“Blender” is built from a live recording by process eight-track, 64-step drum-machine pattern using No-input Mixer. No extra layers or samples were added. My only direct interaction with the drum machine is toggling mutes on and off; everything else happens through the mixer. The track is shaped using a no-input feedback routing approach, treating the mixing console as an instrument and effect unit at the same time. By sending the output back into the input, the system becomes unstable and responsive, where control is always partial and the sound can shift suddenly.
Rather than relying only on internal feedback noise, I let rhythmic and melodic material actively enter the feedback loop. With a strong enough input signal and a carefully balanced feedback amount, No-input mixer with the drum machine will interacted with each other, “push” the feedback into a gated, pulsing behaviour, as if the mixer is rhythmically breathing along with the pattern. Over time I added a compressor on the mixer’s output to tame sudden spikes and narrow the dynamic range, making the volatility usable in a musical structure.
The core of Blender is frequency-selective distortion: different elements of the same pattern are processed into contrasting textures by manipulating EQ, gain, and the feedback path. For example, removing the low end from both the input and feedback paths isolates the hi-hat, producing high-frequency feedback streaks and brittle noise textures. In contrast, feeding back primarily the kick drives the mixer into clipping, pushing the low end into harmonically saturated territory—creating a gabber-like feeling with aggressive impact.
TRUMAN B
Art Work: 人形A
This debut marks her current step into the realm of experimental electronica. Born from a no-input mixer improvisation, the track’s original percussive impulses transform into warped melodies and fractured textures through layers of self-resonance, dissolving the line between rhythm and noise. Distorted vocal samples twist through the mix like spectral loops, creating a wicked, body-charged atmosphere that teeters between chaos and groove.
TrumanB is a split in the signal—a dance of decay, distortion, and emergence, made for the night floor or the inner dark.
from Field Music and Non-Music for Tian Ye
by LEAP
Before new year’s, out of the blue, Zhu Wenbo commissioned me to do a recording about the fields, and I thought it was just in time to go back home to the mountains in Meizhou and record something. Arrived when it was already the evening of the Chinese New Year's Eve, ran into a row of gongs and drums on my way home, a traditional program of my hometown. So much so that every time I go back to the mountains my memory is always the banging sound. Every year it starts from seven or eight in the morning till one or two at night, some twenty old people and children form a band with the gongs. Sometimes they do it while swimming, with firecrackers also. It’s the annual hearing damage. The field is quiet, with drifting fog, but the people are particularly noisy, who are also part of nature. I slowed down the recording twice and put it in the sampler, and it sounded very much like hoeing again, all at once. It very much felt like working in a vegetable garden. There's a whistle with a filter tone and lfo that sounds like a bird, and the sound of a potted wheel. This is my version of a gong. I have many memories of the fields, the waves whirring, the birds chirping—like the sounds of gods. But the sound of gongs and drums, it's the memories of people, I guess.