New Music! "False Flag" by LX NEN

[Andrew Robinson]

Hello 'barians

After many years of announcing that I was doing the RPM challenge (record a
whole album in the month of February) and failing to complete it, this year
I've done the opposite and kept quiet about it until it was done, dusted,
and uploaded (with about 15 hours to spare).

I'm really pleased with how it turned out, and how much I managed to get
done in 1 month alongside everything else life was throwing at me, in fact
I'm so happy that I've decided to give it a 'proper' release, and set up a
Bandcamp page. If you want to hear the album (or dip into a few tracks),
you can stream it for free here: https://lxnen.bandcamp.com/album/false-flag
You can also pay to download it there (and get a free 16 page pdf of liner
notes!), but please don't feel you need to do that, I'm happy to share it
to the bar for free. Does anyone know a good way of doing that reliably for
free these days?

There are 9 tracks, totalling just over 70 minutes, and they seem to hang
together well as a body of work. Here's a track-by-track breakdown / gear
list (almost all Reason with plugins) / braindump. By the way the themed
track names were a last minute thing to replace meaningless working titles
and are about the only part of the album I'm not happy with, so don't
expect them to be particularly relevant/helpful.

1. Strengths - Easy listening Techno (?) with nice hooks and a pleasing
blend of quirky noises. Lots of physical modelling with Reason rack
extensions here, for the bass flute, string-like pulse and wobbly bouncing
ball-ish thing.

2. Weaknesses - This is 'single' from the album. A 'found sound' voice
sample of poetry is distorted until it's mostly unintelligible. More
physical modelling for a flute-like sound, and Devious Machines Texture and
Infiltrator 2 provide various types of damage and aging.

3. Opportunities - Not a Pet Shop Boys cover. One of my rules for the
project was that I must use every piece of software I've installed over the
last year, which is how this ended up being a war between an orchestral
track (Spitfire Audio's BBC Symphony Orchestra, Reason's Friktion
and Harmony Improvisator by Synleor) and a dubstep track (PhasePlant and
303).

4. Threats - The most agressive track here. Traditional techno with lots of
heavily processed 303.

5. Denial - Somehow I ended up making an easy listening record from the
1940s and it fits in nicely here as a short oasis of calm before drifting
off into slightly disturbing decay. The clarinet line has been stuck in my
head for weeks. Expect low bandwidth, police radio chatter and layers of
artificial gunge.

6. Anger - A solid 10 minute slab of 120bpm techno. 808, 303, quirky gritty
noises.

7. Bargaining - The silly one. A cross-genre kitchen sink wall of sound
with distorted bells, sci-fi noises, violin solo, tom-toms, 303, an
orchestra, timbales and 1/4 speed distorted toy piano of doom.

8. Depression - Dark sub-bassy abstract dub techno. An attempt to take the
listener to the sort of tune-free timeless dub groove territory that
Kraftwerk's 'Abzug' inhabits. Packed with 'what the hell was that' sounds
that still just about make musical sense.

9. Acceptance - Darkly grooving techno that eventually resolves to a
happier place, courtesy of a 303 put through a chord-voice harmonising
effect.

I hope you enjoy it. I'd be really happy to get any feedback you might have
(particularly around quality control and better mastering, which hasn't
really been done). There's a lot of music to wade through so feel free to
skip through any tracks that are not working for you. Of course I'm happy
to answer any how did you do that / why did you do that / etc. questions.

- Andy_R
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