SPECIMEN · 001 · LIVE
Cordyceps
Ophiocordyceps sonifera
Cordyceps is a harness for the Open Source project Composer’s Desktop Project (CDP). CDP has been in development in some form or another since 1980. It does things to audio that no other tools can do - things that cannot be done in realtime, because they are time-domain bound. There have been many attempts at making CDP accessible to mortals, to varying degrees of success. There have been none to date that are anything like Cordyceps.
Cordyceps is an opinionated tool - choosing to completely obfuscate which of the 200+ CDP subprocesses are implemented. Parameters and processing choices are chosen with one global slider: chaos. From here, you have to listen to the audio output and identify sounds that you like or dislike. Choosing these will guide you through the maze of CDP by ear - a novel experience for such an insanely deep project. Each sound added to the pool for processing is mixed together and normalized - only pitch can be directly modified prior to processing. Files generated by cordyceps can be directly dragged into the DAW of your choice.
We make software the way mycelium moves through a forest floor: slow, lateral, opportunistic, and specialized.
The practice of discovery is valuable. Uniqueness is created by friction. We do not believe in presets.
A tool should retain a private life. Some behaviors are reserved for the listening, creative mind, not the seeing, rational mind.
Quantized, on beat, pitch corrected signals are boring. The world is ready for a renewal of organic, chaotic music.
Processing chains are cybernetic systems — and the best results come from surprising feedback loops.
The boundary between two systems is where the most unusual species live. We work there.
Roughly seasonal. Each transmission carries a strain note, one field recording, and an early release link. No tracking, no analytics — just a damp envelope through the post.