Live Wires
15 Performances on the Buchla Easel
In 'Live Wires, Steve celebrates the 50th anniversary of Donald Buchla's Music Easel and pays homage to his grandfather and father's pioneering work in power transformer technology. Some of their patents, alongside Don Buchla's innovative Music Easel, appear on the cover art.
Throughout these 15 performances, he infuses his music with asymmetrical Fibonacci-inspired loops and echoes, blending the concept of transformer's spiral windings with melodic spiral-infused patterns. Processed and panned through Apple's Logic Pro, these loops intertwine into a symphony of sounds as a nod to his family's electric legacy, which currently powers my sonic explorations.
Find it here:
eVOLVE starts out with an exploration of a simple melody performed on the Buchla Music Easel and then is slowly adapted and transformed on the 200e. It is then processed with echos, reverbs and massively sequenced loops into a wash of shimmering lushness and then reemerges in new key as it builds layers of sequenced patterns. With no other tonal pathways left to explore the music submerges in to a dark, timbral world that is the provenance of the timbral language Buchla 200e in a Skylab enclosure.
Steve H performed this live at Nick's (virtual) Garage on July 31, 2020.
OCEANA
Oceana EP
This EP, Oceana, takes you on an emotional, sonic journey exploring he Ocean from its surface to the deepest, darkest depths and back again. Steve H says:
"Oceana begins, quite appropriately, in the pentatonic mode slowly building up complex layers of filtering bubbling, melodic, effervescent wash. It then slowly and imperceptibly submerges the listener deeper into its mysterious, reverberated depths as the musical modes shift to lydian, ionian and then completely devolve into dark layers of gong-like natural dissonance. It, then, briefly attempts to return to the surface with the reappearance of the pentatonic bubbles, but surprisingly a rhythmic Buchla solo halts the progress as it takes another plunge even deeper into the darkest trenches as the composition transitions into the natural minor scale. Finally, it suddenly rises back to the surface and into the glorious, shimmering sunlight."
Oceana is infused with shimmering reverbs, loops and echos, inspired by Fibonacci (spiraling) ratios, designed to infinitely perpetuate the verisimilitude of the nature world.
Oceana is performed live, in surround, on the Buchla 200e electronic music instrument and later mixed and mastered to stereo at Steve H's New York studio.
Buchla Now
Buchla Now Cassette and Digital Download
Limited edition Buchla Now cassette/download!!
Check out my latest composition, "Spirals of an Inner Life" in a collection called Buchla Now. It includes music by several extraordinary musicians who are masters of Buchla's electronic music instruments: Marcia Bassett, Suzanne Ciani, Dan Deacon, Jonathan Fitoussi, Steve Horelick, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Hans Tammen, and compilation curator Todd Barton. I'm so thrilled to a part of this historic release.
https://www.ultravioletlight.blue/product/buchla-now
Buchla Now is being released as a 300-copy limited edition cassette with 3-color risograph printed artwork by Wilson Ward Kemp as well as digital-download codes included with each cassette.
interSonic
The beautiful and haunting NEW CD, interSonic, by synth-wiz, STEVE HORELICK and JORDAN RUDESS (Dream Theater) , features 11 tracks + a download card which includes 3 bonus tracks exclusive to the CD.
As Steve and Jordan describe interSonic: “When we assemble our collection of electronic and acoustic instruments, we’re setting up our sonic canvas. Will the music be tonal or textural? Who knows? A wonderful, initial state of uncertainty fills the air...Keys are pressed. We listen. Knobs are turned. We respond. Touchplates are activated and music begins to flow from our minds through our fingers into the real world. It’s magic. Our very personal magic.”