The Stag Funeral

Well a fresh Neolithic Ceremonial Headdress release has “dropped” as the kids say. It has a sort of scatological ring to it, doesn’t it? Regardless, I am pleased to present The Stag Funeral, my latest release under the Neolithic Ceremonial Headdress moniker. Much like previous releases, it’s a sort of ambient record that’s hard to slot into a specific subgenre. Besides the drone-y bits and characteristic mangled field recordings that have become part of the NCH sound, there’s also a few tracks that lean rather heavily into percussion, and then some bits that stray into a contrapuntal melodic style. In short, it builds on to many of the things that made the previous record so unique and interesting to listen to. Also like the previous record, it makes great background music for your desk job, a walk in the park, or a midnight drive.

For modular synth nerds who are super curious, I can speak briefly about the rack and modules used in the production of The Stag Funeral. As with the previous record, I wanted to keep the rig I recorded on fairly small: 6U of 84hp with a complementary row of 1U tiles. For most of of the album, the configuration looked something like this:

The first thing that that jumps out at you is probably that the only sound sources (not counting the audio rate signals from the Wogglebug) are two Antumbra Atom modules and the MakeNoise Morphagene (which can also be characterized as a DSP effects module). For those of you not familiar with the Atom, it is essentially an 18hp version of Mutable Instruments Elements, a modal synthesis module, that provides a huge pallete of sounds that range from eerie to dark to beautiful. Learning to keep this module reigned in is a bit of a chore, but well worth it. I certainly tried to keep things out of the “really weird” end of the spectrum for the most part (after all, the album has to be listenable, doesn’t it?) but still managed to eke out some very expressive stuff.

Probably the most ballsy move is taking up 36 of my precious hp with the Intellijel Rainmaker, the delay module to end all delay modules. Much has already been said elsewhere about why this module is so incredibly magnificent. I was a little hesitant to bring it into the fold, given that I find the Intellijel Shapeshifter very un-fun to use for anything beyond a basic dual wavetable VCO on account of its extreme reliance on menu diving, but my experience with the Rainmaker has been very pleasant. Despite its appearance as a menu-diving monster, it’s actually very straightforward to use and doesn’t take long to acquire a decent understanding.

Some tracks swap these components variously—some use the Shapeshifter instead of the Atoms, some use the Make Noise Erbe Verb. I’ve swapped out the single Ornament and Crime and replaced it with two 8hp “micro” versions of the module as built by some dude on Reverb.com. All in all the setup was pretty good for my intentions, and I’ll probably continue to use some variation going forward.

The biggest godsend to my new setup was taking the mixer outboard… sort of. It’s still a Eurorack mixer (the WMD Performance Mixer to be precise), but I installed it in its own 3U 54 hp case that also has two rows of 1U tiles. This allows me to transition easily between this portable rig and my studio rig without sacrificing all the WMD PM bells and whistles (figurative bells and whistles) that I’ve grown to rely on.

To summarize, it’s all so incredibly awesome, am I right? Feel free to leave a comment or such if you have questions, or simply wish to showing my work with praise. Or horrible insult or whatever. Anyhow, I’ll try to be a little bit more active on this blog this year. Given that I receive only a handful of visitors in any given month, I’m usually fairly content to keep my thoughts to myself. Naturally, I might have some more visitors if I improved the content, so I suppose that’s on me, right? Anyway, thank you for listening, and carpe diem!