Godfried-Willem RAES

"BBDLSP"

1974


The hardly pronouncable title of this piece is derived from the device I build for realizing this purely analog electronic piece: Bucket Brigade Delay Line Solo Piece, realized in the Logos Studios for Electronic music in 1974.

As in most of my pieces, here also the idea of musical composition coincides with that of the design and realization of the musical instrument on which it is to be performed.

In this case the instrument was designed around an electronic but highly unorthodox circuit with three short-circuited bucket brigade delay line chips. These chips were just newly available from the electronics industry at the time I designed the instrument, and are normally designed to be used in reverb- machines for music performance and studios. They are capacitor based analog memories, capable of storing a limited amount of audio information. In my design however, they are used as highly complex and multi-dimensional oscillators. Although the general aesthetic is within clearly defined and predictable limits, the instrument itself and in particular its musical output became highly unpredictable and extremely awkward to controll. The musical flexibility of the generated sound patterns however, was what I aimed at. It thus became sort of the opposite of 'slow going' analog electronic music.

The piece is available from the Logos Archives on analog tape (15ips/ 38cm/s), DAT or CD. It can be performed as a somewhat crude but pure ea-tape composition with spatialisation. Nowadays (2004) the piece would probably be classified as glitch music...


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Godfried-Willem Raes


First published on the web june 5th 1997 

Last update: 2011-05-13