Well, if you’re on a tight deadline for delivering an ambient/experimental/IDM album, and you’re totally out of money (and even possibly ideas), good news. You’re saved. Tim Exile just released S L O W, for free.
To those who don’t know him, Mr. Exile is a professional mad scientist specializing in Reaktor engineering, virtuoso laptop musicinator, electronica personality, and man about town. Tim’s exploits are widely known and buzzed about among nerds and sonic weirdos, but since they won’t reach everyone’s ears that way, he also has a mailing list. Signing up for said mailing list is your key to unlocking the treasure trove of S L O W. (Spaces reproduced here in deference to Mr. Exile’s branding wishes.)
Synthetic reverbs often use series of delays to do their work. The trick to S L O W is adding more delay lines – like, lots more delay lines.
The result is a wash of events, one you can separate into a series of reverbs or squash together to create shimmering reverberation. You’ve likely heard experimental effects like this before, but Tim’s made them really easy and accessible.
There’s an interesting and unusual trigger for this, too – not just making fun noises, but pondering data. Tim writes:
It originally came to life as one part of the IBM #RemixIT project where I sonified various uses of IBM’s technology. S L O W represents the journey from a single data point to a global pattern of masses of concurrent data.
Good stuff. Have at it. You’ll need a copy of Reaktor (though you can use a trial version to give it a go).
And as Tim extorts us, “Put your knitwear on, plug your mic in and drench this evening in a sea of drones…”
Why, boys and girls, that sounds like a good idea. See you at the other end of the reverb tail.