Baba Yaga: The Liner Notes
A new BARGEIST album is now available on Bandcamp
Baba Yaga is the score for the Halloween episode of the Tsar Power podcast, where my cohost and I rank the Russian Rulers from Rurik to Putin. You can find us on Patreon to listen to that episode, and find us wherever you get your podcasts to hear more. You can listen to Baba Yaga now on Bandcamp.
Album art by Carlos Gonzalez. @neatocarlito.art
All of these tracks were made in Audacity using a method I call digital lo-fi. Instead of a proper synth, samples, or plugins, I used a cheap practice keyboard, the Korg Volca Beats drum machine, sampled my own instruments, and used only Audacity’s built-in effects.
Part of the reason I did this was because I consider it a challenge to make music with this cheap equipment, but also because of my personal fascination with the history of lo-fi music. When most people hear lo-fi, they think of lo-fi hip hop which typically involves using software to emulate analog gear and all the sonic artifacts that come with it. It might contain tape hiss and the crackle and pop of vinyl, but those are typically added in as effects or samples. Some lo-fi artists do actually use cheap equipment. Recording on actual cassette tapes in particular has become pretty popular with bedroom pop artists, emulating the generation of musicians that were forced to record their demos on cassette because that’s all they had. By and large I enjoy the sound of lo-fi, but something fundamentally bothers me about the contemporary lo-fi ethos.
To me, trying to emulate old equipment or simply using old equipment is missing the point. When this sound came about, the artists were just using whatever they could afford. What’s more, a lot of the time they were actually deliberately misusing or overloading that equipment. The overdriven electric guitar, the sonic backbone of rock, was created when blues artists started turning the gain on their amplifiers way up. The guitar tone of You Really Got Me by the Kinks was apocryphally created by cutting the membrane of their amplifier up with a razor blade. The modern equivalent of that would be to take whatever equipment I happened to have on hand and overload it. This album is my attempt to do that.
Judith Beheading Holofernes
I built this off the idea of using a cheap keyboard– the Casio CTK-100 if you want to know– that I’ve had forever. It is by no means a good piece of equipment. For one, it works by FM synthesis, which if you’ve ever heard a cringey synth tone in a 90s pop ballad, FM synths are generally responsible for that. Some people like them, I personally think they sound bad compared to analog synthesizers. For another, I couldn’t program my own sounds, but had to pick from 100 pre-programmed ones. So it’s not an instrument for serious musical production so much as a toy or something you would give to a kid learning to play the piano.
My first step was to create a drone in the bass range, because I always thought that that sounded creepy and it could give the track a physical presence. I chose a string sound, ran it through an overdrive pedal and played the lowest key, which happened to be C. Then I added a very, very slow tremolo effect, so it resembled the deep breathing of a living thing.
That was creepy but pretty boring by itself, so it needed some kind of riff to go along with it. Originally I just went up to the highest point on the keyboard and played an F#, the tritone of C, and then the highest B, the major seventh, which again is extremely dissonant with C since it’s just one half-step below the octave. Ironically this was so unpleasant of a sound that it was really distracting, and I needed something way more subtle so it wouldn’t distract from the story being told.
I wasn’t really sure how to proceed afterwards, but as I was listening to other composers for inspiration, I heard the piece Fantas for Saxophone and Voice by Bendik Giske, which is a cover of Fantas by the Italian composer Caterina Barbieri. It contains this short saxophone riff that fades in and out, and I thought that sounded eerie, so I copied that idea.
I found an ethereal sound on the keyboard and came up with a three note F-B-C# riff that had the ambiguity I needed. F is a perfect fourth away from C, which sounds neither dissonant nor consonant with it. B is both a half-step below C, so pretty dissonant with C, and it’s also a tritone of F, so it’s pretty dissonant to follow up with. C# is of course a half-step above C, so again pretty dissonant. So the melody just dances around the root note without actually landing on it, but just above and below it. Once that melody was finished I also added a reversed version of it afterwards, because putting anything in reverse makes it spooky.
After that, I put everything at half-speed, lowering the pitch, and drenched them both in reverb. The reverb on Audacity can sound pretty crappy, but I also think it has an interesting quality and it would be fun to use those cheap effects for this track. The song Come as You Are by Nirvana has an opening riff that uses a pretty cheap chorus pedal that does what most chorus pedal makers want to avoid, which is make it sound underwater, but they deliberately embraced that sound and subsequently popularized it.
Blood Quantum
This track was made entirely using the Korg Volca Beats drum machine with the tempo turned up to 600bpm. I played around with it for a while, recording every weird sound I could come up with, then selected a few I thought would be appropriate for a track. It’s made up of three parts. The pulsing beat is a kick with an extremely short delay, giving it a sort of distorted texture. The scratchy, high-pitched noise is a snare played again and again at high bpms, and the melody is the tom sound with the pitch manipulated live by me. The entire idea was misusing the drum machine for drone and noisemaking purposes, and I think it served its purpose well.
Qlippoth
This track was also based around the idea of misusing a drum machine. The Korg Volca Beats has a built-in effect called stutter, but it’s really just a delay. I found that by turning this delay all the way up, I could create a more sparse and empty track that gave the generated sounds room to breathe. In addition, I created many of the sounds with the philosophy of reworking a given sound away from its intended use. Within this track you will hear a snare drum with all the white noise removed, a sampled crash cymbal slowed down to the maximum, and a hi-hat with the “grain” setting turned all the way down.
