Alterneath by Bëker

Another great musical experiment. An ambient album perhaps akin to Tangerine Dream's Phaedra or Rubicon (which I love) and yet very different. It is a much denser sound than I usual use, but I wanted that rich sound that has different layers you can hear (with the headphones on) over many listening's. Unfortunately because Bandcamp doesn't allow uploads greater than about 30 minutes, I had to split AlterneathA into 2 parts, as it is just above that limit at 31.44. Here is an except of my journals:

So AlterneathA has a great dependence on the aJuno-1. Most of the basic and melody tracks are from this keyboard. The main middle 'piano' section uses my HP-5500. It seemed to have a close enough piano sound for playing around, but recorded it sounded horrible, so I had to use some extreme EQ and lots of reverb for it to sound ok. The rest of the song is filled out with my Juno-106, and a single track of my U-20 using a choir patch. The pulsating sound was something I had wanted to use ever since I had heard it, and that is from the 106. I had wanted to use a fair amount of my JX-3P but there is really only 1 track of that. I heard in my head some distorted sounds so I used an organ sound with distortion from the aJuno-1. Oh and I almost forgot I used some arpeggios from the EP-11 with delay.

For AlterneathB the main keyboard was my VP-03. I had wanted to use this keyboard for some time and knew this would sound great for it. The vintage choir and strings sounds were perfect. I did start though, with a sequence from the JX-3P. It took forever but I finally got it kinda close to sync with the click track. If I ever want to do this again I will use the MC-50, because that at least will sync to my recording program. I used a few other JX sounds, but most of the basic and melody tracks are from the VP-03. And of course I included 2 vocoder tracks, how could I not? The rest is the Juno-106, and EP-11.

Finally the birds. This spring was quite nice and like many I was not working, so I spent many mornings drinking my coffee listening to the birds and their spring chirping. One day I decided to record this. I thought I should put music to this, and realized I didn't have enough bird music. So over the course of several days I recorded over 40 minutes of bird chirping. This is the basis of the whole recording, and perhaps makes it more surreal sounding because it is so recognizable over much of the very discordant ethereal music.

A solo project, that has been percolating for a long time (longer than one has fingers and toes). The madness is perhaps the manic side of Bëker's disfunctional bi-polar personality. Binary Drama is the first of this branding, written mostly in 2007, through the worst of times and later the best of times. It was a lazy project the refused to finish itself until now.