Brad Balliett and I have been talking about writing a Rake’s Progress together for almost a year. We want to further explore the space opened up by our last EP, The Oracle Hysterical. We’ll keep the ultra-dense, no hooks, bazookatooth delivery, keep the through-composed hip-hop format, but we want to shift our focus from all-samples to a more original and electronic palate.

Brad’s written a terrific libretto, and I’m beginning to produce some sketches. At first I was, stubbornly, going to try to build everything in MAX/MSP myself, but at Steve Nalepa’s Ableton workshop at Caroline, I caved. I wouldn’t use it for most things, but it’s just right for this project. As long as I’m smarter than it. So these sketches are also my self-tutorials as I learn to use new software.

And I’m going to share the sketches here. Whether they’re awesome or embarrassing isn’t really the point. I’m toying with establishing an iterative heuristic for the sketching process, some kind of genetic algorithm thing; stay tuned.

Some feedback would be great. Especially angry messages about how putting classical music to a beat is some kind of travesty — they’ll be perfect in my collection of Boring Ideas that Everyone Has.

Here’s the first one. Samples from Ravel Miroirs, and Berio Glosse.