RISC Chip

RISC Chip is an electronic music project by Mike Hodnick under the "Kindohm" artist moniker. It was made with the TidalCycles live-coding pattern environment (based in Haskell).

The album will be released December 15, 2016 on the Conditional label. It is available in both digital and 12" Vinyl formats at shop.conditional.club/album/risc-chip.

Contents

• Production With TidalCycles
• Tracks and Source Code
• Audio Samples
• Visuals
• Nerdy Production Notes

Production With TidalCycles

NOTE: this music was produced with 2016-era TidalCycles version 0.8. It isn't really feasible to run this code on your computer any more, but hopefully you can still glean some interesting info from it.

RISC Chip was composed, produced, and performed using the TidalCycles live-coding pattern environment. If you wish to use this source code, you must install TidalCycles first.

TidalCycles (or Tidal for short) is a language for live coding pattern. It allows you to make musical patterns with text, describing sequences and ways of transforming and combining them, exploring complex interactions between simple parts.

Tracks and Source Code

1. 32-bit Falcon

2. Mint

3. Lake Effect

4. RISC Chip

5. Bit Dust

6. Viewport

7. Practical Closures

8. .lean()

9. Enger Tower (bonus track)

10. Wrist Singularity (bonus track)

Audio Samples

Audio samples are in the samples folder. They are structured in a way that is compatible with the TidalCycles environment. Note: samples were used only for the tracks RISC Chip, Bit Dust, and Viewport (all other tracks used live synthesizers with MIDI).

Visuals

Visuals for one track were created by Shawn Lawson (Obi-Wan Codenobi) for the album release date. The Force was used live-code the visuals.

• Mint with fragment shader and cues

Nerdy Production Notes

All tracks recorded from live-running TidalCycles patterns with live hardware over tidal-midi or one-shot samples.

Writing and production of RISC Chip began on June 10, 2016 with the creation of Pattern 454 from the 365 Tidal Patterns project. Production lasted until August 30, 2016.

All sounds were sourced from the following analog hardware[1]:

• Elektron Analog RYTM
• Dreadbox Erebus
• Korg Minilogue
• Korg Volca Keys

Writing and recording was primarily done from TidalCycles MIDI. Patterns were executed and recorded in real time with live synths. Exceptions are on RISC Chip and Bit Dust which used one-shot samples extracted from patterned synth recordings.

[1] Two tracks contain content not sourced from the above hardware:

1. RISC Chip (vocal samples) and 2) Viewport (which is a remix of the track Ring Surfing from Expedition album).