no less than brilliant Mr Yellow! you know - is consistency of tempo a necessity? I wonder if rock steady tempo doesn't rob modern music of subtle expression. In my dealings with Abelton Live it probably could have handled the tempo swimming.

It was a very involved and convoluted process. This originally was intended to be a pseudo-remix of an old, old Cajun Zydeco track, "La Valse De Mon Vieux Village" by Amede Ardoin. It is a public domain song that can be downloaded free here: http://www.juneberry78s.com/sounds/mo33014t11.mp3 I was captivated by the haunting melody of the track, more so after reading a little bit into the life of the performer, Ardoin. I've been wanting to do some kind of re-incorporation of an old-timey southern American song and this was ripe for the picking. I started off with something IDM-ish in mind, but was overhwhelmed by the inconstancy of tempo in the original recording. This could have been fixed with enough cutting and rearranging, but I despaired and decided to do something just plain weird instead. The original song is now so mangled and buried within the mix that, even if it wasn't public-doman, there's no copyright court in the land that could possibly get me for infringement. I started out by layering 16 different channels of the track together in Acid Pro, all of them time-stretched out to three times the length of the original. I then set out applying a different string of effects to each channel. Some channels have nothing more done to the original track than some chorus and stereo-izing reverb. Some channels are completely mangled through the use of various comb/notch/low-pass filters and ring modulation filters. One channel, the most prominent, has a compressor-driven volume gate applied to it that is fed by another channel that is saturated with crunchy tube-amp distortion. Basically, I used the distorted channel to drive the volume gate; when the distortion clips, the compressor cuts hard on the accompanying channel. This effect wasn't quite to my liking on the first mix through, but I liked the idea, so I took the tube-amp distorted channel and basically cut every other note out of it. All the processing was done at 140bpm, but the original track is anywhere from 120 to 127 (like I said, it varies). Lather, rinse, repeat, throw in some cascading delay on the master channel and voila.

I like it too. I hope you don't mind I kept a copy. I'd like some info on how you created this one if you don't mind.

I like this.... very very good track... needs some serious EQ'ing though... the mid frequencies are far too loud and it kind of gets annoying on the old ears after a while...