Thalidomide
Thalidomide is a track built entirely by using samples I found on a free sound library called 99Sounds. The sample pack was titled Underground Sounds, and it was made with something called a geofon, which is typically used to detect earthquakes, but in this case was used to pick up the vibrations in things such as old metal ships, bridges, things of that nature. So I picked all my favorite sounds and tried everything with them in terms of effects and processing. I initially tried to distort the hell out of them then compress it, but that wasn’t really working. It was just too distracting, and it just sounded better left as is. But I didn’t want to just take the sounds and not modify them in any way, so I split one track up that had lots of creaking sounds and spread them around in the song. But there was something still missing, there was some kind of trick or interesting idea I could use. Then it hit me: if I set a tremolo at 16 cycles a second, that’s the same as 16Hz, aka a C0 on the musical scale. That ended up sounding pretty cool, so I put some echo and reverb on those creaking sounds, then put a tremolo at a minor second above that, so when they clash it sounds pretty dissonant. Just like in Qlippoth, the sparseness and space of the track is what makes it effective.
The Children of Loki
This was a pretty challenging track because, counterintuitively, whenever I tried to make it sound dissonant and creepy, it always ended up sounding way too nice.
My initial idea was that I would get a random number generator to give me a series of frequencies, which I would then put in the song as sine waves of about ten seconds each. In my mind, the fact that these were totally random frequencies would be immensely creepy because they’re by definition totally outside the 12-tone Western scale. But for some reason, it just ended up sounding really beautiful and pleasant. So I had to start over.
I slightly modified my original idea. Instead of being totally outside the western scale, I would go with something within the western scale that I knew would sound creepy, which was the Super-Locrian mode. To briefly summarize, Locrian is a musical scale that is considered so dissonant and unsatisfying it’s practically useless. So I chose the even more dissonant version of this scale.
I chose four octaves of the scale and assigned a random number to each one, then I used a random number generator to decide what order I would play them in and for how many seconds. Halfway through I decided it needed more room to breathe, so I also used a random number generator to decide how many seconds of silence each note would get in between. I could have gone back and also done it to the lower octaves, but I didn’t feel like it.
I was listening back to the end result and I felt really happy about it, but I was also really surprised because it seemed like, once again, no matter how un-musical I tried to sound, even with random generation little phrases would form and sound too musical.
I finally resolved this problem by shifting from all the notes in the Super-Locrian scale to the sorts of chords that you would play over them, namely what are called altered dominant chords. If you have a piano or guitar near you, you can see for yourself how these sorts of chords sound. To make an altered dominant chord, you take the fifth and the ninth, (G and D if your root is C) and shift to the half-step above or below each of those.
From this point, I used random number generation again to determine the length of silence and the notes, and for the fifth and ninth intervals I chose if I would go for the lowered or raised note first, then slid up or down to the second one. So the tracks for the fifth and ninth not only include the raised and lowered pitches, but every pitch in between as they transitioned from one to the other.
The Crooked Back of Giacomo Leopardi
After I finished the last track, I got a sudden urge to still make a track with basic wave shapes fading in and out. So I first took a triangle wave because it didn’t sound as harsh as the other options that weren’t sine waves, and I made a 12-tone melody with it. For those who don’t know, a 12-tone melody is created by choosing a note, then another note, then doing so again until all tones in the chromatic scale have been used once without repeating. I knew I needed to do more than that, so I went with the idea of applying transformations of some kind to the same melody.
I copied and pasted the melody one octave below, two octaves below, and one octave above. For each of those, I raised them a seventh, a semitone, and a tritone respectively. I also raised and lowered some a quarter tone, making this track microtonal.
Finally, I speed up the original melody and added it as a sort of stab, including with a reversed version.
Ishtar’s Descent to the Underworld
This track was made entirely with sounds that are built into Audacity. I started with this thing that’s supposed to help you keep time, so basically a metronome, but for some reason I really liked the sound of it. So I distorted it, put it at half speed and drenched it in reverb. I also added a very slow phaser effect to make it change over time a bit more. I wanted something else to go with it, so I added a sine wave tone in the sub bass range, which is an E1, since the metronome sound is E C C C. I wanted to add another layer, so I added a Bb1 sub bass because that’s the tritone of E, which turns into an F1 sub-bass since that’s the minor second, thus creating two dyads out of the most dissonant possible intervals. I’m keeping with a minimalist theme for all of these tracks, so I ended it there.
We’re the Carriers of Blazing Torches, We’re the Kindlers of Crackling Pyres
Everything in this track is built with samples of gongs and cymbals I made myself. I started out by just whacking the gongs as hard as I could, but naturally that was way too aggressive of a sound for an ambient piece. So I cut off the attack and just let the sound of the resonance fade in. By itself it still sounded a little creepy, so I was getting somewhere.
To figure out how to arrange these sounds, I took a page from Brian Eno. In his 1978 album Music for Airports, Eno took piano riffs, synthesizer sounds, the human voice, and other musical elements and set them off on tape loops of differing lengths. No two interactions between all of these were exactly the same.
While Eno used this technique to make a relaxing soundtrack meant to calm people in typically stressful airports, I took advantage of the fact that without any kind of stable repetition, these musical elements are completely destabilized in the minds of the listener.
I had no access to tape, but the individual samples of those gongs were already of different lengths, so I just had them repeat over and over for half an hour or so.