Mystic Cartography: Mapping the Sonic Unseen
mc.gender
Scintillation
(2024)
Scintillation is a tour-de-force of granular synthesis and micro-montage techniques. For this piece I focused on the spoken word and pitched elements. Everything presented began as found sounds processed using granular synthesis and convolution.
—Matt Gender
Let’s take a walk—but not through any familiar terrain. This is a journey along a path that doesn’t merely unfold beneath your feet; it resonates outward with each step you take, shaping itself as you move through it. Sound untethered from source, free of the visible world, pulses around you, responding to your presence. You are not just a pilgrim—you are a maker, an architect of the unseen.
Stripped of the usual markers—no instruments, no performers—only resonance remains, threading itself through your thoughts and desires, reflecting them back in shimmering echoes. The sound is not passive; it extends from you, projects through you. With every footfall, something emerges. Something is being built.
Gleaming sonic architectures, birthed from shadow, rise and vanish—cathedrals of waveforms, shifting and reforming in the fluid space of perception. Their forms are not fixed; they take shape through your psychoacoustic processing, your internal landscape of desire impressing itself upon the sound. You are the cartographer of this ephemeral world, charting a geography that exists only in the act of listening.
And as you traverse deeper, you begin to sense the incline—the imperceptible ascent into something within and without. The terrain itself is changing. The resonance is no longer just an echo but a revelation, a hierophany unfurling in sound. The once-occulted stirs at the edges of perception, waiting for you to hear it.
Shall we walk?
—Michael Eisenberg
Matt Gender, DMA, is a concert organist, choral musician, electro-acoustic composer, and sound engineer currently living in Minnesota USA. He is a specialist in granular and particle synthesis, randomized systems, noise, and musique concrète. He has been featured in several electro-acoustic music festivals, including NYCEMF and the IUPUI Earth Day Art Model. When he’s not doing anything music-related, Matt is an avid student pilot and enjoys flying airplanes!
mc.gender has a very well stocked bandcamp page. Check it out if you want to explore more of his sounds and purchase the track that we are featuring here.
These clusters of sound, textures of color and timbre, they rise from the unseen chambers of the mind begotten by the ear. Timapni quivering to electric pulses, frequencies build citadels of pure imagination. This mystic cartography unveils the secret labyrinths of within, blending memory and desire, sound and spirit, light and dark recesses within/without this temporal consciousness.
Great track. 🍀🌹🍀
I concur… great track and also put so eloquently! Thanks for your comment. To me, this piece (to borrow a phrase from the great Ian Anderson) is a “song about everything”. Everytime I hear it, it takes me to different places and different times. These places and times seem to be stacked on top of each other where each visit embellishes, clarifies and amplifies the time previous.
It’s a learning experience where the learning is infinite and, did I say how killer this sounds through headphones!!!
Mike