Kandinsky on the Radio

How to Listen

To listen to the tracks uninterrupted and in order, click here or click on the album cover. This will take you to the album player page.

I sequenced the tracks of Kandinsky on the Radio to be experienced from beginning to end, balancing the moods and styles of the tracks and progressing from relatively singular ideas and textures in the first half to the shifting tone poems in the second half, culminating in the epic Very Like a Whale.

These are compressed mp3 files. You can listen and download uncompressed wav or flac files from the ThinAirX page on Bandcamp.

Why it Sounds Like this

I compiled Kandinsky on the Radio from jams I recorded live in my studio in the spring and summer of 2020. I was experimenting with what I could do using only an iPad as the sole generator of sounds. I ended up with a few dozen tracks that sounded really good, selected the best, edited and shortened them by cutting out glitches and stretches where the energy sagged, and assembled them into Kandinsky. Most of the tracks are from a single performance (with the exception of Very Like a Whale, which is admittedly a montage. And Tune-up.).  

I always record directly to stereo. What you hear is what I heard as I played—no post-production overdubbing or multi-tracking (except Whale). Where I did splice or move something around, I used cross fades to hide the cuts. 

Limiting myself to the iPad is not a gimmick or artificial constraint. The iPad (“iOS music”) is capable of creating sounds that are just as good, and in some ways better, than electronic music produced with outboard hardware. This wasn’t true even a few years ago. The processing power of the iPad and the diligence of an international community of genius developers and audio engineers has brought iOS music to the point where the audio quality equals that of laptops. The interface is a breakthrough as well. The new apps exploit the touch screen in ingenious ways, and the virtual on-screen controls give offer a degree of creative control that hardware knobs and sliders never could. Plus the iOS apps talk to each other in flexible ways, creating even more options and combinations for generating and controlling sound. I’m convinced that iOS music is the next step in the evolution of electronic music.

What you are really hearing in the tracks of Kandinsky on the Radio is my excitement as I discover ways to create textures and landscapes that weren’t possible with all the hardware and soft synths I used to play.

Who is Kandinsky?

“Each color lives by its mysterious life.” —Wassily Kandinsky

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian-born painter and a seminal pioneer of abstract art. He’s one of my favorite artists: I have Kandinsky posters in my office and studio, and I always make a beeline to his works when I visit any art museum. 

From a distance, Kandinsky’s paintings look like a tangled mess. But if you peer closely, even the smallest sub-section is a mini-composition, full of inventive detail. Take a step back and you see how all the sections interlock to give structure and movement of the composition as a whole. Dive in and wander around these scenes with your eyes, see people, houses, animals, trees, mountains in the abstract shapes and colors, and make up your own stories to go with the images. 

As I make music, I have similar images in my head, and I’m striving for the same contrapuntal layering, interlocking vignettes, sharp details and vivid colors. When I look at a Kandinsky painting, I hear my music.

Transmogrifying Kandinsky’s images into sound is not a stretch. Kandinsky was also a pioneering art theorist. In his writings he frequently equates visual shapes and colors to the sonorities of music, and compares the process of painting to the process of making music. He wrote extensively about the attributes of specific colors. It’s not a coincidence that the primary colors red, yellow, and blue are cited in the track titles of Kandinsky on the Radio.

“Lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and… stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to ‘walk about’ into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?” — Wassily Kandinsky

Tracks and Track Notes

Tune Up

When I go to an orchestra concert, one of my favorite moments is the tune up. The oboe player sounds the tuning note (A440) and everybody tunes to that. The individual players usually sneak in a few runs and arpeggios, warming up, but at random and all at once. The cacophony is delicious.

Here my electronic instruments are tuning up. (An anachronism: electronic instruments are never out of tune.) You can hear the audience chattering as late-comers take their seats. 

Oh, and your ears are being tuned up as well. This is your warning that the sounds and noise to follow are not normal. 

Unlike most of the other tracks, this is not a jam but a montage from several tracks that otherwise didn’t make the cut. It’s composed in the spirit of musique concrète — think John Lennon’s Revolution 9 on the Beatles White Album.

The Ghost of Electricity

“The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face.” I’ve always loved this haunting image from Bob Dylan’s Visions of Johanna. The image suits the frenetic energy of this track.

Here I was exploring what I could do with two keyboards driving two arps (arpeggiators) that are driving two different sounds (grand piano and that whistle sound) fed into a heavy delay and sometimes a looper. There’s a lot going on, and you aren’t expected to follow it all. The objective is a flurry of rapid notes, a frenzied counterpoint, that somehow hangs together.  

