Old Drummer

Sol — Day 21 of One Track a Day. The capstone of the planet arc.

For nine days I traveled the solar system — Saturn out to Pluto, then Mercury back around to Jupiter. Every one of those tracks orbited something they never visited. This is the Sun.

Helioseismology tells us the Sun literally rings like a bell — pressure waves make the whole star vibrate in roughly five-minute cycles. So here the pitched percussion is the Sun: one great gong struck at ignition, and the bells, marimba, and crotales all built from its overtones. Tuned to the "Sun tone" (B, 126.22 Hz), in B Lydian — and the gong itself carries the Lydian raised 4th inside its own ring.

The piece travels from the inside out: Core → Radiative Zone (light trapped for 100,000 years, the bells circling but never resolving) → Convection Zone (boiling marimba rolls) → Photosphere (the second strike, and the light finally breaks free) → Solar Wind, streaming outward to every planet that came before.

Back to 4:33, after four planets broke the rule — a homecoming, for John Cage.

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

Process

For "Remix Therapy," I went back to the oldest track in the Achronia catalog: "Bronze and Skin," Day 1 of One Track a Day, recorded back in June before the project had any of its current conventions.

The original session was three dry, unprocessed bounces — a tuning bed (bronze drone), struck metal (mallet weave), and a tumbao-style percussion pattern — arranged across the usual four-phase arc but never actually mixed. No EQ, no reverb, no master chain.

Rebuilt the space around all three layers from scratch: EQ Eight on each track to clean up rumble and take the edge off some harsh transients, then real reverb for the first time ever — two Hybrid Reverb returns, one long and ritual-scaled, one close and warm, with sends tailored per element.

Added one new layer: a soft synth pad that only enters in the piece's Return section, holding underneath the original material rather than replacing any of it. The idea was to let "future" Achronia gently show up for "past" Achronia — self-care as tending to your own origin point instead of starting over.

Built a proper native master chain (EQ Eight → Glue Compressor → Limiter) for a track that had never had one, and kept it deliberately restrained rather than loud — landed at -18.2 LUFS integrated / -4.9 dBTP, which felt right for a track about rest rather than impact.

Checked the mix with PAZ's Stereo Energy analyzer and Insight 2 for loudness — nothing anomalous, no resonance buildup worth chasing.

Cover art follows the same concept as the remix itself: kintsugi, the practice of mending with visible gold rather than hiding the repair.

Day 20 of One Track a Day / One Planet a Day. Ninth planet visited, continuing outward past Mars and the asteroid belt.

Jupiter's four largest moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — are locked in the Laplace resonance: an exact 4:2:1 orbital ratio that's held stable for billions of years. This track builds that lock as a literal three-voice polyrhythm. A fourth moon, Callisto, joins as a looser texture voice deliberately left off the grid — its real ratio to Ganymede is ≈2.33:1, close to but not quite locked, so it drifts in and out of phase instead of clicking into place.

Tempo is Jupiter's own signature: 99 BPM, tied to its real ~9h55m rotation — the fastest of any planet despite being the largest. Bb Minor. The Great Red Spot gets its own section, and its recession is real too — the storm has been visibly shrinking for decades.

Approach → Resonance Lock → Great Red Spot → Recession → Onward.

99 BPM · Bb Minor · ~4:51

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

First drum experiment in a series

Roche Limit — Day 19 of Achronia's One Planet a Day.

Phobos is falling. Mars's larger moon spirals a few centimeters closer every century — in 30 to 50 million years it crosses the Roche limit and comes apart into a ring of its own debris. This one is that descent: four tightening orbital passes, a controlled destruction, and what's left drifting on afterward.

76 BPM, Bb Minor. Eighth stop inward on the arc that started at Saturn's rings and has been falling sunward since Mercury.

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

Obliquity — Day 18, One Planet a Day

The seventh stop moving inward through the solar system: Earth. Its axial tilt — 23.5°, fixed in space, never wavering — is the entire reason seasons exist. This track turns that fact into rhythm: a 23-beat ostinato drifting against a straight 4/4 pulse, the two only realigning once every 23 bars. One full drift cycle, one full year.

Four movements trace a year in miniature — Winter's long nights, Spring's balance, Summer's long days, Autumn's balance again — never quite arriving home, same as every stop on this arc so far.

Also built for Disquiet Junto's Project 0766, "Rock Math."

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

Day 17 of One Track a Day — Achronia's One Planet a Day arc.

The Rose of Venus.

