Anthony Manning
Islets In Pink Polypropylene LP vinyl

The whole album was composed and realised on the Roland R8 drum machine. It followed the same process as the Elastic Variations pieces, with the major addition of many, many hours of editing. Each piece was composed as a series of patterns, of varying lengths ( 5,6,7 bars long). The stock R8 sounds were embellished with one of several ROM sound library cards ( mostly the Dance card, number 10). These patterns were created by tapping out a rhythm, then, in real time, using the Pitch slider as the pattern looped, to create improvised melodies for each of the pattern's voices. The rough version of each piece was built by stitching the patterns together as a song, listening to each addition over and over, to make sure the melodies flowed into each other in a vaguely coherent manner. Once this initial rough structure was in place I set about fine tuning every single note. The R8 doesn't allow you to assign a pitch to a note in the conventional sense. It's not possible to assign a pitch of Middle C to the first note of the first bar. Instead, it assigns a numerical value to a note's pitch, between -4800 and +4800 ( I think those numbers are correct - that little screen is seared into my memory ). If you restrict all notes within a piece to a mulitple of, say, 400, you therefore create the possibility of a sort of scale. For multiples of 400, you have a total number of 24 permissable notes. However, most of the percussive sounds, when pitch shifted, only sounded 'good' over a reduced range.

NEW / Released in 1994 / Reissue 2021

Tracklist:

A1 Untitled

A2 Untitled

B1 Untitled

B2 Untitled

B3 Untitled