Sounds like the first morning – 12 Months of Mornings begun

At the beginning of February 2024 I started a new, year long project called “12 Months of Mornings”. You can read the inaugural post here. In short, over the course of a year starting in February 2024 and finishing with the photo from January 2025, I am creating one track a month based on the previous “good morning world” aka おはよオーリバー photo I regularly post on SNS.

First morning: 12th February 2024

A few days ago I finished and published the first track from the project, created based on the おはよオーリバー photo from 12th February 2024. It is available on Bandcamp as the first track of an album that will grow with each passing month as new tracks get added. It is currently set to pay as thou wilt, and will then slowly increase in price. So get in there early to get a great price! Or just have a listen via the embedded player:

So, what is going on there? you may ask.

This is all based on sounds, albeit many of them heavily treated with effects, created by loading the image above into various image to sound programs and creating a pool of sounds to work with.

Initially I tried Coagula, a piece of software that has been around for many years created by Rasmus Ekman, who also created the legendary Granulab. Unfortunately, Coagula interprets blue tones as noise, so the results with the image above were not too useful.

I then used an old version of Photosounder, which interprets the image properties differently and gives more control over a variety of aspects.

The original photo gets somewhat squashed in Photosounder, but you can change the frequency range to which areas of the photo are equated in the sonic outcome, limit the overall range frequency range (lowering this from 22050 to somewhere in the 14-18khz range can produce more musically interesting results at the cost of overtones). The result of this process was still relatively noisy. You can hear it coming in at the 1 minute mark of the final track – to make it more interesting I used a emulation of the MoogerFooger Ringmodulator and another plugin that created delay-based gating effects to create life/movement.

A screenshot of the final track project in Cubase, showing the effects in use on the Photosounder generated sound object.

I then moved to another program, Stone Voices’ Sound Art. This, again, sonifies images according to its algorithms, giving you a set of options. As you can see in the video below I did, for example at one point flip the image horizontally to created a different sound. This program also has some minimal image processing available, adding alpha and saturation controls to further shape the sonic output. I’ve created a short video using Sound Art. See if you recognize the sound in the finished track!

Overall I personally like the use of Sonification as a creative tool, but I also feel that it’s important to point out that this is a very arbitrary process that much more reflects artistic choices in how data is converted to sound, then it does about the actual data. And it’s worth to be wary when you’re told that something is the sound of a photo, or an astronomical object or other phenomena, projects or media that don’t naturally produce audible sounds.

“12 Months of Mornings” is, ultimately, a creative project of composition that works with – somewhat random – source material that I harvest by transforming images to sound. I’m also planning to use tools to transform images to MIDI (a language used to control synthesizers and other electronic instruments and that contains information about note pitch, velocity (loudness) etc. I will post about that process in a future update. It’s probably better to see the pictures as a graphic score, its instructions transformed into music by various means of interpretation.

You can get involved by becoming part of the process: The photo each month are selected by choosing the picture with the most engagement (likes, reposts) across both the platforms I’ve recently been posting them to, Twitter and BlueSky.

Another Day – Friday 22:05 Eternal

It’s been a couple of days since the release of the latest The Dubnihilist mini album. Thank you to all who supported it on Bandcamp, listened, joined in for the listening party on Sunday 3rd and those who shared it, helped spread the word and already played in on their radio shows! Among the latter, Fadimat 105 on Radio Fro in Austria and Utopian Transmission broadcasting from Felixstowe!

As of today, Friday 15.03.2024 the mini album is now also out on all major streaming services, youtube and selected download stores. Please chose the service of your choice and listen long and loud!! Do follow, please as in the fight against algorithmic obscurity, engagement really helps. Adding to playlists will give possibly earn you special Nihilist-Karma points!

CLICK HERE for a handy list of links to the major providers – if yours isn;t listed, just search for The Dubnihilist

A big thank you to mahorka’s Ivo Petrov who invited The Dubnihilist to contribute a 1 hour mix to the Planck Tone series to mark the occasion of the release. You can listen to the mix, a selection of own tunes and remixes as well as some dubtastic infuluences on Mixcloud:

Last not least, check out the first review over at Igloo Magazine! They even chose it as featured release! Many thanks!

Follow this link to read the review!

Make sure to follow on the various music platforms, such as Bandcamp, Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube, Spotify and more! And of course on The Dubnihilist Social Media: BluSky, Instagram and Tw@ttreX.

PS: New The Dubnihilist tracks are already in the work and there will hopefully be an exciting announcement in the not too distant future! Live long and bass!

Friday 22:05

The Dubnihilist is back with the track that started this incarnation. And there is more!

The Dubnihilist – Friday 22:05 (Cover by dfkt)

Out today, Leap day 2024 via Dystopian Dub Discotheque, is “Friday 22:05” the latest mini-album by The Dubnihilist.

Consisting of the title track, an all hardware – I think DAWless* is the hype-word these days – Electro Dub Jam, recorded in May 2020 on small set-up that marked the beginning of moving away from mostly in the box work to increasingly more hardware making its way into the productions here chez Bunquere.
*The final product is, strictly speaking, not purely DAWless because it had been recorded multi-track and additional edits plus mixdown effects (EQ/Compressor/Gates) were used. No additional synths/echoes or overdubs tho.

Rediscovered a while ago the track was uploaded to Soundcloud and found quite positive echo so why not put it out properly?! Which brings us to today’s release which features two remixes by The Dubnihilist themselves, which both stray quite a bit from the original. “Friday 22:05 (Another Day)” is a straight, dubtechno track that strips down a lot of the chords, instead opting for plentiful percussions and bass over a 4/4 kick. And “Friday 22:05 (3:00 AM)” is a pure, beat-less chill-out track.

