I liked Akira Rabelais’s music and wanted to achieve the same kind of sound created by his Argeïphontes Lyre plugin so I set out to get it directly and took an unexpected turn. Here’s what happened…
Akira Rabelais is an excellent artist both musically and aesthetically in his art and writings. His music and art give me a sense of uneasiness. I particularly liked his album “Eisoptrophobia,” a collection of glitched classical works, as they are familiar yet very different, with artful defects throughout.
He developed Argeïphontes Lyre, a somewhat cryptic (on purpose (genius)) granular/glitch machine available only as a plugin for Macs. I work in Windows, so that was not available to me.
So, I studied the output rather than the plugin itself. Biosphere used the Argeïphontes Lyre plugin to create the tracks for his album “Departed Glories,” which, for me, had some of his most haunting tracks. Akira Rabelais also used it, so I studied both artists’ works.
After noticing what the Argeïphontes Lyre was doing in both Biosphere’s and Akira Rabelais’s music, I understood that it was doing something quite magical by combining several different effects in a single plugin, thereby blurring my ability to discern the discrete elements.
However, I researched Akira Rabelais and found that he studied under a professor named Tom Erbe. Tom Erbe created a suite of plugins under the company name of Soundhack. Erbe and Rabelais collaborated to develop at least one of the Soundhack plugins, Decimate+, and likely some others. So it’s reasonable to assume that Argeïphontes Lyre bears some of the traits imparted by Tom Erbe in his Soundhack plugins.
The Soundhack plugins, I believe, have the essence of what Akira Rabelais’s Argeïphontes Lyre does. Somewhat. They are different, for sure, but the basics are there, and combining several different Soundhack plugins, I found that I could achieve nearly, if not identically, the same type of output as the Argeïphontes Lyre based on study of the music of Biosphere on Departed Glories, and Akira Rabelais’s works.
I made an album that glitched the classics of Erik Satie by using the Soundhack plugins exclusively, and the results were absolutely what I was looking for.
I used ++decimate, ++binaural, ++delay, and ++spiralstretch plugins to get the sound I was looking for. I recorded the automation for the controls on each and varied these as the piano played the classical track. I had to do this several times, changing only one or two controls each time, as I could not change them all at once. This provided a changing glitchscape of sounds layered upon and into the piano.
I was able to create a glitched classical recording not by using the Argeïphontes Lyre plugin directly, since it wasn’t available on Windows, but by studying its use in the works of Biosphere and Akira Rabelais. I also researched the creator, Akira Rabelais, and explored the works of his mentor, Tom Erbe, particularly his Soundhack plugins. Because the Soundhack plugins were possibly the progenitor of Argeïphontes Lyre, this allowed me to achieve the desired effect without actually using the Argeïphontes Lyre plugin itself.
This shows that if you want something, study the origins of it, and you just may find what you need.