Adham Shaikh, Soleilmoon.com, Kyma, Computer Music Tutorial

[Jim Coker <jcoker@interaccess.com>]

Just wanted to poke in with a few items that should be of
interest to loopers:

Adham Shaikh has a new ambient CD out on Instinct Records w/ 
guitarist Tim Floyd.  This stuff is very reminicent of Eno's
On Land, as well as Eno and Michael Brook's Hybrid, with 
lots of looped ambient sounds, acoustic guitar, and creative
reverberation.  I'm also a big fan of Adham's earlier disk,
Journey to the Sun.

The record label Soleilmoon has a new web site, 
http://www.soleilmoon.com. They carry loads of interesting 
obscure stuff, like the tribal-ambient band 'O Yuki Conjugate'.
I've been sending them email to try to get them to put sound
clips on their site, like the excellent one Alchemy has :)

I was lucky enough to spend some time with the Kyma system
at Symbolic Sound a couple weeks ago, and have to say that
in addition to all the other things it can do, Kyma makes
a kick-ass looper.  The wavetable RAM (i.e. were digital audio
is held) can be configured to hold any number of delays and samples,
then sampler objects can be used to read from delays or samples
(or any part of wavetable memory). The sampler objects can have
their playback rates and looping points modified in real time
by any control signal (midi CC, envelope folowers, etc).  Using
an lfo on the playback rate, we were able to get a chorus effect,
and by moving the looping points w/ midi CC messages, all sorts
of neat rythmic modulations could be created from a simple starting
pattern.  There are various mixer objects that can be used to 
layer signals, and on top of all that, the system
can read and write audio to disk at any point in the signal chain.
Anyway, there's an awful lot of depth to Kyma.  If anyone's interested,
I could probably be coerced into writing more.

One thing that was really impressive is how friendly Carla Scaletti
and Kurt Hebel are, and how dedicated they are to this system.  Here
is clearly one of those rare cases where a wonderful idea has not
been diluted by its implementation.

One last note, somewhat related to the above, I recently picked up a
new book by Curtis Roads, _The Computer Music Tutorial_, which has
all sorts of useful information out synthesis (subtractive, additive,
FM, waveshaping, physical modelling, the whole enchilada), as well 
as related things such as midi, effects processing, and such,
all of it covered in a very clear, readable style.  It has, for
instance,
the best descriptions of phasing and flanging I've seen anywhere.  It
also has a truly exhaustive set of references for anyone who is looking
for more.  Not cheap ($55), but well worth it.

jim