music

Discreet Harmonica

Brian Eno's Discreet Music is a groundbreaking piece of ambient music. It's 30 minutes of beautiful and deliberately unobtrusive music, created by combining small loops of music, each less than a minute long.

A few months ago, I spontaneously tried to record a harmonica cover version of it, and since then, have been working on my own pieces generated in similar ways. A few short and simple loops, allowed to run and change against each other, treated with some effects, perhaps inspiring further improvisation.

These are some of the results that I've liked. They are long, not meant for concentrated listening, and experimental in the true sense of the word, meaning I didn't know if they would work and am still deciding if they have worked.

Discreet Harmonica I: Loading the player ...; The first in the series. These loops were a little more manual, played into a Boss DD20 on a very long delay setting.
Discreet Music: Loading the player ...; My cover of Eno's piece. I'm not fully satisfied with it, but it was wonderful to put these two simple loops together and hear "Discreet Music" come out of it. There are only two loops. One was in an RC20 and the other in an RC2, together decaying into the DD20.
Discreet Harmonica II: Loading the player ...; Second in the series. Same setup as above.
Discreet Harmonica III: Loading the player ...; Third in the series. This was my first experiment with two new delay boxes: the Eventide TimeFactor and the Boomerang Phrase Sampler III.
Discreet Harmonica IV (More Music For Housecleaning): Loading the player ...; A while back I did a drone study I nicknamed "Music For Housecleaning" in honor of Eno's ambient album Music For Airports. This is a sequel to it; several long loops running together, as I cleaned the house and checked in every once in a while to add something new. The three loops were running in a Boomerang phrase sampler, decaying into an EHX 2880.
Discreet Harmonica V (The Very Long Black Veil): Loading the player ...; This takes the very simple and beautiful melody of the old country classic, and loops it against harmonized versions of itself, all of irregular length. I believe this was also the Boomerang, decaying into the EHX 2880.
Discreet Harmonica VI: Loading the player ...; These loops were built in an Eventide Timefactor, processed through several different filter effects, and decayed into the 2880.

Ken Ficara

music

Discreet Harmonica