There is one spot (starting around 01:50) where the texture thins out and you can hear chords being picked up by the steady 1/16 notes of one or both arps. At 2:30 I turn on a doubling effect on the piano and the whistle drops out. Starting around 3:35 I turned up the delay to thicken the texture even more and build to a climax with full-fisted chords and atonal lines, a la Stockhausen piano sonatas.

All of these techniques are incorporated again, here and there, in subsequent tracks on Kandinsky on the Radio.

Airmail

Airmail was a special class of mail we Boomers remember as being super swell because if you paid a few pennies more your letter flew to its destination in an airplane and not a truck. “Send it airmail so it gets there by Thursday.”

This is the calmest, most floaty track on Kandinsky on the Radio, and the most tonal. The devices here are relatively simple: two layered synths being played by two keyboards, with some overlap. The looper is on one of the keyboards.  

Stick an airmail stamp on your forehead and journey through the clouds.

Dance to Small Pleasures

Small Pleasures is a painting I’ve visited a number of times in the Guggenheim in New York City. Kandinsky painted it in 1913 and it’s one of his better-known purely abstract works. It’s large, nearly 4 feet square. If you look closely, you can see people dancing on the top of a brown hill. Or is that the band?

Using layered arpeggiators and loopers, I’m creating my own colorful dance. 

The piece opens and closes with “pads”—chords of long sustained notes, a common device in electronic music. The dance commences when I turn on the two arps around 1:15, one for the marimba lead and another of the ostinato effect in the bass. I’m latching notes in the bass, which means the repeating arp pattern shifts meter according to the number of keys I’m pressing—five in some places, then seven, then four. When I do the same with a second arp, but feeding different notes, it creates a polymeter effect—4-note cycles against 5 notes, for example. It creates an invigorating rhythmic counterpoint, like a group of Deadheads dancing together, each in their own world and moving to individual rhythms, but somehow integrated with the group energy. 

Along with the jagged rhythms is jagged harmonies—atonality. The key to listening to atonality is to first give up associating these “wrong notes” with anything ugly, harsh, or wrong. Instead, hear the angularity as just another flavor of melody and the dissonances as deliciously rich harmonies (like jazz chords). 

Around 3:10 the piano enters and, if you listen closely, you can hear the marimba arp repeating the same notes but in a steady arp-driven pattern. Before the pads return, I slow down the arp to signal to the dancers that it’s time to conclude their dance and rest.

I find the polyrhythmic, contrapuntal texture of this piece exciting. It turns some people off at first because it’s dense, with a lot going on. But if you listen for the intricate interplay between the different voices and let yourself be carried away by forward energy of the total sound, you’ll discover your own small pleasures.

Float Upstream

“Float upstream” is a John Lennon lyric. It’s from the Beatles track “I’m Only Sleeping,” which musicologists say is the first time that reverse-tape effects were used in a commercial recording. Reverse effects are a hallmark of my Float Upstream. 

This track is laid back, comparable to the adagio of a classical piano sonata. It’s small scale, unhurried, private, contemplative. Unlike the previous track, it’s easy to hear everything going on and you have time to savor the atonal combinations and clusters.

This is mostly grand piano played into reverse loopers. Listen for how, after the initial sounding of the phrase, the reversed version of a phrase follows a few bars later. Not only are the sounds reversed, but the contour of the lines is backwards: a rising scale repeats as a descending scale, and vice versa. In fugal writing this is called retrograde inversion and takes great skill to pull off. With electronics, it’s easy. 

To avoid making a total mess with all these sounds going forward and backward, I use a “ducking delay”: a long delay that that speaks only in the pauses between phrases. 

At about 04:00 a choir joins in, doubling the piano at a higher octave. Marimba, entering around 5:20, tries to steer it in another direction, but the whole enterprise runs out of steam and unceremoniously grinds to a halt. 

Landscape with Red Spots

This is an ambitious piece, flowing through contrasting sections, speed changes, a variety instrumental voices, and employing all my favorite devices—delays, loopers, and especially reverse effects. The dense texture and many layers sound like they were multi-tracked in different takes. But they weren’t. This is all taken from one long performance in July, 2020. The trick is multiple loopers. Some are acting as long delays—each time the sound returns it’s at a lower volume. Some are locked in to repeat a phrase indefinitely, until I turn it off. If the loop time is long—more than 4 bars—it sounds like an independent line layered on whatever is being played at the moment. Multiple loopers are the secret to being a one-man electronic music band. 

The squeaky high sounds are from the reverse loopers playing backwards AND at a higher playback speed, causing the pitch to shift higher. The different loopers are panning back and forth between the left and right channels at different rates which is another trick for adding action to the sound. 

