Fixing The Mix of Exquisite Blood by Damian Barbeler

The aim of the Fix The Mix assignment was to remix an existing work using the original stems in order to fix it. We were given four options to make marking fair while allowing for different skill levels in the class: easy, medium, hard, and insane. I chose the insane option: remaking the electronic accompaniment for the end of Exquisite Blood by Damian Barbeler.

Background

Exquisite Blood is an avant garde noise music work inspired by Titian’s painting of The Cruxifixion.

Tragically, COVID restrictions prevented me from travelling to the church of San Domenico in Ancona Italy where the painting hangs to view it for myself as research for this assignment. The painting graphically portrays the agony, drama and anguish Christ and his followers experienced when he was on the cross, and Barbeler has recreated this experience sonically for his listeners. Where Titian stabbed paint onto the canvas to render the violence of the scene, Barbeler stabs at our ears. Exquisite Blood was awarded “Recommended Work” at the 2004 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers, but I suspect the Magic: The Gathering card of the same name is more fun to play.

This mix is clearly going to take a lot of work to fix.

Fixing The Mix

My artistic vision for this mix is to make Exquisite Blood a little more easy-listening.

The first challenge was to find the starting point, Bar 350 on page 14 of the score. This was non-trivial given that the score is borderline incomprehensible, the tempo is fast and changes all over the place. I jokingly asked if it was recorded to a click track. The piece runs to 16:53, but the stems are up to 26:26 long and clearly there has been a lot of editing. In addition to the main instruments, there are also sampled versions of the instruments with different EQ characteristics. There are also extensive electronic sounds derived from granular synthesis of the instruments to produce the stabbing effect reminiscent of nails going through one’s palms, or in this case, ears.

Syncing the stems was easy due to the synchronisation tone at the beginning which was captured by all the microphones. The violin track included the closing section, which made it easy to synchronise the closing stem section, where violins are panned left and cellos panned right. The violins in the closing section sound like they’re being heard on an AM radio, so I applied a severe bandpass EQ to them.

I noticed from examining the score that the sections of samples didn’t appear to have been used elsewhere in the main instrumental tracks. We were told that we didn’t have to recreate the entire track, but there were large sections of manipulated samples which I wanted to identify. Part of my bespoke workflow (a catchphrase for “do it however you want”) was to reassemble the structure of the entire 16:53 track from the 26:26 of stems.

This was an active way of listening intently to the stems so I could identify which sections had been cut and used as samples in the section being remixed. By the end of this process, I decided it didn’t really matter where the samples came from, so long as the resulting cacophony hurt your ears, and recreating the whole structure was probably a complete waste of my valuable time.

Our lecturer had hinted that knowing the plugin he used for the electronic accompaniment would help, but we had virtually no chance of guessing what it was. He later revealed that it was the Fragulator which does granular synthesis with a random element. It was originally in Cycling ’74’s now-defunct Pluggo collection and is still available in Ableton’s Max for Live pack.

Unfortunately I’m using Logic Pro and since the Pluggo collection no longer runs on 64-bit macOS, I had to make do with the granular synthesis engine in Alchemy. I loaded segments of the samples Vln close-OD_03 and PR close_01 from the section of the piece being reconstructed into Alchemy’s Granular synthesiser and disabled all the usual filtering so they came through clean, but granularized.

To recreate the crunching effects, I used another instance of Alchemy set to generate noise, modulated its filter frequency randomly, and panned it alternately left and right with an LFO modulator.

Just for fun, I also threw in a spectral synthesis channel loaded with the Exquisite Blood artwork consisting of a section of Titus’s painting.

I played with a stereo delay with feedback to each channel to emphasise the bouncing left and right effect, but concluded Alchemy could do it better.

I added EQ to all the recordings to limit the bandwidth of the channels which sounded lo-fi in the original recording. Barbeler had used a classic trick of combining hi-fi recordings of the orchestral instruments and piano with lo-fi noise effects. I also automated the electronic sounds so they continuously vary throughout the piece.

If I had the Soothe2 plugin, I wouldn’t use it for this because it removes harsh frequencies, and for this piece, the harsher the better. Nor would I use the 21k shelf filter from NSEQ-2 to remove high frequencies that can wrap into the audio band, for the same reason.

My penultimate processing chain included Multipressor to highlight the softer passages, Match EQ to recreate the overall EQ characteristics of the original, Spreader to provided wide stereo spread, Space Designer to add a little reverb, Channel EQ to remove some softness in the harsh parts, and Adaptive Limiter to avoid clipping.

The End of Sonic Suffering?

Barbeler’s original artistic concept for Exquisite Blood was to recreate sonically the suffering of Christ as depicted by Titian’s painting The Crucifixion. We were given permission to differ marginally from the original if we can improve the work, so long as we can justify it. So here goes:

Christianity teaches that Christ took on the sins of the world by being crucified, freeing us from the repercussions of our evil deeds and restoring the perfect relationship between humanity and God that existed before Adam and Eve engaged in original sin in the Garden of Eden.

The continued existence of suffering and death in the world suggests that this philosophy has holes you could drive a Mack truck through, but if I put that aside and play along with the theological game for a moment, the crucifixion event implies that our suffering is no longer necessary. Christ has already borne the pain before we were even born, so we don’t need to keep suffering… like having to listen to noise music such as Exquisite Blood.

The Buddha pointed out that all living beings suffer, but there’s no need to create any more suffering than necessary. So, my final step in fixing this mix is to include a sample that makes the work a little easier to listen to.

Lessons Learned

Speaking of unnecessary suffering, picking the Insane option was probably a mistake because it made my life more difficult than necessary. What was I thinking? I could have done a perfectly adequate job on the Medium or Hard option, and probably would have practised skills more relevant to the type of music I want to make.

Nevertheless, I did expand my experience of Logic Pro into new areas, principally learning how to use Alchemy and granular synthesis to make noise music. I also practised listening intently and carving up stems to recreate a mix in the Logic Pro editor, which are useful skills to develop.

Here is my final remix of the final epic section of Exquisite Blood: