Sevish Music

Atmospheric drum and bass - 'Mashroon' uses the Bohlen-Pierce scale, which contains no octaves at all. It repeats at the perfect twelfth instead (aka the tritave), and divides it into 13 notes. Here I've used the equal tempered version of Bohlen-Pierce which divides the twelfth into 13 equal notes. This tuning approximates many odd-numbered harmonics very well, while missing most of the even-numbered harmonics completely. For me, Bohlen-Pierce music sounds like restful tension. Or to put it another way, it is consonant but not resolved. It's great for atmospheric sounds or eerie Halloween music. But it can also excel at "normal" or even cheerful music, which I will demonstrate with a track on an upcoming album next year. Anyway for now I hope you'll enjoy the dark atmospheres in this drum and bass choon, 'Mashroon'.

Orbital is uses a microtonal (well, macrotonal) scale called the Bohlen-Pierce scale. If you ask a lot of people, they will probably say that Bohlen-Pierce music sounds surreal and alien. I would tend to agree, except that the Bohlen-Pierce scale can play familiar major/minor chords too. BP does force you to use wide open voicings but they actually sound very nice. For example if you want to make a major chord in BP, there's no major third or perfect fifth but there is a major tenth and perfect twelfth. My approach for this track "Orbital" was to use a lot of block maj7 chords at various positions. Since the Bohlen-Pierce scale doesn't contain any octaves, these chords don't connect with each other in familiar ways at all. The effect is that you can feel familiar and comfortable at any one moment without knowing quite where the music will lead to.

Ask Yourself uses an unknown tuning that was shared by someone on one of the online xen groups, which was titled SEMAPHORE but seems to have nothing to do with semaphore temperament. My approach was to use my ears, starting by identifying some chords that worked, sequencing those, and then playing melodies over the top of that. Kinda unrelated, but I sometimes perform short, textural, improvised pieces just for fun. I usually forget about these experiments and rediscover the recordings at a later time. In this track, I sampled a past experiment that was performed in Scott Dakota’s supermariner tuning. This microtonal tuning creates a kind of synchronised beating that reveals itself best when used in long-form drone or ambient works. In this case, the beat is too busy and you can’t hear the beating effect, but I still found that supermariner makes an interesting contrast against "semaphore".

I grew up playing video games. I still play them today, but when I was a kid my favourite system was the Sega Mega Drive. One thing that always brings me back to those simple times is hearing the sound of the Mega Drive’s FM synth. It has a characteristic grating and bright sound that I just love. I bought a VST instrument called FMDrive which quite faithfully reproduces the sound of the original Mega Drive sound chip. The only problem was that it couldn’t be microtuned. I wrote a couple of emails to the developer, Aly James, and he sent me a custom build of his synth with support for microtonal equal-tempered scales. The first thing I did was make this track in 10-EDO. It’s my first time using 10-EDO. I tried to focus on using it like a warped diatonic scale instead of two interlocking 5-EDO scales, but you can hear both approaches used.

I started a mid-tempo jungle tune a long time ago (before 2010 I think) and never finished it. When I listened back to it I knew in my heart that there was something special in there. Since I lost the original session files the only choice was to recreate it from scratch - and then see it through to completion. The result is this track Same Old. Two tunings were used, the harmonic series segment 8-16 and the subharmonic series segment 10-5. That subharmonic segment is a pentatonic scale that I love very much - one of its notes has a distinctly bluesy intonation. As for the 8-16 harmonic series segment, it sounds pure and super familiar. All of the notes except for the 11th, 13th and 7th harmonic are well represented in normie music. The chords that you hear are all 8:10:12:15 - that means they are all maj7 chords in just intonation. Each note from the harmonic series segment is the root of a 8:10:12:15 chord.

I have written more music in 22-EDO than I have written music in any other tuning system. It seems to make the music so much more colourful, and I think that's what keeps me coming back. There are a lot of new intervals to explore, but even the familiar intervals sound unusually lively in this system. For the melodies here, I used a 'by ear' approach. I didn't try to fit things into a single mode of the tuning system. Same for the chord progression which repeats throughout. Deep house / 22edo From my album Harmony Hacker

Gleam has a fast quintuplet groove and uses 22-tone equal temperament as its tuning. I love how a familiar pop or rnb chord progression can become very wonky when played in a tuning like 22edo. Microtonal electronic music from Sevish's album Harmony Hacker

Earlier this year somebody was using a leaf blower down my street, which I noticed had a strong 7th harmonic. And there I was all of a sudden, with 'The Well-Tuned Piano' stuck in my head! Midnight Cascade uses the same microtonal tuning used in La Monte Young's 'The Well-Tuned Piano'. While much music uses tunings based on factors 3 and 5, this wonderful tuning is based on 3 and 7. The result is pleasantly jangly, with a strong JI overtone buzz and a variety of interval sizes which create a unique grain for melodies. Emotional drum and bass / microtonal music From Sevish's album Harmony Hacker