Minimalist Music Assembly

My latest excursions in ambient and meditative drone music, named after an unofficial CD-R release from 2005. Two ethereal textured loops and stochastically driven tree tones, utilizing an instrument designed by Dillon Bastan with Max For Live.

https://arjenschat.nl/album/minimalist-music-assembly

Dronology MMXX

As part of my ten year anniversary on Bandcamp this month, I present an album that predates the platform in concept, though never had a formal release. Dronology was part my analog ambient project in 2007 and consisted of patches that would play throughout the night whilst recording them to MiniDisc during my sleep. 

The recordings for the 2020 version of the concept are various takes on composing drone music and include aleatoric composing techniques and signal processing, as well as live improvisation. 

I’ve included the five unreleased MiniDisc recordings from 2007 as bonus tracks, with individual cover photos of the original discs.

https://arjenschat.nl/album/dronology-mmxx

Al-Amry

“Al-Amry” is a benefit album with ambient music from Mathias Grassow, NODO, Vincent Pierins’ solo project “Kalymorph”, and Arjen Schat. All proceeds are donated to the Unicef program to provide food for the children in Yemen.

http://nsgk.bandcamp.com/album/al-amry-a-benefit-album-for-yemen

Ritual

This three-track EP is once again a change of pace from my recent output. Actually, it is a more experimental approach of the same pace. The three compositions are abstract by nature, but grounded by raw rhythmical structures. Even though the recordings originate from my hardware equipment, they have been processed extensively beyond recognition and set the scene for a surreal aural experience.

Includes the full 20-minute version of “Rituel Artificiel I” and the drone versions of all three compositions as bonus tracks.

http://music.ohrwert.com/album/ritual

| n f | n | t e

“| n f | n | t e” allows you to dive into the evocative world of soundscapes and meditative drones. Slow down your pace of life with these five pieces, clocked at around 30 minutes each, carefully sculptured to alter the perception of time and space.

Inspired by a 53-minute electric piano piece I recorded for Psoma Psi Phi, I decided to record another piece with just the reverberated signal of my trusty Rhodes. This approach drastically changed the dynamic of how I play and kept me longing for the wonderful harmonics that were accumulating in the reflections of the reverb. Then I applied the same technique whilst playing on my Waldorf Blofeld. This created a similar result, but with wavetable synthesis and aftertouch added to the equation it allowed for even more expression. Now imagine all of this being stochastically automated and sequenced with a quantized transposition modulation. Fancy words for me engineering the music in such a manner that I only have to synthesize the sound, and press record and stop. Finally, I took it a step further and processed pre-recorded sequences by manipulating its duration on a granular level so that it has similar dynamic features as the live takes, but not a single note was actually played live.

http://arjenschat.nl/album/n-f-n-t-e

DRON

“DRON” is a continuous dark ambient mix using parts of the unreleased “DRON + RYTM” project.

Original parts processed and recorded at Infraklang, Augustus 2015. Mixed at SiO2, October 2016.

Music, photography and design by Ohrwert.

https://music.ohrwert.com/album/dron