Improvisation No. 28

Improvisation No. 28 is a Kandinsky painting on regular display at the Guggenheim in New York. Painted in 1912, it’s a riot of color and form, with no apparent overall design. But spend some time with it, wander with your eyes, take in the mini-groupings, zoom in to details, and you’ll experience an adventure with no end. 

Kandinsky created a series of nearly 40 paintings titled “Improvisation.” In his writings accompanying these works he explicitly references musical improvisation. I’m returning the favor by borrowing the title for my musical improvisation. Kandinsky wants you to hear music when you view his painting; I want you to see colors and shapes when you listen to my music. Listen more than once, zoom into the detail, experience the adventure.

I recorded this piece in May, 2020, a few days after recording Float Upstream and starting with the same concept of piano fed through reverse loopers and heavy delays. I added a multi-tap delay—best for deep reverb effects—to give the illusion of big sounds in a big space. It’s nervous and unsettling, asking “why?” as it builds to a climactic wall of swirling sound. In the end, it walks away, still asking questions. 

The Sky was Yellow and the Sun was Blue

This title is a lyric from a the Grateful Dead song Scarlet Begonias, a favorite at live shows. This lyric appears in the last verse which, Deadheads know, is followed by an extended jam that journeys to the far reaches of Grateful Dead mind-scapes. 

Wind in the willows playin tea for two;

The sky was yellow and the sun was blue,

Strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hand,

Everybody’s playing in the heart of gold band, heart of gold band.

Kandinsky would approve. Before he went fully abstract with his Improvisation series he painted rustic scenes with unnatural colors, including yellow skies.

This piece incorporates many of the devices you’ve heard in the previous tracks, combined to create a truly electro-symphonic experience, an evolving story that evolves and moves. It’s a walking around piece, an andante. Wander into the forest, look around, go deeper, lose yourself in the thicket, listen to the colors, hear the birds chirping, talk to the newts and beetles, lie down on the moss. Open your eyes. You’re back. 

Very Like a Whale

The title is from a scene in Hamlet where Polonius is evaluating Hamlet’s mental condition, striving to prove he’s insane. Hamlet is playing along, but in turn is subverting Polonius’ perception and playing with his head. They’re looking at clouds:

Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.

Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.

Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.

Hamlet: Or like a whale?

Polonius: Very like a whale.

Truly, this is a long track with big sounds, like a whale. But it also fits the whole theme of the album—seeing what you will in clouds, or paintings, or music. 

I assembled Very Like a Whale from my favorite segments of tracks that otherwise didn’t make the cut for the album. It’s a montage, unlike the other tracks (except Tune Up). After it was finished I was surprised at how dark and relentless it was, sinking deeper and deeper into threatening holes. Then I realized why it sounds that way: it reflects my dark mood in October, 2020, just before the U.S. Presidential election. Knowing that, the title takes on a third layer of meaning: truth is what I say it is. “I’m not crazy, you’re crazy.”

Tech Talk and Performance Notes

Building my Instrument

Unlike a violinist or guitarist, electronic musicians have to build their own instruments. The instrument is the totality of all the sound generators, effects, controllers, and the way everything is hooked together. It always very personal and reflects technology preferences as well as musical choices. 

My instrument changes every few years as technology changes and I get new ideas. Decades ago, when I first started, it was all hardware—modular synths and keyboards. Ten years ago I replaced some of the hardware with software on a laptop. A couple years ago I made the radical leap to electrified clarinet (see notes under Mouth Feel). Today it’s all iPad and iOS. Tomorrow my plan is to merge the clarinet into the iOS setup.

iOS Rules!

Most of the things I can do with iOS music apps are theoretically possible to achieve with elaborate (and expensive) hardware and laptop setups. With a couple dozen music apps on one iPad, it’s easy to do just about anything a composer/performer might want. For example, in my previous setup where I played a clarinet through guitar effects pedals (listen on Mouth Feel), I struggled to manage two hardware loopers—all those cables and pedals, and the single-purpose controls in the hardware forced me to expend a lot of energy just working around the limitations. Now, with the iPad I easily manage four loopers, and can configure and blend them any way I want, plus make changes on the fly while performing. Same with delays and other effects. I also have four independent arpeggiators (“arps”), which I could never do with hardware. 

A big advantage of iOS is that the apps are inexpensive—$5 to $20 is typical—compared to $100 to $500 and more for hardware units and effects pedals. This means an iOS musician can download many different flavors of the same function—a phaser, for example—try them out, and select the one that suits them best. It also guarantees a dizzying pace of new apps being developed and released, and encourages both the musicians and the developers to experiment freely. Some of the best audio engineers in the world are designing iOS music apps.

