dive into such a unique project and see it all come together. To everyone at the venue who helped in any way, Billy for the opportunity, and those who came by to check out what I went nuts working on for a couple weeks, thank you. Hope to do something like this again some day 🎃 Happy Halloween!
https://www.gleix.net https://www.instagram.com/gleix
Thank you to https://www.brendanzoltowski.com for helping capture footage during the event.
#cityfox #halloween #installation #synchronizedlighting #touchdesigner #flstudio
