Sevish Music

Chill microtonal chord progression / 22edo The tempo and velocity are controlled by a drunk walk using the drunk object (e.g. from Pure Data, Max/MSP or Max 4 Live). This piece uses the Xen-Arts IVOR and FMTS2 synths, with Drunk Arpeggiator (old lost version) running in Max 4 Live.

This drum & bass tune is written in a 14-note microtonal temperament. Next Xen is a compilation album that unshackles music from a 200 year old ball and chain. Western music theory says that there are 12 equal notes, and for some reason it's a taboo to break out of this. But what if you want to hear 13? Or even 100 notes, all of different sizes? Such music would be called microtonal, xenharmonic, or just "xen."

From the album '23'. After the Subversio album, this is the second release on Dubbhism Deluxe bringing together the sounds of Jacky Ligon (Xen-Arts), Sevish (split-notes) and Tony Dubshot (Dubbhism). This EP is about a tuning, known as 23 EDO. We call this style Xenharmonic Bass Music. All pieces are written using the same tuning, and once again the FMTS synthesizer, a VSTi developed by Jacky Ligon of Xen-Arts, was used to design many of the sounds on this EP.

Never Coming Home (Remix) is track 1 from Sevish's EP MK-SUPERDUPER. It's a drum and bass remix of an unreleased microtonal ambient/textural piece in 313-EDO Madagasgar[9]. MK-SUPERDUPER is named after the secret bass society who wanted to illuminate the world with new musical colours and liberate us from the 12-tone system and 432 Hz nutters. All the leaked details are in the liner notes which are included with the album download. This is not just a "theory"!!!!!1

This is the title-track of the EP. It's a jazzy drum and bass tune using a microtonal tuning called 22-EDO (22-tone equal temperament). There are some atmospheric elements, some straight-ahead bass stuff, 808 perc and sampled melodica, so it's a mixed bag. The chord sequence is based on the same sequence as my ambient piece 'The Sky Are Sick' ( • Sevish - The Sky ... ) MK-SUPERDUPER is named after the secret bass society who wanted to illuminate the world with new musical colours and liberate us from the 12-tone system and 432 Hz nutters. All the leaked details are in the liner notes which are included with the album download. This is not just a "theory"!!!!!1

A Sega Genesis remix of the Shenmue I Slot House music. One of the catchiest and cheesiest hidden gems on the whole soundtrack. My dream: to replay Shenmue I and II on my PC, maybe with updated and improved controls... The choice of Japanese/English dubs would be a treat too! :)

The Before Time is a jazzy drum'n'bass tune with a little techno influence, written in Wendy Carlos' microtonal Alpha tuning. Alpha splits the perfect fifth into 9 equal parts. This means that the perfect fifth is totally pure but the octave is very badly tuned. In other words, this scale has no octaves! In Alpha tuning, the individual harmonies may sound recognisable, but melody gets warped and harmonic progression sounds quite strange. For this track, I worked with harmony based on stacked alternating major and minor thirds. Alpha supports this kind of harmony very well.

Introduction from Exposure EP. This was my final release before I started using microtonal scales exclusively in my work. Do you think it was a good idea to head into microtones? Or should I have continued along the path I was heading with this EP?

Samples taken from 'Steal This Film'. I'm interested in the topic of intellectual property and still hope that the duration of copyright can be greatly reduced. Exposure EP was released under a creative commons license in 2009 and most of my old works are also under creative commons licenses. This changed from 2015 when I started releasing new music for purchase only, and I've found these works have been uploaded to torrent websites. But I think it's great that folks have found a way to enjoy the music for free. Pirate away, people. As for those people who bought my sounds, I'm super grateful for the support and will put it towards some instrument purchases next year.

The scale is a hexatonic, just intonation, non-octave tuning that has a few incidental octaves. As I recall, the tuning was a preset tuning pulled out of a synth, and was labelled as "hexany". That must be a mistake because hexanies usually repeat at the octave, but this one clearly has a non-octave repeating scale. Anyway, as a non-octave scale you can expect some cloudy tonality and that connects the bass, chords, and soaring melody in a vague way.

My Girl Is Blue was written before I started composing microtonal music. It's warm and jazzy with some chopped jungle breaks. Check out my newer stuff if you like this one. Piano drum and bass from Exposure EP.