Astral Truth Window

My wife Tina and I make contemplative ambient music as Astral Truth Window. We also use this name for some tracks I made years ago which we first released in 2018.

The image above is a colour-altered, reverse-fish-eye version of a photo of a tea tree tunnel at the Two Bays walking track at Cape Schanck, Victoria, Australia (Google Maps).  Here is a raw camera image of the real thing.

Robin Whittle rw@firstpr.com.au 31 March 2021  ©

My work on vitamin D in general, and especially concerning COVID-19:

https://astraltruthwindow.bandcamp.com

The four slow-moving videos from The Vasty Deep are at the Astral Truth Window YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOZ0AfEcx93zLrJeEjsGw8w

These use Ken Burns effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns_effect long, slow, pans.

YouTube uses data compression which degrades the visual quality.  There are adverts and other distractions.

The xxx-smaller.m4v files below are good quality, and play smoothly if downloaded and played in VLC Player.   They will probably play in your computer web browser, but perhaps not so smoothly. These play perfectly on an iPhone 6S, (Safari or Firefox) with automatic full-screen and zero distractions.  Android Chrome and Firefox play them OK but there's no easy way to go fullscreen.   (They were transcoded with HandBrake MP4, Web Optimized, Align A/V Start, no filters and these options.)

You can download the xxx-original.mp4 high quality 1920x1080 video files via the following links, but the files are BIG and probably won't play in a web browser.

https://soundcloud.com/atwindow

or follow these links to the pages there for individual tracks, which we released as an album The Vasty Deep in late October 2018:


The SoundCloud app for Android (and presumably iOS) can also play these tracks - search for Astral Truth Window.  As far as we know, these apps do not show the text descriptions or any comments for each of the tracks.  Likewise viewing the web pages with a browser on a cellphone or tablet.  To view the SoundCloud pages properly, you will need a desktop computer.

These are via http://distrokid.com:

These are via http://distrokid.com:

tav/	8 variations of Tanglefoot Approach.
hq/	256kbps MP3s of the above tracks. suitable for podcasters, DJs etc.

A "truth window" is a special kind of window built into the interior wall of a straw-bale house, to show what the walls are constructed of. Google images link.

If the aspects of the Universe we most obviously connect with are a physical plane of existence, sharing the x, y, z and time coordinates with other things in a somewhat related "astral" plane, then it would be interesting to find such a window since it might gave us insights into the workings of that adjacent plane as well as our own. 

The workings of our physical world are a profound mystery.  For instance, how and why do particles of matter behave like waves when they are moving at a well defined velocity, including being diffracted by slits and gratings far larger than the particles themselves? What could give rise to time, three dimensions, electromagnetism, gravity, energy and matter? More broadly: how and why is there anything at all?

Tina and I lack traditional skills with instruments, and we don't read Western music notation.  We like setting up systems, creating novel processes and playing.  Tina is a child of the 60s and I am a 1955 model.

Tina's background in the arts in Texas, publishing and bookselling in New York, and family therapy in Texas and Melbourne, Australia.  She writes as td Whittle (  http://www.liketellingthetruth.com & Goodreads ) and works with me on electronic musical instruments.

We live in Daylesford, Victoria, Australia with our male ginger tabby cat Ponyo.

I have worked in electronics since 1973 and studied for a year at the Music Department at La Trobe University in 1976 - including with Warren Burtas our dynamite lecturer and tutor.  I left the next year to build my own computer and make my own music.  Between 1977 and 1979, with the help of my Camberwell Grammar School Radio Club buddy David Furst, I built a Z80 computer which later had 8" floppy drives and ran Cromemco CDOS.  I wrote a sequencer program for control voltages, trigger pulses and four channels of 8 bit DAC audio for drum-like sounds, with the ability to edit the sequences in real-time on a 64 x 16 character display.  We used this in Equal Local, (discography, video) with Philip Jackson doing all the rhythm programming.  Originally it could trigger a TR-77 drum machine, and later a TR-808.

I have worked with electronic musical instruments since 1980 (Casio keyboards, Devil Fish).  I also work with C++ programming for mining optimisation - maintaining and extending the program my father Jeff developed: http://www.whittleconsulting.com.au/prober-e-2017/ . 

My zak patching system was integrated into the sound synthesis language Csound in the late 1990s.  I used Csound in 1996 and returning to it in 2018, since current CPU chips can run it so well in real-time, and since I can use it with Rory Walsh's Cabbage real-time GUI and patching system.

For someone who has been keen to make music since the mid-70s, this has been a disjointed process with interludes including for telecommunications privacy advocacy, attempting to improve the Internet's architecture (Ivip) and the Devil Fish and other modifications.  Two other pieces I made or contributed to have been released on CD:

• What a World (1980 SoundCloud) with Valek Sadov, on the Informatics EP Dezinformatsiya .
  
  
• Cloud 18 Edit (1996) on the first CD of Green Ant Productions' double CD set "ambi-ant beatz a chill-out journey GA04"  (discogs.com, psydb.net) which was released in 2000. As far as I know, there's no copy of it on the Net and the CDs themselves are totally obscure.  Here it is a 256kbps MP3, but please note that it is not for the faint hearted: Cloud-18-Edit-Robin-Whittle-256.mp3.  It is an excerpt from an earlier stage of what became Tanglefoot Approach but I accidentally added an extra zero to a scaling factor and the result was much wilder and weirder than what I had in mind.  I gave a CD of this and the other Csound pieces to Felix of Green Ant for their interest - I had no intention of them releasing any of them.  They took a 2:31 excerpt of Cloud 18 and put it on their CD, with some additional sounds in the last 6 seconds, just two tracks after the awesome Atmosphere 145 by Dumb and The Ugly.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumb_and_the_Ugly .  I can't find "Atmosphere 145" on the Net, but it is on a 1992 CD (discogs.com) and was co-written by Ollie Olsen. 
  

I didn't really contribute directly to the Equal Local compositions, though my minimal Korg 700 playing might be audible on the first EP, and my fluffed beginning to one of the songs was adopted by Dean Richards.  The Z80 computer, in the hands of Philip, certainly did contribute something to the band.


In past decades, to release music, someone had to pay a few thousand dollars to press records or CDs. Then they had to spend money on marketing and put a lot of effort into distribution, radio play etc.  Economically it only made sense if there was a reasonable chance of hundreds or thousands of people actively purchasing the discs for non-trivial sums of money.

But what if the music isn't like anything else?  Its hard to imagine anything so different selling.  So the tracks sit around for a few decades on tape or CD-R until the time is right.  Ollie Olsen did offer to release Spare Luxury and Tanglefoot Approach on Psy-Harmonics, but I didn't have any more such pieces and I couldn't see how these two would fit with this or any other record label's material.

Now, it is relatively easy and inexpensive to make music available via the Net.  The geographical limits of AM and FM radio propagation, the costs and delays of shipping discs around the world are no longer a concern.  Nor are the limited stock holding capacities of record stores, and the need to convince retailers that the music might be salable.

Skye Klein, as Terminal Sound System, A Beautiful Machine and other musical monikers.  The instrumentation is generally very heavy, but evokes space, light and inscrutable processes:




Zen Zsigo (Hastings, UK) as Cremation Lily:

Albums:



Sam Rosenthal (Portland, Oregon) as As Lonely as Dave Bowman:

Albums:

A treasure trove of playlists, podcasts and appreciation of ambient music:



low light mixes - space, downtempo, ambient . . .  Podcasts from Dave Michuda in Wisconsin:



A monthly roundup of ambient music on BandCamp:


A sub-Reddit dedicated to oddly satisfying videos and perhaps sounds:

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