Another premiere for The Dubnihilist is the inclusion of two remixes by artist friends: “Friday 22:05 (autonomaton remixes The Dubnihilist)”, a leftfield reworking which, of all the versions, stays closest to the original but transforms it into new shapes and adds its own subtle twists. autonomaton, of course, is a label mate of old – his release “a little adventure in unconventional dub” was released on DDD in 2016. And we’re slowly but steadily working towards more releases from a wider roster of artists. Stay tuned!

Last not least, “Friday 22:05 (Mono Peninsula Remix)” brings another artist friend (as Photophob he has previously remixed Tomoroh Hidari and vice versa) into the circle. I’m especially thrilled about this, as Mono Peninsula have not only been a constant source of inspiration with his exploits in the dub techno/ambient dub and beyond, but also a catalyst towards this incarnation of The Dubnihilist thanks to their invitation to remix “Severnaya” on “Archangelsk Revisited“.

“Friday 22:05” is now out on Bandcamp.

There will be an online bandcamp Listening Party on Sunday 3rd March 2024 8PM UK Time.

The release should be available on major streaming services by Mid-March 2024. Make sure to follow on the provider of your choice, such as Apple Music, Deezer, Youtube, Spotify and more.

Follow The Dubnihilist on BluSky, Instagram and Tw@ttreX.

Darkness and Decay: Room of Wires remixed

Tomoroh Hidari-wise I spent the final weeks of 23 and first few of 24 mostly creating three remixes. And I’m happy to share that the first of these is out now on DECAYED, celebrating “10yrs of isolation and collaboration” of UK duo Room of Wires.

“For Room of Wires, this is still the beginning, always eager to explore new ground, even after 10 years. Here, they invite some of their past allies to re-work a few highlights from the last decade, as well as a couple of re-workings from themselves.”

Released via S27 the album features remixes by Weldroid, Cognition Delay, 4T Thieves, Peltiform, The Dronefynder General, Daz Disley and Room of Wires themselves, all mixed into a cohesive story-arc that works perfectly for listening to it all in one piece!

Here’s to the next 10 years from me also!
And now head over to Bandcamp, listen and support thine musicians:

…and stay tuned for announcements of other forthcoming remixes and more!

12 Months of Mornings

I am adjective to announce a new, slightly different Tomoroh Hidari project which starts today:

12 Months of Mornings.
A musical exploration of photographed morning skies. February 2024 – January 2025.

おはよオーリバー of 01.02.2024

Each month starting from February 2024 one photo from my regular ”おはよオーリバー” (Ohayooliver: “good morning (from/to) Oliver”) social media posts will be chosen to form the basis for a track. By using the result of a transformation “sonification” into sound using image to sound software (image to midi if such a thing exists would also be interesting) as the first building block of the composition to work with and build on.

The selection of the pictures will initially be decided by choosing the picture with the most engagement (likes, reposts)* across both the platforms I’ve recently been posting them to, Twitter and BlueSky.  

The first month will be February 2024 with all photos from the 1st to the 29th being eligible. I’ll check the stats on or after March 1st and will then create the first track. 

おはよオーリバー from 23.11.2023

A bit of background story:

A bit over two years ago, if memory serves me right, I started to regularly take pictures of – mostly – the morning sky from my window and post them on SNS with the greeting おはよオーリバー (Ohayo-liba-) a portmanteau of Japanese Ohayou and my first ever name, Oliver: “Good Morning Oliver” (although you may find that auto translate is sometimes the better surrealist of us).

Sufficiently meandered -> flashback: Having never in my life been a fan of the early morning hours, unless they were experienced at the end of an Epicurean night, I learned to embrace them coming from the other side of bedtime. Inevitable, once one allows a cat to move in. (Extra points for mentioning cat.)

So, I began this smartphone-age ritual to take a photo out the window every (well, the majority) of mornings as part of my wake-up routine (espresso, cat cuddles, the usual…) and share it. It’s a friendly “hello world” in the morning, a breeze of fresh air (short in winter, where I often wait until after daybreak) and a book of days in pixels. Distant skies (or less open views) from hotel rooms when I travel, variations on a theme on a polychrome scale ranging from grey-in-grey-ish grey to more colours than a 90s SONY commercial.

Originally mostly on Instagram/fb stories, they started to also find their way to Ex-twittre and, occasionally – and from now on regularly – BlueSky. And on the latter two mostly have found their small but appreciated as well as appreciative audience and thanks to the friendly comments of one EQ-P (now officially a Muse!) the idea for this emergent project was sparked.

おはよオーリバー from 15.01.2024

There may other ideas come along or develop over the next twelve months, so there’s scope for this project to evolve, but for the principle of 1 picture of each month is chosen and a track created from it the following month.

I haven’t decided yet how I will release the music and considering various options including a subscription maybe, but would also be up work with an adventurous and supportive label on this.
More tba.

*(Don’t worry, this is not going to turn into an onslaught of “vote for this month’s…” daily tweets, but I might occasionally encourage or find – hopefully entertaining – ways to keep folks engaged. I’m planning to also post about the process a bit, so do follow along for more!

So stayed tuned for the morning skies. And follow me on BlueSky or Ex-Twittre for your daily おはよオーリバー。ありがとうございます。

… before you leave: Tomorrow, February 2nd is another Bandcamp Friday. Your support, as always, means the world! Thanks!