Sylph Fossil development, proto-builds & Abyssal Hymns (ᏗᏂ.)

This is the third installment of Glyph Institute research papers - click here to read the previous entry.

After spending the last year & a half dedicated to tracing the sprawling history of a phenomenon called Lei Music - I decided to formalise my fixation on the field by founding a research facility called the Glyph Institute². In the following months I will be publishing my experiments, analysis, and best attempts to elucidate the questions that have always eclipsed any formal understanding of Lei Music. Comprised of a tangled nexus of folklore, geology, sound technology and ever-diverging historic accounts - Lei Music’s questions seem eternally shrouded by a dense blur.

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-Final build of Sylph Fossil, Iglooghost ₁

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The development of ‘Sylph Fossil’ was a strenuous process. It was rife with unexpected results, guesswork, and contact with vile, abyssal beings. Around three hundred and twenty-four αlfa builds are sat on the Glyph Institute² vaults - and in this journal entry I’ll be sharing a few of these proto files.

During the earliest conceptual stages of the NewSylphᴹᵒᵈᵉˡ¹ Dꜵsing Rods, our intent was to develop open-source instruments that would provide perfect conditions to summon entities with the least possible external interference. Very quickly, we found our efforts diverging from our primary goal - when early malfunctions led us to some very intriguing results. It was during these drawing-board experiments that we decided to split into two separate dev teams; the other team continued work on creating the purest possible rod model while I led a splinter unit off the beaten track. My group was specifically created to investigate the results of sculpting hyper-sharp Dꜵsing rods made from a material called Sylph Alloy.

When attempting to create & record Lei Music using our unfinished NewSylphᴹᵒᵈᵉˡ¹ rods, we would consistently get glimpses of impartially summoned beings with distinctive amber hues. Their movement was rapid & violent, while their colour was unlike any summoning records we were aware of. Our demos would usher beams of grey, steel blue and bruised orange to pierce through the rifts - while dismembered entities glided in rage through our testing environment

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-Mapping of the summon's light fluctuations 2

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The twelfth test with the NewSylphᴹᵒᵈᵉˡ¹ rods was perhaps the first noteworthy breakthrough we made. We’d sculpted the upper 33mm of the rods’ protrusion to point northwards, which seemed to result in irregular, isolated patches of silence that interrupted our demos. While using dense & swamp-like tones, we found the fluctuations in the air (caused by the new rod protrusions) were stretched, shrunken, and almost magnetically pulled around to sudden halts. The air was viscose & thick - & our laptops’ output was reduced to a pathetic, crawling rhythm. Dancing to this stuttering cadence was the partial entity we’d managed to summon. Moving in erratic bursts - it seemed to be puncturing its rearranging body parts through the air while never revealing its entire form. The summon was terminated after around 20s due to the increasingly apparent lack of control we had over the being.

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-Twelth αlfa build of 'Sylph Fossil' ₃

​▶ PLAY . . .

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It’s hard to not personify these summons and project earthen characteristics onto their behavior. Even the phrase ‘entity’ feels loaded - lumping these gaseous aether-dwellers into the same categories as flesh and blood organisms. Maybe they are only as alive as a geyser or an aurora or a stormcloud. This being said, the movements of the summon felt almost akin to a tantrum. Summons are terminated when collateral damage grows at an exponential rate - but the mood & temperament we perceive the entity to be feeling plays an undeniable part in the decision.

We were determined to press on with our experiments and manage the issue of the summon’s fury.  The modified NewSylphᴹᵒᵈᵉˡ¹’s razor sharp spines were rounded off in the case that the highly concentrated points were the cause of the overly intense entity. We had also been developing a new percussion sub-software on the Glyph Suite DAW, and planned to use it in tandem with the modified rods. The instrument had decent expressive capabilities - with dials that shifted the sonic profile between squealing twitches and titanium gulp noises. We tried to sequence some basic rhythmic channels, but kinks in the sub-software dragged many input signals slightly off-beat - resulting in a fidgeting rhythmic profile.

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₁ Visualiser for 'Sylph Fossil' by Iglooghost, published in association with Glyph Institute², 2021. Solo violin, Vivek Menon. Additional vocals, Cuushe & BABii. Violin engineering,  Drew Atz.