landforms
I figured I needed to craft some decidedly non-synthetic sounds for my environments, which is a bit of a challenge when you are making the sounds with a synthesizer. I would build 'alien' environments, places that had soundscape qualities but places that were not from this world.
Deciding to start with various noise-source modules, then, I ran their output into some audio-distortion modules. What did I get? Distorted noise! The sounds did indeed have alien qualities, like sounds coming from an inorganic place, not the organic biomes we're used to hearing here on planet Earth.
So this was ostensibly what I wanted, but when I began putting the sounds together, an interesting thing happened. Instead of becoming audio emenating from an environment, the sounds became the environment. I heard them as tokens of a physical layout. Imagine kayaking around one of those locations like the Halong Bay Islands in the South China Sea, or the rock formations off the Izu peninsula in Japan, or (closer to my home now) the rocks of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. The sounds themselves were the rock formations, coming into view (audibly) as the music progressed.
At first I wasn't very happy with what I was producing, but
with this new sound-as-the-envrironment-itself approach I began to
really enjoy the music. They are different in certain
ways from my other work, and that's not a bad thing at all.
Brad Garton
July, 2026