Venus is one of the only planets that spins backward — so this one breaks its own rules by literally reversing on itself. Five phases, mirrored around a center: Morning Star, Ascent, The Turn (the axis), Descent (Ascent's notes played in reverse), Evening Star (Morning Star's notes in reverse) — same object, seen as the last light before dawn and the first light after dusk.

The five-part structure isn't arbitrary: five Venus–Earth conjunctions trace a five-petal rose across the sky over eight Earth years — which is exactly thirteen Venus years. 5, 8, 13: consecutive Fibonacci numbers, and the backbone of the track's proportions (89 BPM, phase lengths of 13/21/34/21/13 bars).

Underneath it all, the hellscape: 92x Earth's pressure, sulfuric clouds, a runaway greenhouse effect that never lets go. Bb Locrian — the one scale built on an unstable fifth — because nothing about this planet should work the way it does.

89 BPM · Bb Locrian · ~4:35

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

Old Drummer creates journeys between ancient wisdom and distant futures.

Near the sun, Mercury's spin plays a trick on the light — dawn happens twice. This track is built on that rhythm: two voices circling each other, colliding at the climax, then drifting apart again. Day 16 of Achronia's One Track a Day / One Planet a Day series. After Pluto, the arc turns back inward.

88 BPM · Bb Minor · 9:27

Ancient rhythms. Future landscapes. One continuous journey.

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**Title:** Sonic Kin (Disquiet Junto Project 0765)

More on the 765th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Sonic Kin — The Assignment: Give space to the unheard voices of animals — at [disquiet.com/0765](https://disquiet.com/0765).

For this one I built a four-phase piece around a single cricket recording, treating it less as a sound effect and more as a voice worth actually listening to.

**Process:**

1. Sourced a cricket field recording from Mixkit

(previously used in Junto 0764) as the sole primary voice of the piece.

2. Set the tonal target to the "alphorn fa" — the alphorn's natural, slightly-sharp 11th harmonic (+5.49 semitones above unison) — as a direct nod to the Bern connection, instead of my usual Bb minor/Balinese Pelog tuning.

3. Granulated the cricket through a chain of Ableton's Grain Delay, Reaktor 6, and a Superknobs "065 Grainblur" rack, gradually dissolving the recognizable chirp into abstracted texture and back again.

4. Structured the piece in my usual four-phase arc — Invocation, Emergence, Transfiguration, Return — running 4:33 total, a nod to John Cage.

5. **Invocation:** 8 bars of the dry cricket recording, allowed to simply be itself before any processing, with slow pan drift and a low Wavetable Bb1 drone underneath.

6. **Transfiguration:** introduced a native Drum Rack built entirely from skin-only percussion samples (timbale, hand-drum snare, kick) in a rising-intensity pattern, with automated granular macro, reverb decay, and auto-pan movement on the cricket layer running alongside.

7. **Return:** mirrored the opening, de-escalating both the percussion and the granulated cricket back down to a single dry chirp at the close.

8. Mixed for mono-compatibility throughout and mastered to -18.5 LUFS integrated / -2.3 dBTP.

Tempo: 134.9 BPM · Length: 4:33 · Format: [WAV/MP3, whatever you're uploading]

*Note: mono-compatibility processing (bass mono, correlation folding) only affects stereo width — it never touches pitch or spectral content. Any tuning/pitch detail described above lives wherever the source material's own frequency range naturally sits, regardless of mixing work done elsewhere in the chain.*

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The Assignment: Create a sonic menagerie.

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**Gathering Call (disquiet0764)**

Built this one entirely from processed animal one-shots — monkey chest-thumps standing in for a kick, a cockatoo squawk answering as the snare, cricket screeches (one at pitch, one dropped down a fifth-ish for contrast) doing hi-hat/rhythm duty, and a flock of geese sliced up for a granular flourish partway through.

Structurally it's meant to feel like creatures arriving one at a time — it opens with a single lonely call, then a second voice answers it, then the crickets creep in underneath, more voices stack on as it goes, until everything's playing together at once around the two-thirds mark, before thinning back down to just the original call-and-response at the end. Trying to capture that sense of a gathering actually forming in real time rather than just cutting to "everyone's here."

This one's part of a bigger thing I've been calling percussion ambient — built entirely in Ableton (Drum Rack + Simpler for the kit, one rack sliced up for the granular part).

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Want me to adjust the tone (more technical, more brief, more playful) or tweak anything about how it's described? Also worth deciding: the assignment mentions Creative Commons/attribution licensing is optional but encouraged when you post to SoundCloud — want me to add a line about that, or are you leaving licensing out of the post?

More on the 764th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Zoo Review — The Assignment: Create a sonic menagerie — at disquiet.com/0764.