Feeding the Hungry Silence is Sinusal’s second song, part of the soon-to-be-released Necktar 2017 Volume V.
This is what happens when a lecture on psychedelics in the age of intelligent machines meets a F# minor double Native American flute on a sick bed a friday morning. It may or may not be about the death of creativity. You decide.
Flute courtesy of Spring Shine.
Words by Terence McKenna.
This is what Inform 7 humbly told me as I was trying to plug Aaron Reed’s Keyword Interface into his modified version of Eric Eve’s Conversation Package for Sand-dancer. Oddly enough, the culprit seems to be Emily Short’s Complex Listing.
I am now halting in abject failure.
If the above makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t make much more sense to me. All you have to know is it was quite an astounding moment. The error came up with a rather dreadful picture of an antique skull. It was like the program had both committed suicide and triggered the apocalypse, and was apologizing for this.
Interactive fiction development can be this amazing, yes.
Necktar 2017 is a massive, free metacompilation of hors normes music produced by Le Colibri Nécrophile / Earsheltering / H.A.K. Lo-Fi Record.
Sinusal has contributed to Necktar 2017 Volume 4. Here is the official page with contributors list and links. Below is a preview of what is available on archive.org (yes, the first track is a three hours and half piece of noise. The rule is there is no rule).
A mere journey through time,
the great work of anachronistic alchemists,
the apiary of a network of precognitifs,
the magnetic murmur of a quantum flaw,
a vortex of antimatter annihilating all listeners’ dogmas,
a dream above the Earth passing through the Unconscious,
a psychotropic meditation resetting the consciousness,
an early bud of the new era…
Watching Stone Become Sand is Sinusal’s first song, part of the soon-to-be-released Necktar 2017 Volume IV.
Sinusal is born from trying to compose a soundtrack for Sand-dancer, Streams of Europe’s current interactive fiction project.
Gazing at spectrograms while listening to Native American flute over broken industrial dubstep patterns may trigger visions of hybrid landscapes and antithetic feelings. We hope it will.
Flute by Ephemeral Rift.
Since Inform 7 became our weapon of choice, we had to learn how to master it. A few months ago, we started to work on a (supposedly) small interactive fiction project set in Cranianth, the citadel of the Horde. Currently called Sands of Torment, this project involves a heavy focus on RPG mechanics and an ambient procedural soundtrack. It uses ATTACK by Victor Gijsbers, a custom behavioural system for the main character’s evolution, possibly a new version of Damusix by Eliuk Blau…
Let’s say there’s a lot of complexity involved. And at the moment, this is a bad thing, because there’s also, naturally, a lot of beginner’s mistakes involved, high expectations, and probably low results if we carry on with all the crazy ideas we want to implement in this first Inform 7 game.
That’s why we’ve bought a copy of the excellent Creating Interactive Fiction with Inform 7 by Aaron A. Reed. We could also mention Blue Lacuna was impressive enough for us to grab its author’s book in total confidence.
This book is meant to teach how to use Inform 7 efficiently, and it does, by providing step-by-step instructions for the development of an example game called Sand-dancer. We’re not utterly clueless Inform 7 dummies. Yet we decided from the beginning to follow the book and complete all its exercises and suggestions before going back to Sands of Torment, which is quite time-consuming, but equally rewarding. The problem here, apart from the noticeable Inform skills improvement, is that the result will be nothing more than a somewhat customized Sand-dancer version. Nothing even close to Europe after the Rain, and nothing related in any way to Streams of Europe.
Hence the idea to go further by using Sand-dancer as a framework for an interactive soundtrack composition. While the game is set in a modern, contemporary context, its atmosphere shares many similarities with what we’re aiming at in Sands of Torment. This is the perfect playground to hear what Glulx sound extensions such as Located Sounds by Mikael Segercrantz or Multiple Sounds by Massimo Stella can do.
So, in the end, our Sand-dancer version will be released as an “interactive musical fiction”, and you’ll probably get a new Streams of Europe’s album as well.
Streams of Europe’s complete discography is now available for download in MP3, at 320kb/s, for free.
All albums are released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Here is the full list in chronological order:
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And if some related wallpapers sound appealing to you, feel free to download this:
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We don’t really care about Christmas.
However, since Streams of Europe’s latest album, Degenesis, is finally complete, we thought it would be nice to make everything available for download in the same place.
During the last few years, we’ve tried a lot of music distribution networks. All of them were interesting in their own way. All of them also had their own limitations.
The truth is, there are simply too many places to upload and promote music, and not enough time. We want to stop wasting time on various networks, and focus on what Streams of Europe is about.
Hence this new website. You can already listen to everything in your browser. Try the top right menu on the Streams of Europe page, or hit play in the albums category for a full playlist.
You may also enjoy some minimal wallpapers, available for download in Art of The Rain.
The Christmas gift, which may or may not be available on Christmas, will consist in Streams of Europe’s complete discography encoded in 320kb/s.
Degenesis is the result of several live improvisation sessions from 2009 to 2011. Based upon drones simultaneously recorded while played looped over themselves, theses tracks go beyond the usual boundaries of Streams of Europe’s music. The album aims to epic, dantesque aesthetics, and describes the first half of the six ages that shaped Europe after the Rain.
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Degenesis by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.
In a world where mankind has lost everything but its genetic legacy, eight major powers struggle for survival and domination. Here are their colours.
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Neorganics is titled after the exhibition of the same name. The original live performance had a duration of about three hours, but the second part (which was pure improvisation) was lost in a “not enough RAM to record everything properly” accident.
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Neorganics by Streams of Europe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.europeaftertherain.com.
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