By Keith Walsh
Having not played music with him since the summer of 1981, I thought that David Ralicke would be most passionate about woodwinds and brass instruments. We had played together in a ska band with the legendary Moynahan Brothers, The Munsters, in 1981, after I graduated from high school (David graduated from the same high school in 1982.) At that time, Ralicke played trombone and I played synth, a Moog Prodigy.
Since then, he has lived a profoundly interesting artist’s life, playing with a variety of reggae and ska bands, touring with Natalie Merchant and Beck, and playing on Beck’s records, and as a member of art rock Asian nostalgia/psychedelic band Dengue Fever. He’s released two solo albums, got some licensing deals for shows including “Malcolm In The Middle,” and kept generally busy since high school, learning new instruments, including in the 80s converting a bread truck into a practice space for saxophone. What I didn’t really know about him, until seeing his mesmerizing mini films on Facebook, was that he is very passionate about electronic music and synthesis. Over the course of our hour plus telephone conversation, we got to deep dive into synths in ways I never had before.
When he got into synths, he told me “it really changed how I view (music)—once I really started to wrap my head around synthesizers. If we look at the arrangement of Western classical music for instance, if we look at how and why there are certain voicings with certain instruments, I began to think of everything in terms of synthesizer language. I’m like ‘saxophone – sawtooth wave. Trumpet—sine wave.’ “
Ralicke remembers the Roland Juno 106 as the first synth he ever played with, which is coincidental because later a friend gave him a Juno 6 during a move. “The big mind shift didn’t happen until 2001 when I was digging into software, EQ and synthesizers.” There was no looking back.
Now he ponders the correspondence between acoustic sounds and the arrangement of tone and timbre in classical and electronic music. “Why, in the orchestra, is the bassoon and the flute playing this part, or violins on this part- that’s exactly what someone might do with a synthesizer in combining different wave shapes, modulations and filters…Which is amazing. The difference of course is in an orchestra each individual player is controlling everything about one oscillator. Which is why I think synthesis got me excited, because I like to play a few different instruments, and this has allowed me to manipulate all these different oscillators all at once. At the same time I love how learning an acoustic instrument requires a huge understanding of this one sound in order to express it in endless ways”
Ralicke plays everything from trombone to sax, and flute and bass clarinet, but for his series of videos, which he began to create after the COVID lockdown hampered his life as a musician – he relies quite a bit on synthesis, including from his Elektron Digitone, Analog Four MKII and Octatrack MKII, a Moog Minitaur, a Moog DFAM, a Roland Juno 6, Make Noise 0-Coast and Arturia software synths, which he calls “amazing.” “The Elektron stuff, it’s super fun and super creative, like the Analog Four- it’s a cool sound. Just the raw tone of the oscillators are great, like a white piece of paper waiting for you to do something with it- the sequencer, the parameter locks, all the modulation sources , you can just start creating crazy spaces ”
Like so many of us, Ralicke finds something special about the Moog sound. “I feel like the Moog oscillator sounds like music without having to do anything to it. It doesn’t have the wild workflow that Elektron has but its basic tone sucks me in. “
I asked him about the reputation of Elektron machines for being challenging. Is it true? “Well, I think it depends on which Elektron device you’re getting,” he said. “I started with perhaps the most challenging, which was not a synth but a sampler (The Octatrack). When I got it, I definitely wanted to mess with some samples, I wanted to get my head out of the computer. I wanted to be as creative as I could be, like using Ableton, but not be looking at a computer. I was like, this thing is the only thing that seems close. So I got it. I got it just after they came out with the Mark II and it kicked my ass for awhile but now it’s a blast”
Sounds–And Visions
For his videos, Ralicke creates ambient soundscapes that can range from eerie to nostalgic, using his synth gear, his woodwinds and brass and Logic Pro to mix. On “Hummingbird, Front Porch,” he paired the video with a soundtrack that’s reminiscent of the salon music of Paris, France from around 1920. “I was sitting there and the hummingbird showed up,” he said. “I have my phone.” I suggested that he is using whatever device is available at the time to capture video. “There’s enough amazing National Geographic videos of hummingbirds. I love this hummingbird, I love this moment, I have my phone with me,I’m going to take my terrible old iPhone video of it and pulverize the image so that it becomes an impression of an idea.”
