Hey Exit – Advection

Advection is a pretty light, airy affair – a trio of instrumentals made in a beta version of VCV Rack over a couple weeks in the summer of 2018 (you can actually still hear the low-CPU pops that characterized the beta, ha). I was listening to a lot of Laurie Spiegel and Keith Fullerton Whitman at the time, and catching the synth bug in general.

Parallel to these interests, I've always been very taken with the music of windchimes. Over the years, I’ve played duets with them, tried to mimic their rhythms on guitar and other instruments, and even taken a few stabs at recreating their grammar in CSound or Max, all to varying degrees of non-success. Modular synths have always seemed like a fun route to get closer to windchime music, but the price tag has always been a deterrent for me. Once I found VCV Rack, it seemed like a much simpler proposition.

After a couple weeks of plugging stuff into other stuff, I put together three separate takes on the music of windchimes – the first track bearing the least obvious resemblance to its inspiration, and the third, the most.