Below I’ve listed the apps and controllers I used to record Kandinsky on the Radio. What’s remarkable, and hard to show without making schematic diagrams, is the routing between apps on the iPad. Basically, I can route anything to anything else, have real-time control of not just the routing, but the levels as well. For example, any of the four arps (each with adjustable time intervals) can drive any of the four synths in any combination. Then any of the four synths can be sent to any of the four loopers, and at different volume levels. Output from any of the synths or loopers can be sent to any of the three effects chains—different combinations of delay, reverb, and modulation. I use envelope followers to create ducking effects. I use foot pedals to trigger loopers and adjust feedback levels and other parameters as I play.

Is all this complexity necessary (I often ask myself)? Yes it is. It enables me to perform ambitious music live, to jam and improvise with all these electronic possibilities at my fingertips (and feet). 

Riding a Beast

The challenge is to tame the complexity enough to make meaningful music worth listening to and enjoyable. Performing is a juggling act where I’m constantly tweaking levels to keep everything in balance, adding layers, fading out old material, trouble-shooting glitches on the fly. If I get bored with a certain sound, I can alter it, usually without knowing exactly that the new sound will be. If I like what I hear, I think, “what can I do with this?”

Half the time I’m on the verge of chaos, riding a beast, and often feel the instruments playing me as much as I’m playing them. Sometimes the results are a big mess; sometimes they’re amazing! 

In a typical session in my studio, when trying out new ideas, I’ll get the settings working the way I want and tackle the inevitable technical problems. Then when everything is ready, I turn on record and play a performance, beginning to end, as if I had an audience in my studio. I do two or three such performances in a session, then listen back to the tracks and decide what works and what doesn’t, make some notes, and get ideas for what to try next time. 

This is how the tracks for Kandinsky on the Radio were created, and why they’re less structured than the tracks on the other albums. But for my ears, they work just the same. You can hear the beast and it’s primitive energy pushing me and the music to undiscovered realms. 

Gear Notes

All the sounds and effects originate on a single iPad Air 3. I use a second iPad (iPad 6) solely to control the apps on the first iPad.

Most of the apps (except AUM and some synths) are AU3, a software standard that enables tight interconnections between apps. Plus it allows an unlimited number of instances of the same app to run at the same time—for example, separate delays on separate channels.

All notes originate from two controller keyboards and are routed to the synths on the iPad via MIDI. I use an assortment of pedals for additional levels of control and triggering.

DAW

AUM is my only DAW (“digital audio workstation”). It serves as mixer, MIDI clock, stereo recorder, audio and MIDI traffic cop, and is the host for all synths and effects apps.

The sound-generating apps are:

Ravenscroft 275 (sampled grand piano)

Pure Synth Platinum (sampled-playback synthesis)

Thumb Jam (sampled playback with an optional touch interface)

Zeeon (digital modeling of analog subtractive synthesis)

Effects Apps

Four loopers: Ostinator, plus three instances of Enso (for reverse looping, among other things

Four instances of a MIDI arp built with the MIDI scripting app Mosaic. All are set to arp in “as played” order.

An assortment of delays, reverse delays, panning, filters, compressors, reverb apps.

I use an envelope follower FAC Envolver to create ducking for the primary delay and some reverse effects.

I use a couple of Eventide effects apps for deep reverb, multi-tap delays, and frothy weirdness.

MIDI Designer

I use a second iPad dedicated to running MIDI Designer to control all the synths and effects on the first iPad. MIDI Designer is a build-your-own construction kit of knobs, sliders, buttons, X-Y pads, etc. It’s highly versatile and smart. With MIDI Designer I’ve been able to build a multi-page platform that puts all the controls I need at my fingertips for live performance. This is a critical part of my “instrument.”

Hardware Controllers

88-key Roland RD 300sx stage piano. I’ve had this piano for a long time. It has it’s own sounds, but I only use it now as a MIDI controller.

25 key K-Board (Keith McMillen Instruments) is a small keyboard I’ve literally velcroed to the Roland. It does things the Roland can’t because it has pressure-sensitive keys and key latching (for drones and arps).

QuNeo pad (KMI) for controlling rhythmic divisions of the four arps.

Various rocker pedals and foot switches for triggering loopers and controlling levels.

I/O

iConnect Audio 4+ is the central hub for all the MIDI controllers and keyboards, and it sends the audio output to headphones and house speakers.

Studio monitors: IK iLoud MTM

Credits

All music composed, performed and edited by Steve Bowman.

Cover art: Steve Bowman

Mastering: Saso Puckovski at Earworm Studio