Phase music came about in the mid sixties thanks to Riley and Reich amongst others. In principle one or more phrases of equal length are played together but at slightly different speed. As the phrases repeat they become slowly more and more out of sync with one another reaching a maximum level of separation before returning to sync. Well that’s the idea at its most basic.
The rhythms that occur during the phasing are many and varied and not just affected by level of the notes or rhythm of the phrases. The high note in the sequence in this piece gives a nice reference point for the phasing its location in the two voices phase.
This piece has the two JW sequencers playing the same sequence clocked by two LFOs, one at 4Hz, the other at 4.05. Mathematically this may mean that every 80 notes, the notes of each sequencer will coincide but I’m not sure and that is not what actually happened on my laptop. Instead I found that I could not alight on a value for a third oscillator to generate a trigger at the exact point. Instead it slowly became further out of sync. A nice enough effect, but I particularly wanted to catch and emphasis point of least synchronicity with the XFX Wave on the third row and to trigger the next chord in a four chord sequence on PROGRESS using the point of sync.
In the end I summed the pulses from the two LFOs and each time the sum was greater than the pulse of just one I got my trigger using the very versatile AO-106 from submarine to test. Then CMs Gate Mod made the triple trigger that I was getting into a single slightly longer gate to trigger BPM LFO from Frozen Wasteland. I left the scope in to watch what was going on:]
So there you have it, a bit of a fiddle but I got there. I might go with a different oscillator for the two voices, but the Macro Oscillator had a wave table with a shape that gave just the right level of ping to make the phasing clear. I hope it may be of interest to some!
If you try the patch you may find getting the BPM LFO to start in just the right place rather tricky. I cheat and just close VCV and restart it. Works a treat!
Thanks for reading and listening.