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Chaos-surfing in Ottawa
Album: 01 Sep 2005
By: EdmundEagan


http://www.twelfthroot.com/

Distance Blue, a new album by Continuum-virtuoso Edmund Eagan, serves up some cool blue sounds for the end of summer. With each track named after a shade of blue from a paint sample chart, the sounds range from airy string-like harmonics to delicate reeds, electric guitars, plucked strings with vocal formants, thereminish swoops, underwater piano pings, metallic grains, alien sitars, computerish blips, and microtonal scales of unknown ethnography, all drenched in delicious reverbs and mysterious ambiences.

Eagan's combination of Kyma with Continuum comprises a new musical instrument in its own right. The sound-generating algorithms are variations on a plucked harmonic resonator run through Johnston-CrossFilters mixed and sometimes processed by additional Crossfilters. Eagan writes: "Having this Continuum/Kyma system allows me to write music in a much more improvisational way then I normally would in the structured environment of typical computer music generation. The result for me is a very gratifying musical experience, akin to surfing (riding the waves on the edge of chaos)."

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