Old Drummer

Four O'Clock

Four drums. Four different clocks. One shared beginning.

Four O'Clock opens with a single pulse — steady, four-square, unremarkable. Then three more voices arrive, each keeping its own time: a five-beat drag, a seven-eighths flutter, a three-beat sway. None of them agree. None of them are wrong.

For nearly six minutes they drift — not randomly, but exactly, each voice locked to its own internal law, slowly falling out of step with the others simply because their bars are different lengths. This isn't performed chaos. It's math made audible: four independent cycles, sharing a single origin, guaranteed by arithmetic alone to eventually return to it.

At 5:50, they do. Every voice lands on beat one at the same instant — not a composed climax, but an inevitability that was true from the first note. Then it dissolves.

Part of the ongoing One Track a Day series — Day 8.

Four Tribes — Day 7 of the One Track A Day series (Achronia)

Four voices — drone, struck metal, skin, and string — enter one at a time, gather, peak, and dissolve. Tuned to Pelog Selisir, the 66 BPM pulse breathes rather than drives, moving through a four-phase arc: Invocation, Emergence, Transfiguration, Return. By the end, a struck djembe and a Tibetan bell no longer read as percussion at all — just vapor, hanging in a long reverb tail until the whole thing goes quiet.

Percussion Ambient. Rhythm dissolving into resonance.

Hollow Ground strips everything back to skin. No metal, no synth — just frame drum, hand drum, and fingertip texture, pitched through D♭ Major and left to breathe at 72 BPM.

The piece moves through four phases: a single grounding tone (Invocation), a second voice answering it (Emergence), a drift into overlapping, phasing loops that dissolve rhythm into pure resonance (Transfiguration), and a return to stillness — changed by what came before (Return).

Part of the ongoing Percussion Ambient project: rhythm becoming breath, sound becoming environment.

Achronia · Skin Only · D♭ Major · 72 BPM · 12-TET

**Interstice** 🌀

A voice caught between two tuning systems, trying to translate itself into being. Built from a leftover blank track, this one grew into something stranger — half retuned Jawar scale, half ordinary 12-TET, same instrument speaking two languages at once. By the end it collapses into a single held note, reverb-soaked, resolved.

Then *Transmission*'s scattered voices — drone, metal, percussion, alien signal — bleed in around it, each on its own unsynced timeline. Non-linear time, made audible.

Day 5 of One Track A Day. D Minor · 66 BPM.

#PercussionAmbient #Achronia #OneTrackADay #experimentalmusic #ambient

Transmission is built around a real tuning collision: the ritual instruments (drone, struck metal, hand percussion) are tuned to Jawar (KF) — an authentic Sundanese gamelan tuning from Gamelan Kyai Kangjeng Fatahillah — while the "signal" voices (Absynth 5, Meld) remain in standard tuning, structurally unable to align with the ritual instruments no matter what's played.

Four phases: Approach (quiet, searching, mostly listening), Contact (the signal breaks through, alien and unresolved), Communion (the ritual instruments try to answer back — rhythmically together, harmonically still foreign), and Silence (the signal recedes, leaving the drone changed, resting on two of its five true tones).

Part of an ongoing exploration of Percussion Ambient.

disquiet0756 by Old Drummer

Day 3 of One Track a Day. Bardo takes its shape from the Bardo Thodol — the Tibetan Buddhist description of the intermediate state between death and rebirth — mapped onto four musical phases: Chikhai (dissolution), Chönyid (luminosity), Sidpa (seeking), and Return (threshold).

Built entirely in Ableton Live using the Kumoi scale (a Japanese pentatonic), with hand percussion, struck metal, and a Wavetable drone as the only voices. The piece opens on an unresolved open fifth that collapses into dissonance, builds into a dense, overwhelming wall of interlocking percussion, falls apart into deliberately off-grid, disoriented rhythm, and finally resolves back to that same opening fifth — quoting its own opening bell figure as it closes the loop.

Part of an ongoing exploration of Percussion Ambient — a genre built on rhythm that dissolves into resonance rather than groove.

Percussion Ambient · Pelog 7 Tones KF (Sundanese, Bandung — ref. 451.09 Hz)

Second piece in a daily series exploring percussion as lead voice, not rhythm section. A four-phase ceremonial arc — Invocation, Emergence, Transfiguration, Return — built through both harmony and material: earth and skin tones open the ritual, air textures join as it widens, metal and pitched percussion peak, then everything dissolves to a single held tone.

Tuned to Pelog 7 Tones KF, centered on Tugu (A).

Bronze and Skin by Old Drummer

Disquiet0756

In a Flash

BPM: 153

Time Signature: 4/4

Key Signature:

Length: 1 minute and 16 seconds

• Assignment: Contribute sounds to a Flash Gordon–themed 2026 Musikfestival Bern event.

• First I consulted with Claude (AI) on the project.

• Using Ableton live 12.4 with Producer Pal

• Claude was the technical skill and I the creative side. I also made the decision as what to use and what not to use. A true collab. He is also good at music theory.

• Added a drone bed and ritual gong

More on the 756th weekly Disquiet Junto project, In a Flash — The Assignment: Contribute sounds to a Flash Gordon–themed 2026 Musikfestival Bern event — disquiet.com/0756. More on Musikfestival Bern at https://musikfestivalbern.ch. Many thanks to the festival’s Tobias Reber for the invitation to again collaborate, and to Werner Hasler, who developed this Flash Gordon event. This is the eighth consecutive year of Bern x Junto collaborations.