On The Edge

On The Edge

The concept for this composition was to recreate the feeling I had during an experience with ayahuasca. A place of material emptiness yet energetic fullness, charging and discharging, silence and noise, darkness and light.

Part of the ayahuasca ceremony was accompanied by some guitar playing by the shaman and it was for long my primary instrument so i decided to use it as the sound source for this piece. Combining recordings of an acoustic guitar from bowing to over-tensioning the strings until they break with manipulating the recordings with a playable multichannel vari-speed sampler made in Max/MSP and then again sampling the resulting audio files and playing them with a conventional sampler via MIDI-keyboard to arrange them.

The original piece is for 8-channels with two LFEs the version here is a stereo mixdown.