Recordings · Scores · Sketches
Catalogue of work.
Compositions and installation sound, music written to picture with three of the films, and a set of rhythm studies. Everything plays from this page, and the notes under each entry hold the context.
Composition and installation
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LN·01
Blackbirds and a lavta
Lavta and blackbirds · single unedited take
Notes and technical dossierClose the notes
While improvising with my lavta last spring in Glasgow, I realised the blackbirds were answering my music. I decided to capture this live fragment as I tried to improvise with them. A single, unedited take, no electronics.
lavta · single acoustic capture · open-window environmental resonance
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LN·02
Oud texture (Smyrna)
Oud, percussion and granular processing
Notes and technical dossierClose the notes
An oud passage recorded in the stone interior of the old bathhouse in Smyrna (Izmir), using its natural reverberation. A transient motif refracted through real-time granular fragmentation, short gestures frozen into resonant micro-loops that dissolve back into the chamber. Bendir and finger cymbals underneath.
oud → granular freeze (Beads) · percussion → multi-tap delay (Magneto) · bells → pitch-shifted reverb (Mimeophon, Clouds) · stereo field rotation via Maths
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LN·03
L’ambiance
Installation sound · Espacio Liminal, Galería Niebelungen
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Made for the installation Espacio Liminal (Galería Niebelungen, Berlin). Sub-bass foundations, slow-swept narrow band-pass filters, and slowed environmental recordings of glacial thaw, using deliberate voltage drift to mirror the perceptual adaptation of the ear to quiet spaces.
Plaits (wavetable) · Ripples (band-pass, slow sweep) · Clouds (80% wet) · environmental recordings → Morphagene at half speed
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LN·04
Lean candles
Documentary opening theme · duduk, analogue bass, tape
Notes and technical dossierClose the notes
Opening theme for an Armenian documentary on political transition. A sample from a beautiful apricot-wood duduk over analogue bass synthesis and mechanical tape degradation. Down-tempo, the lament of the reed held in a modal scale.
duduk → 3 s granular buffer · TR-8S rhythm architecture · Moog Sub 37 analogue bass · vinyl crackle → tape saturation → dynamic sidechain
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LN·05
Gothenburg port soundscape
Installation sound · exhibition on the history of the port
Notes and technical dossierClose the notes
A soundscape from the sound installation I made for an exhibition in Gothenburg on the history of the city’s port. Two sections of the installation, played here one after the other.
stereo and binaural field recording · stereo microphone pair → Zoom F3 · recorded in the city, the port, on the ferry and at the seaside
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LN·06
The shearwaters (in development)
Field recording and acoustic instruments · two seabird colonies
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Night recordings of two seabird colonies, Manx shearwaters on Rùm and Scopoli's shearwaters on islets off eastern Crete. Nocturnal colony sound, nesting calls from underground, and acoustic instruments, tracing the maritime geography that links two edges of Europe.
nocturnal field recordings · acoustic instruments · archival voice materials · multi-channel spatial staging
Music for screen
Where there is a still, the film plays inside the entry. The films are shown by permission, for this website only; all rights reserved.
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SC·01
White Rose
Score for the short film · alternative ending
Notes and filmClose the notes and film
My score for the short film White Rose, written during film composition study at Guildhall. The picture moves from a dark house out to woods, fog and a lake. This is the version with my alternative ending, and it is the only sound on the film below.
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SC·02
The Boxer
Cue for an animated short · excerpt
Notes and filmClose the notes and film
A thirty second cue for the animated short The Boxer, from the same study at Guildhall. A boy slips into the boxing tournament at the Grange Hall with a bottle for the fighter.
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SC·03
Waves
Cue to picture · excerpt
Notes and filmClose the notes and film
A short cue to picture: a woman on an outrigger boat in the last of the light, open water behind her.
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SC·04
Two cues for short film: Japan and Java
Screen reel · Japanese instrumentation, Javanese gamelan
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Two cues from my screen reel, each written for a short film: one in a Japanese idiom, one built on Javanese gamelan.
Experiments
Three rhythm studies. Each takes its pulse from a different source: stone, a piano, a voice.
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EX·01
Limestone aksak
Seven-eight · drums made from field recordings of limestone
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A rhythm in seven-eight: an aksak, the asymmetrical, limping metre built from uneven groups of beats. It runs through the traditional songs of Thrace, Bulgaria, Turkey and the whole region around them. There is no drum kit here. The drum sounds are field recordings of limestone, processed until they could carry the pattern.
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EX·02
The piano turns
Trip hop · a sampled piano, and what it became
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This began as a trip hop sketch on a sampled piano. As it went on the texture grew more uncomfortable, and by the time the main melody came in it had turned into something closer to the score of a thriller. I stopped where it turned.
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EX·03
Voice in grains
Granular · a rhythm cut from a chopped vocal
Notes and technical dossierClose the notes
The rhythm here comes from one place only: a vocal performance, sampled and chopped until the cuts themselves became the beat. It sits on a distorted bass, while granular processing pulls the voice apart into grains and lets it gather again.
vocal performance → sampled and chopped into the rhythm · distorted bass · granular processing
To commission a score or sound design, write to hello@levantnoir.scot.