I am very proud to announce that my album “Algorithms” has been released on HIDE productions. All sounds on the album were created from heavily processed YouTube videos suggested to me by my algorithm. Unfortunately, no Elektron devices were used. It was all done in Ableton with lots of granular synthesis.
Fucking speechless mate.
It’s like you got a focus group together to make an album, but everyone in the focus group is me.
Haha, thank you @Fin25! That means a lot to me, especially since you mentioned in a thread that you hate granular synthesis. Apart from that, I think we have a very similar musical vision.
It’s not the tools that matter, it’s way they’re used.
This is awesome.
Just the start of Reality Shifting and I’m hooked! Lovely.
Thank you @DonovanDwyer. I like many of the bands you mention in this forum. It makes me happy when someone with such good taste likes my music.
Thank you! 
Really great stuff. Would love to hear more about the production process.
I’am really enjoying this, good work !
Thank you, guys!
Shure, I like to share my experiences. What do you want to know? Are you more interested in the conceptual aspects or the music production?
Both. Technical details but also the inspiration.
I always had trouble finishing tracks because there are so many options in music production. So I have to narrow down the options for myself. An album concept helps me enormously for this, as it provides the framework for the sound, the instruments and sounds used, the way of working, etc.
Often I have the best ideas at night in bed. That was also the case with Algorithms. I asked myself the question: How far will I get if I exclusively use already existing audio material from Youtube. I wanted to do something similar to DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing, just with the sound of social media instead of vinyl. The italian futurists wanted to sound like city traffic and the musique concrète guys composed works out of everyday noises. The noise of today can be found on the internet so I used that as a sound source.
I then typed the word “algorithms” into Youtube and then randomly downloaded videos and their audio tracks without looking at which ones they were. I wanted to collect the source material as broadly as possible in this initial phase. Among the videos were documentaries, influencer films, pet videos and a lot of trash.
It was clear that I wanted to produce this album about the internet exclusively in the box. For the production I used Ableton and mostly it’s native plugins. An important role plays Ableton’s Granulator and Paulstretch. I also used PPOOLL and Push 2.
During the production I noticed that I was able to express my emotions very well, even though I used exclusively foreign source material. That was a very nice experience. I let myself be guided very much by chance and layered sounds on top of each other in a collage-like way. The sounds consist mostly of very small snippets. Skinny Puppy used to work in a similar way, incorporating randomly sampled radio and video recordings into their songs.
Such a random discovery can be heard on “Threnody for a deceased user”. I found out that I could extract single vowels from spoken word and create a choral sound from them. I wanted to make it sound like Krzysztof Penderecki conducting a choir of damned internet zombies.
I tried to put some meanings in the titles of the pieces to give listeners something to think about.
Finally, I would like to say that I am very proud that my album was released on HIDE Productions, as I am a big fan of the label. I benefited a lot from the interdisciplinary label and its creative team behind it and the collaboration was very focused and straightforward. Lovely people!
I’m already working on my next album. It will be even more conceptual.