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Sunrise Sessions Volume One

by RJ Valeo

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about

The Sunrise Sessions, Volume One.

A collection of one-take hardware performances recorded during the lockdown months of the covid19 pandemic, between April 2020 and August of 2021.

The performance rig was set up in the living room and it had a number of different configurations. For several of the performance configurations, a multicamera video was recorded. The full length video was available on Vimeo for a short time but is now taken down. Individual songs from that performance were pulled out and are contained within this release, along with other performances.

Some personal notes about my process and relationship with these electronic instruments.

These tracks, these one-takes, are an intimate window into the delicate and beautiful morning hours of the sun rising and a new day beginning.

Each of the sessions that these tunes were extracted from was recorded between 4 am and 9 am, at the end of an all-nighter getting the machines in order.

I love this process, and I am most comfortable in the studio, performing with the machines with no one around, the later the better, or best yet, the morning.

That floaty time of transcendental wonderfulness when everyone and everything is. The 25th hour, that feeling. That is what I wanted to capture in this recording.

This is my favorite way to work, to compose the whole thing live on the spot, and these long-form performance releases, while a bit slow to get going, burn very bright when they get there.

In the past, I would lament for years over composition and mix, but with these, it's just a 2 track recording right out of the mixer.

As for this collection of tunes, the compositions in this collection simply are the ones that I found and fell in love with first, then mastered them.

This is a dawless all-hardware performance, this is mentioned simply for context. This performance is a system designed for improv one-takes. By setting up systems - each machine with its own set of unique patterns and arrangements that both work independently and together and don't need a specific patch or sound to be coherent - then combining them randomly - utterly unaware of which patterns are which, new music emerges that was never intended. Some of it is chance, and all of the variants are the result of quantum mechanics manifesting realities.

By sharing the creation process here, even the soft and messy bits, (with some natural bird sound from a mic out the window), there are moments in the studio where a twiddle on a sound turns into inspiration, which takes hold and then the music emerges. It is these novel moments of shared discovery and sonic archeology that drive me to continue to pursue these endeavors.

The patterns in the different machines had been under development for about 6 months (when recording began in 2020), and each pattern was built to stand on its own, not made in conjunction with other patterns in other gear.

Pattern creations - Digitakt - internal sounds and external devices, RTHM, Polyphase (iPad sequencer), Beatstep Pro, RTHM external midi sequencing. The Polyphase sequencer with it's 4 midi tracks were fed into multiple sound creation devices stacked on the same midi channel. While the Nord was on all 4 midi channels, the Pro-1, Matrix1000, Monopoly, and Minilogue XD all were also stacked on those same channels. Not at the same time, faded between, each stacking a sound on the Nord.

The sequencer in the iPad, Polyphase, it has some great bind-to-key and tuning functions, so I used that heavily. I stay away from standard 12-tone tunings as much as possible, and these recordings make use of the Dorian mode as well as the Pythagorean mode heavily. Other modes as well, but these are the main threads.

The artwork was created using an AI system, building the image from a prompt telling the story of the album. Sunrise performance over a multi-dimensional mars scape.

While performing I really don't know what will happen next - there is a lot of chance, and the risk of error, but those are the best parts, the things created out of chance, and as the performer, I experience these for the first time at the same time as the listeners - which is amazing for a creator - and it is scary as one never knows how well things will work. It is always a dice roll. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

These are raw, and not an edit in sight. Tunes, replete with a broken crackly mixer that stops working on the right side and needs a good punch for it to come back.

For those that were wondering, here is the gear list used on these recordings, in no particular order and not complete. Not out of anything other than a lack of complete documentation. Fortunately, the video tells the story of some of this.

Partial Gear List
Clavia Nord Lead2 Rack
Korg Mono/Poly
Oberheim OB-1
Behringer Pro-1
Behringer TR 8 thing
Elektron RTHM
Elektron DIGITAKT
Yamaha Rev-7
Alesis Midiverb4
Oberheim Matrix 1000
YamahaTX81-Z
Ensoniq DP4+
Lexicon Vortex
Motu828MkII
Pedals and other things that I forget

A bunch of other stuff too, but that is the bulk of it.

As I find more of the pictures from the recordings I will build out a gallery, but I don't want to prevent these from getting out, so it will be in stages. Music first, images to follow.

credits

released December 19, 2022

Recorded on location in Ridgewood Queens, NY
Mastered at Transelectronic Labs
Produced, Recorded, and composed in one take by RJ Valeo

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RJ Valeo Queens, New York

Electronic Musician, Producer, and Artist

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