Get all 16 Stephen Roddy releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Leviathan, Signal to Noise Loops - Compilation, Darkness Visible - EP, 30 Epoch Opus - EP, Jupiter, Single: Search Party, Wave Grid, Le Son Du Corps Et Un Corps de Sons, and 8 more.
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Mūlamadhyamakakārikā
13:42
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Mūlamadhyamakakārikā named for the chief writing of the eminent philosopher/teacher of the Mahāyāna school, Nagarjunna represents a musical exploration of the Buddhist ideal of Sunyata. The piece explores the inter-relation of silence and sound referencing Leonard Meyer's similar model of expectation vs realisation as the driving musical force.
More importantly, it's a nice rich soundscape with both melodic and noise elements going on and I like that I can't pronounce the name of one of my own tunes.
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Stormchaser
08:32
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Stormchaser is an exploration of the role of embodied pattern recognition in the structuring of musical experience. Embodied patterns are patterns we encounter in our daily lives that separate meaning from randomness. When the features of an embodied pattern emerge in a random signal that signal stops being random and becomes immediately meaningful. Embodied patterning is at play when the noise of TV static momentarily resolves to present the features of a familiar face, or the clouds align in the shape of some familiar beast. Embodied patterns make the random familiar and add meaning to the meaningless.
Stormchaser explores the use of embodied patterning to structure music along a spectrum of meaningful familiarity that incorporates patterning elements of physicality and bodily movement, spatial location and degrees of harmonic subversion. It never veers from the domain of meaningful musical discourse, preferring signal to noise, but rather explores the grey areas where one embodied pattern blurs into another to create a distinct and specific experience of meaning that is nonetheless elusive and beyond any truly objective quantification. It is the exploration of the new senses of meaning that emerge in the qualitatively concrete yet quantitatively elusive spaces between other meanings that is focus of this piece.
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Babulus ex machina.
05:44
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Spectroscape in Dynamic Stasis applies the ideas Spectromorphology and Gestural Sonrous Objects to Soundscape composition.
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Magicicada
04:24
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De Vivo Vivens in Musica: A Treatise on Living Music is an exploration of the limitations of our concept of "Life".
It is composed using a hand-crafted genetic algorithm that satisfies a range of contemporary and scientific definitions for the concept of "Life".
Does this mean that the piece itself is truly alive or simply highlight the shortcomings inherent in our conceptualisation of "Life".
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Section A consists a set of musical cadavers recorded in 2009 that have been put through a process of decomposition and decay before being loosely grouped together on the basis of some equally dead ideas about musical structure, not relevant since the 1800s.
Section B introduces some newly dead harmonic material in the shape of the Piano tones head on "Out of the Cold" the following and final track of this collection. Though the timbre of this material remains intact and has yet to decompose, the melodic movement that lends a sense of life and vivacity to "Out of the Cold" is dead and gone. What is left is a lifeless corpse.
The Recapitulation drags both of these twisted dead carcasses back out and presents them in tandem like macabre fanfare in celebration of this new life, new piece made possible by the glorious dead.
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Out of the Cold
03:31
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by Stephen Roddy and Mary Parkinson
Out of the Cold is the final track on "R". It is intended as a palette cleaner to finish out a collection characterised by more challenging pieces that may deter the new listener.
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Stephen Roddy Cork, Ireland
“An experimental composer from Ireland, Stephen Roddy proves equally adept at crushing soundscapes as he does mysterious melodies.”
- Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 13, 2022.
Stephen Roddy recommends:
Witch's Lament in the Moonlight
by Oblivion Castle
This is a very well-put-together collection of anachronistic melodic pieces interspersed throughout some truly invigorating black metal. Masterful composition with excellent playing. Strong recommend.
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Hauntingly beautiful and noisy ambient works with layers of atmospheric synths. Mixes electronic soundworlds with more traditional reference points to create some genuinely unique moments.
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From Dreams to Living Things
by Fiadh Productions
This 2023 compilation from Fiadh production is an introduction to a range of exciting music running in scope from the black metal of Uamh to the beautiful drone of Hellstorm Of Flaming Nothingness.
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The 17 mindbending songs on this compilation represent minimalist experimental music at its best, a collage of blips and static.
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Me and the Glassbirds
by Heejin Jang
The Doom Trip label never misses, and the latest LP from the genius Heejin Jang is a trip into thrilling industrial terror.
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Cataclysmic System Binding Loss
by Carbon In Prose
Shards of static & distortion crash against disarmingly beautiful piano & synth melodies on this riveting new record from Carbon and Prose.
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