"Death of Railroad" - Modular ambient + Cat Power vox manipulation

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I almost never work with vocal samples, but after a Youtube deep dive into the granular hyjinx available in Ableton, I decided to take a stab. I first built a fairly complex patch on the modular, featuring lots of sweeping textures and brass-like wavefolding from the Synthesis Technologies E350 (this is my go to oscillator these days, as between its three wavetables and internal sound modulation/fm/wavefolding ... I can get close to what I'm looking for very expediently) and the Make Noise telharmonic doing its ringmodulated bell tone thing into Clouds to create some ominous atmosphere. I'm using both the actual two track stream of the live modular (fading in and out at key changes) and a sequenced tape head bouncing throughout the performance (which is actually the main loop of the piece at the top).

All of this is a bed for a Cat Power vocal sample. I was looking for something from Moon Pix era, tiny voice Chan Marshall but most of that stuff has amazing drum and guitar arangements over it courtesy of the Dirty 3 ... so in the end I grabbed an acapella bit from the intro to her newest record and went to town mangling the hell out of it. Check it out in its natural form below:

Using a similar technique to how I'm sampling the complex modular loop, I "play" this vocal sample with another step sequencer throughout the piece, using it again on the back end for some ominous two octave down vocal drones. Cross-bones style, indeed.

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