Movement 2 (Turn and Face the Strange)

While I was playing around with Movement 1 ( • Movement 1 ), I stumbled upon a combination of a particular setting in Output Movement and a simple keyboard riff (played on an Atom SQ controller) that seemed promising; and I decided to construct another piece around it.
This turned out to be rather tricky: the Movement setting that worked was based on 8th-note triplets, but the keyboard part was pretty much in 4/4. Fitting this into a regular grid structure took a while, and results in some quirky numbers of repeats at different granularities.
After an introduction comes a simple chord progression / transposition, which builds up to a mini-climax. The central section starts with the same progression, but soon diverges; the chords actually form a wedge shape (hints of A Trivial PurSuite (www.youtube.co...) that expands and then collapses. The brassy synth part that enters soon after the start of this grew out of mistakes I made whilst trying to play along to the chords but not quite remembering what they were! I liked some of the bum notes enough to keep them in. This builds to a climax when it returns to the initial chord. Next comes an almost-repeat of the first section, followed by a brief conclusion.
I completed Movement 2 (by chance) on the 50th anniversary of my first "proper" album acquisition, David Bowie's Hunky Dory; so I chose a quote (perhaps a misquote) from the lyrics as a subtitle.
The video uses video and stills chosen almost on a whim, some real, some AI-generated, put through various beat-driven distortions. Each image corresponds to a particular root note.
Brian Ritchie - composition, keys, programming, video
Nov/Dec 2023