Presence is one of the earliest noise pieces I worked on. It was originally created using an old 4-track bought from a pawn shop & it makes heavy use of loops. I took the original tapes into ProTools & remixed and arranged them.

One of the sounds in this piece was created trying to replicate the sound of a supernatural experience, thus the name Presence. You'll also hear the sounds of bells, chimes, chains and other noises that are often associated with ghosts.

The work itself was created in a house that dated from around 1900 that was haunted. My cat liked to play and run up and down the long hallway of the "shotgun shack" and she seemed to be playing with some kind of spirits. They were never clearly visible to me, the most I ever saw were vague orbs of light. There were also occasional breezes from nowhere that would move curtains, but I usually dismissed those as just being an old drafty house.

One day I was trying to recreate a sound someone else in the band had heard during a supernatural experience. When I managed to create a waveform on my synthesizer that they felt matched, it had a strange effect on the synthesizer where every other key on the keyboard ended up with it's own unique and odd sound that didn't match the waveform I had just created. (This should not have happened, I created one waveform that should have mapped over the keys in different pitches. It should haven't created a bunch of different sounds for each key.)

As we continued to work on the piece, I saw something invisible lift a curtain that was hanging in a doorway to enter the room. We decided to run with that theme and the song ended up being about ghosts.

So here is the song, Presence. It contains that waveform/sound that one of the band members heard during a supernatural experience. The song was created during the event described above when my synthesizer freaked out when I tried to recreated that sound & a spirit appeared to enter the room.

Many describe this track as hypnotic, meditative, and trancelike. And I love the way the visuals look and move with the music. I hope you enjoy it.

This is Chatter by CLAWED.

Chatter is another work that was created using DAR samples. For this piece I used a number of environmental sounds I recorded in downtown Toronto. I often take my recorder out with me on walks, just to see what sounds I run across in the city soundscape. I've found when I don't have my recorder on me or don't have it running, I'll often hear something and think, wow, that would be great in a piece! So I've found the best way to capture is to simply capture a LOT of material, then review it later and work with the bits I think have the most potential.

Chatter is meant to evoke an experience. I had an odd, ghostly experience at the Winston-Salem graveyard in North Carolina in the USA.

I've been to various graveyards before and never had anything  like this happen. Most graveyards seem really quiet, like parks with stone markers. :)

Winston-Salem did not seem that way at all to me. I heard voices. At first just a couple, but then LOTS, like a buzzing. I got a very quick onset migraine and asked to leave.

It was very odd. I could just explain it away as some kind of strange migraine aura, but I don't know. It felt weird. It felt like ghosts trying to talk, way too many of them...

That's the experience Chatter is trying to express. Ghostly voices, trying to talk.

The video is a visualization, so you'll notice the imagery is very reactive to the sound.

This is Enhydris Enhydris from the first CLAWED album.

It's made entirely of heavily manipulated and processed sound samples. I used samples from the Large Hadron Collider and recordings from my DAR (Digital Audio Recorder), mostly of a professional plumbing company snaking the drains in condo where I lived. :) Fun fact, there are no human voices in this piece!

The video is a visualization, so you'll notice the imagery is very reactive to the sound. I like the way it looks like waves in water and includes a spectrum of colors as that matches the themes in the song.

People often tell me my works sound "cinematic", like soundtracks to a movie they're not seeing & yes, I think the pieces do paint a picture. I often do have a specific scene or sequence in mind. For this piece, in my mind it's a fantasy/sci-fi scene of a strange rainbow water snake ritual (thus the name Enhydris Enhydris) being performed by monks in robes (human? alien? who knows, robes!) with metal singing bowls. :)

Oh, I should probably also say this piece intentionally has "healing frequencies" included in it. So if you're actually listening to the full resolution version with speakers than can reproduce the frequencies (20-20K Hz), then it can have an affect on the body. I'm particularly fond on the low "cat purr" frequencies which have been studied and apparently can help heal bones fractures!

Doing a web search, I found CLAWED Rob charted in June, July and August on WCBN.

#35 at the highest. I know we charted higher with The First Magic Number getting to #6 back in March 2014. Still it's nice to see the album charting. :)