The Music of Gliftor Draken
Who or what is Gliftor Draken?
Who is Gliftor Draken? A god, a robot, an alien, an imaginary friend? He is all of these and less!
His Greenhead, an organ of pre-cerebral repetition and regurgitation, is the cocoon in which his expanded brain ripens. His T-Stick is the antenna through which the formless energy of his psychedeletions is made manifest.
Backed by earthbound guitarist and sound designer Mark Ellis, Gliftor Draken has been stumbling purposefully forward toward the Heart of the Psychedelic since 2007!
Note: Music is the art of organized sound. Listeners will have to decide for themselves whether any of this is sufficiently organized to qualify.
Swing Nose Frog
This album was recorded and mixed during February 2024 for the 2024 RPM (Record Production Month) Challenge.
- The Coal Cult
- Better Things For Better Living
- Clickbait
- They Are Right To Sense Fear
- Intermission
- Your Retribution
- Swing Nose Frog
- Our Victory
- Investigations
- Finding The Exit
copyright 2024 by Dead Planet Productions
all commercial rights reserved
non-commercial redistribution is permitted and encouraged.
Fungible Tokens
This album was recorded and mixed during February 2022 for the 2022 RPM (Record Production Month) Challenge.
All sounds on this album were generated on a Lenovo Windows 10 laptop. No microphones or musical instruments were used. I used the VCV Rack virtual modular synthesizer instead of real synthesizers. Audacity was used for editing as always. A few tracks were made on the Reaper DAW with various free VST synths. Samples (and the image in the album cover) are from the 1938 Poverty Row thriller, "Cipher Bureau."
I have no idea why anyone would spend money on a Non-Fungible Token, but maybe I'm just too old to understand. The tracks on this album consist of ordinary bits and have no blockchain-verifiable pedigree.
- A01
- A02
- A03
- A04
- A05
- A06
- A07
- A08
- B01
- B02
- B03
- B04
- B05
- B06
- B07
- B08
- B09
copyright 2022 by Dead Planet Productions
all commercial rights reserved
non-commercial redistribution is permitted and encouraged.
Disinformation Theory
This album was recorded and mixed during February 2021 for the 2021 RPM (Record Production Month) Challenge.
The "album cover" is a frame from "Reefer Madness" which seems to have been obtained from stock footage: a dissolve from the usual "calling all cars" sequence.
The sounds on this album were generated in various ways. The "dreadnaught" appearing on three tracks was a Santa Cruz "Vintage Artist" acoustic guitar. The Eurorack synthesizer used on all recent Gliftor Draken recordings appears here, although it was often replaced by the VCV Rack open-source software, or by VST plugins running in Reaper or Ableton Live or maybe something else. Audacity and Balabolka were used in their usual roles. "Workflow" was chaotic as always.
The computers used were a Lenovo Windows 10 laptop and an old HP tower running Linux. A Tascam DR-100 Mk II field recorder was used to record the acoustic guitar.
- So Far
- The Second Time as Farce
- Dreadnaught C
- Deeper Levels
- The Secret of Enlarging Bats
- Dreadnaught A
- The Third Time as Noise
- Windy Dreadnaught B
copyright 2021 by Dead Planet Productions
all commercial rights reserved
non-commercial redistribution is permitted and encouraged.
SS-100-X
I am not particularly interested in JFK assassination theories. Neither do I think that John Kennedy was a great or irreplaceable leader. I am old enough to remember the assassination, but I first heard about it from my third grade teacher rather than from radio or TV. What fascinates me about the assassination is the broadcast media coverage of it, and specifically the media's struggle to improvise some kind of real-time coverage of this unprecedented and completely unexpected event. It's probably the biggest single event in the evolution of our beloved Global Village.
SS-100-X is the catchy name given to the stretched (but unarmored) Lincoln Continental convertible in which JFK was riding when he was shot. I'm surprised that I didn't remember that, but the Internet never forgets.
The audio samples have been stripped without permission from videos on YouTube and the Internet Archive site. The samples are backed by four crossfaded improvisations played on the Eurorack modular synthesizer pictured below.
copyright 2017 by Dead Planet Productions
all commercial rights reserved
non-commercial redistribution is permitted and encouraged.
An Evening with Gliftor Draken
It's all about being alone in the middle of nowhere, listening to the radio, and living through the first few minutes of a nuclear war. Or maybe it's about advertising, or the 2016 election. Not my problem anymore.
Although this is meant to be played as a single entity, it is very long. The following table shows the times at which the various sections start:
0:00:00 Introduction
0:10:57 Decision 2016
0:36:10 Otto the Orkin Man
0:47:49 The Ride of Death
1:09:42 Lucky Strike
1:30:14 Edsel
1:45:35 Products with Three-Way Action
1:57:36 The Sanity Report
2:10:18 You Knew Better Than To Trust Me
2:20:41 An Atomic Bomb Explodes
2:38:51 Return To Normal
Apart from software-synthesized voices and audio stripped from various Internet videos, all sounds on this recording were produced on the small modular synthesizer pictured below. No piano-style keyboard was used, but a computer was occasionally used to play sequences of notes on the synthesizer via MIDI. Many digital recordings were edited together on the computer to produce the final product.
copyright 2016 by Dead Planet Productions
all commercial rights reserved
non-commercial redistribution is permitted and encouraged.
The Synthesizer
The small modular synthesizer pictured below has been used on Gliftor Draken recordings since 2016. It consists mainly of digital modules, providing FM synthesis, wavetable synthesis, and granular playback and manipulation of recorded samples. In the configuration shown, it can be controlled by a computer or hardware sequencer via MIDI, and can process signals from an electric guitar or other instrument.