I asked him about the music. Was it inspired by the music of the Parisian salon and the sounds of Erik Satie, and is that a melodica on there? “That is a melodica of sorts,” he says, “but it’s called a Clavieta. It’s not as loud as what the Hohner variety of melodica is, which are the most famous. The Hohners have a little more bite and a little less reed in the sound. I think this Clavieta sounds closer to a harmonica or accordion. It works really well for that video. If someone was going to force me to go back in history and live in another time and space, if I was forced to I would say ‘Paris, around that period.’ It would have been an amazing place to be hanging out. Just the art world, the music world, there was just so much going on.”
Ralicke’s bamboo video is another amazing experiment with video and using just one sample on the Octatrack. “One morning,” he explains, “I found a piece of dried bamboo in my backyard that I liked, I have this lovely bamboo growing back there. I hit this piece of bamboo against a tree stump to see how it would sound and I said ‘I think I should record this.’ My phone has a metronome so I put on my earbuds so I would be in time hitting the stump at a certain BPM which made it easier to match up my sample mangling with the video later. I think it was 120 BPM. I used a GoPro to record the video. So yeah, I made that entire thing out of a sample of one hit of the bamboo on the stump. I even had a kick drum I made, but I didn’t like it for the piece. So I didn’t use it, But yeah, the sound design capability of the Octatrack, what you can do with a sample, what you can do with it in a live performance situation is incredible” There’s some synth sounding notes in an upper register that Ralicke assures me were created from the same sample.
One of Ralicke’s collaborations over the years has been with Arthur King, a project led by Peter Walker, that ranges from experimental jazz using brass and woodwinds, to electronic music including live improvisations in open spaces. “The whole thing about ‘Changing Landscapes,’ was we would go to a space, and we would do field recordings of both video and audio. And then we would do a performance in that space, based on information we gathered in that space.” As Ralicke explained, he would record samples of sounds from places like a farm in Iowa, or the Atacama Desert in Chile, and then incorporate manipulated samples from the space into a live performance at the very same space. For this he used the Elektron Octatrack, Digitone and the Moog Minitaur .
“So for that kind of stuff, the Octatrack is just amazing. I would have all of my samples from whatever space we were in loaded and ready to go. None of it was rehearsed, and we would just start , and while we were going I’m like ‘I want to do this for panning’ and ‘I want this pitch to go up and down’ and ‘I want this to keep this repeating but in a random way’ and you could do it really fast. Again going back to the Octatrack, it’s a glorious thing, but then it also has limitations too. Like It’s keyboard mode…does it have the range that you want, no, it’s got like two octaves, but between all the weird things that you can do with it I find that I can put anything into it and I can get anything out.”
Of David’s mini films, my fave is “Sparkles.” I asked him how he got the shimmering sound of the track. “I have a feeling that was some Digitone sound that’s been sampled and mangled in the Octatrack. I really like the Digitone, but sometimes it’s a little too shiny, I mean it can do some grungy stuff that I love, but sometimes it’s just a little too sharp.”
As for the videos in general, Ralicke said he started the project after the slowdown of COVID-19. “ I mean the first months were really rough, and then very slowly, things have been picking up again. But in that period of time, I thought, ‘I’m not going to sit around.’ Usually, I’m chasing a lot of work, people asking me to do horns for commercials, or people’s records, playing gigs, and suddenly a lot of that ended. So I decided to start digging back into my creative work. I recorded two CDs like 15 years ago and then I got busy working and doing other stuff and stopped doing my personal work. I really wanted to get back into making some creative music for no other reason than my own inspiration.” Out of this restlessness, the videos came.
It’s clear that Ralicke gets inspiration out of his instruments. The newest muse that he wants to acquire is the Moog Matriarch, a semi-modular synth. “I really love the sound of the Matriarch, I’m going to mess around a little bit. You know, when you get a new instrument, there’s that first romance. I want to get a Matriarch, get the romance going and then I’m going to make this thing, and it’s going to have wind instruments on it and be very chill.”
One thing’s for sure: with someone as restlessly inspired as David Ralicke, new music is just around the corner.
finis
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