Song Exploder, Iced World

This is the name of an interesting Podcast, where artists talk about the creative process in the studio. I always find this kind of useful, as the act of describing a process makes it more coherent in retrospect, and less of a mystery--even to the composer.

When I'm reading I like some constant background noise. Sometimes I like white noise, but later I realized that I can also listen to a lot of Eno ambient music, and it serves the same purpose. Eno's music can be both boring and interesting, depending on where you place your attention.

On the album "The Drop", the track "Ice World" is over a half-hour long, and is probably generative in nature, like Music for Airports. He's always crazy like a fox on how he releases music. If you need to fill up 30 minutes, set up a bunch of sources to run out of phase. (In fact he fades it at the end, so conceivably this could run infinitely.)

I've reverse engineered it as follows:

1. Metronomic track with continuous ride cymbal, with teeny changes over time
2. Piano melody loop
3. "Heartbeat" kick drum, alternating with downbeat/upbeat instances
4. 4-bar "chord change" using a "shimmer" effect of some kind

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