Three years delayed in being collected here, the fifth year of the Deep Earth series finally arrives in totality as a single monolithic set. Spanning no less than 27 discs of music, laid across 93 tracks, Deep Earth Year Five runs over 25 hours in length - allowing you to mine the invisible subcontinent for a full day without resurfacing.
These recordings were, in many respects, done in a state of transition. In 2020, the pandemic descended upon us, and at the same time, I began to develop a modular system for the first time, after several years of working exclusively with "in the box" hardware and DAWs to meet my musical needs. The introduction of both of these things into my creative approach meant that something as "borderlands" as Deep Earth would only get even further out, or perhaps the better term would be further down, as I dealt with the stress of the virus-infiltrated world and explored new frontiers of generative music, sound design and processing. Throughout the year, it seemed to become a balanced equation - whenever the world would impose itself upon me, my work would pull me further away from it - and so it is this sonic riptide that Deep Earth Year Five documents quite well.
The Deep Earth sessions presented here illustrate patch development and improvisation using a number of very specific machines, from Behringer's MS-1 reiteration of Roland's SH-101 monosynth (a machine I'd always dreamt of owning) to Korg's Volca Modular, my first additive synthesizer styled after the "West coast" sound of Don Buchla's instruments. You will hear IK Multimedia's Uno Drum, a unique drum machine that is half analog and half digital, as well as experimental techno "grown" out of single clicks of a 3340 VCO that's been sampled and shaped by a granular processor and other modular tools. There's also the inclusion of what could be my favorite ambient music I recorded that year, in both versions of 'Hierau' created using a multitrack tape machine and the Volca Sample. Other notable appearances are 'Veka' - my first session successfully deciphering how to make the Grass Click-Tone Control Module track pitch sequencing, which is easier said than done with a device designed for medical testing rather than studio instrumentation - and deep techno excursions like 'Ovo' which employ a minimum of equipment, such as the tuned five-voice resonator in the Alesis Quadraverb, two delay paths and a Digitech pitch shifter, to generate huge masses of alien and psychedelic sound.
Year Five covers a lot of (under)ground, which is omnipresent beneath the surface of my more mainstream work, and hopefully demonstrates how and where I find many of my sound design ideas for more composed work as Milieu and Coppice Halifax. Following Year Five, Deep Earth would descend further into a meta-narrative arc with only twelve singular pieces, all rigidly composed, before entering a state of hibernation to make way for the interim Abyssal Geology series, which has continued for the last year and a half. In this way, Year Five is the last leg of Deep Earth to really resemble Deep Earth as it was conceived initially, and perhaps this is a good thing, considering just how much material has been generated by this project.
The intent was always a "cycle" of eight years of EARTH catalog releases, so as of this writing, two more years still remain to be explored, but the world has changed a lot since I started Deep Earth in 2015, and my work has always existed reactively beside the state of that world. Deep Earth has always been defined by curiosity and uncertainty, a willful discarding of confidence and fear of errors as I lower myself and my equipment into the abyss. What I find is what I find, and what I do not find or do not understand is down there too. Whether I am documenting the process or not, Deep Earth lies beneath the surface in waiting, occasionally splintering open to reveal an entry point such as this one you stand before now.
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N.B. Deep Earth currently offers a yearly subscription service, which costs $83, and includes the entirety of Year Six, over 100 different subscriber-exclusive recordings, a reusable discount code for anything in the catalog (from Year One to Year Five) and of course all material released within a calendar year following your subscription. You can explore Deep Earth here:
malfokusita.bandcamp.com More details about the overall project as well as what is included when you subscribe are here:
www.patreon.com/posts/95024300
released January 10, 2024
W/P by Brian Grainger. Recorded at White Pillar, 2020. Mastered by The Analog Botanist. Text by Brian. Design and manufacture by ABM&D. All audiovisual material appears courtesy of Distrans Telekomm. This is Milieu Music number DE-C5. (C) + (P) Oscillog ASCAP 2024. All nights preserved.
Many humble thanks to the subscribers at Deep Earth, without whom this series would be impossible.
