Major thanks go out Biblioteka Records label mate HF5 for producing a brilliant remix of how the night came’s track RED VI: Shadow Play.
Hear HF5’s Red VI – Shadow Play (HF5 Wraith Remix) here:
… and the original RED VI: Shadow Play here:
It is with great sadness that I received the news that the Free Music Archive – a joyful corner of the internet, dedicated to promoting an eclectic array of great, free, independent music – is to shut down after nine years due to a lack of funding. The FMA site is gradually being transferred over to
https://archive.org/details/freemusicarchive.
I archived the how the night came FMA page at
https://web.archive.org/web/20181106080308/http://freemusicarchive.org/music/how_the_night_came/
I would like to take this opportunity to wish Cheyenne and the FMA team all the very best in the future. Hopefully this is just a temporary situation, and we will witness the FMA rise again at some point in the near future.
Many thanks to Naviar Records for including my track I was silent all day – Facing the sea, The tide came up in their recent podcast. Naviar Broadcast #38 is currently available on both Resonance FM and YouTube.
Biblioteka Records recently turned one year old. To celebrate, two specially recorded tracks were released: the industrial behemoth Lucid Control by HF5, and RED VI: Shadow Play by how the night came. Both tracks are available as free downloads on SoundCloud.
Many thanks (again! !) to Matt at calipermusic.blogspot.com for choosing IV: C6H8O7 from Acid Music as their music of the day on Sunday October 14, 2018.
Many thanks to Tome To The Weather Machine for featuring the opening track from Acid Music on their beautiful blog:
how the night came creates uneasy and unsettling drones from Japan written using a chordal sequence following the chemical formula for acid. Influenced by everything from House of Low Culture to the Silent Hill II soundtrack, this floating piece of astral fog is a wisp more than an island enveloping mass. It curls and snakes around changing tonal frequencies, heavy chord changes and an omnipresent heaviness that settles over “I:HNO3” like low ground cover condensation.
Tome To The Weather Machine also kindly linked to the review in a Facebook post.
I wanted to produce some ambient music in Ableton that, at least in part, helped to compose itself. I struck upon the idea of using chemical formulae to provide some basic structure, and began by selecting four simple acids:
These acids – ordered from the lowest number of constituent atoms (5) to the highest number of constituent atoms (21) – contain between them six different elements, so my next move was to assign a different instrument to each element:
Since hydrogen and oxygen appear in all four acids, I decided to make them the basic drone instruments in each track, and followed the general written structure of the printed chemical formulae by panning the hydrogen instrument (Sadness Pad) to the left channel and the oxygen instrument (Celestial Pad) to the right channel.
For variation, I assigned two notes to hydrogen and two notes to oxygen for each track. To keep things flexible for later in the project, I worked in fifths. This is what I ended up with:
Then, to add subtle rhythmic variation across the tracks, I decided to use the number of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in each formula to determine the rate at which their respective notes played over the length of 24 bars. So, for example, phosphoric acid (H3PO4) has the hydrogen notes repeat three times over 24 bars (i.e. once every eight bars) while the oxygen notes repeats four times over the same 24 bars (i.e. once every six bars).
To impose a different rhythmic layer, I totaled the number of atoms in each acid and used that number to determine how many equally spaced chimes would ring out over the central 36 bars of each track. Using the Tinefull Ambient instrument with some delay, I added the following:
I also correlated the total number of atoms of each acid with the tempo of it’s respective track, arbitrarily starting at 80 bpm and progressing in increments of 10 bpm:
I finally allowed myself some freedom when composing the music for the remaining four elements: nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and phosphor. I explored minors, majors and ninths.
After adding various delay, reverb, oscillator, pitch glide, and pulse plugins, I balanced each instrument’s volume and timbre, applied gentle compression, then exported the audio files.
Using chemical formulae to ground the basic structure for a set of related ambient tracks was an interesting way to impose parameters within which to compose ambient music.
There are two accompanying videos for I: HNO3 and IV: C6H8O7:
Both videos are based on the public domain film Have I Told You Lately That I Love You? (University of Southern California, 1958).
Simple Mountain Films are currently working on a documentary entitled “Imprints in Time”. The documentary will contain music from the “how the night came // <1” split EP.
The film’s maker, R. A. Moore, wrote:
A poignant window into a vanishing Appalachian tradition, the loss of a world famous family legacy and the impact of modern influences on one of the last traditional Appalachian potters. (Currently in Production, Slated for Release 2019)
A teaser trailer can be found on Simple Mountain Films’ Facebook page, and also on how the night came’s YouTube channel.
Thank you to Ricardo Mello for including “[1594] The Comedy of Errors” in his beautiful video for PALEOLÍTICOS. See the video here.
When asked about the project, Ricardo Mello wrote:
Our goal in the video was to show the passion of two woodworking professionals and professors, and we had decided that we would not use interviews or even the interviewees’ speech so the film could express the sensitivity and passion of these two teachers. In this case the emotion of music would be fundamental. It was against this challenge that I came across your music at a first audition we knew it was the right song for the film. The word emotion best defines what we get by putting that song into the movie. Thank you very much for your partnership.
The Paleoliticos video is also available on how the night came’s YouTube channel.
Please check out more of Ricardo Mello’s work (PraiaPixel) at Vimeo.
