Tristan Arp meets Gliss

A native of the Detroit suburbs, Tristan Arp has been making explorative electronic music for more than a decade. As a musician and producer, his style is less about genre-allegiance than a dedication to rhythmic detail, inventive melody and a self-described tendency toward “pointalistic” micro-percussion.

Arp’s releases for his own aptly titled Human Pitch imprint, as well as Banoffee Pies, Wisdom Teeth and 3024 follow a liminal path along the extended borders of melodic ambient, bass music and leftfield breaks – often with a comic and swaggering gait.

This is perhaps most apparent on his recent string of EPs, particularly 2023’s The Self Elastic, where melody and various sonic artifacts – both instrument and sample-based – ricochet at the oblique angles of accompanying percussion, glancing, bouncing and bubbling over the sounds of liquid and billowing subs. “Lead with ideas, not gear” Arp told a recent interviewer at Stamp the Wax. It’s a maxim that makes sense when listening to his Eurorack-led recordings, which are equally as evocative of the concepts behind them (as told by the the titles) as they are enjoyable without knowing them at all.

That said, gear of course does play a key role in the modes of exploring the ideas themselves. Here, Arp gets a chance to try out Gliss to create melody, pairing it up with an external quantizer – in this case the Ornament and Crime module – and setting the CV range to control the range of pitches. From there, he probes the possibilities of setting the parameters for the touch size CV to the rate of an echo, creating ethereal harp-like sonics echoing at different rates.

Real-time exploration of gestural and parameter control is exciting. Gliss is also capable of much, much more. Check out our recent Patch Notes video series to get an idea of what’s possible.

Dig in to Tristan Arp’s discography here: https://tristanarp.bandcamp.com/