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I’ve been pretty obsessed with simple ratios in the forms of chord progressions for as long as I can remember, hence all the long sustained chords in my music - for some reason I find chords even more satisfying in the lower frequencies, maybe we can pick out the ratios more clearly when they’re using slower wave fronts like with bass. I also love melodies and rhythms that combine different loop lengths so that interesting syncopation effects arise as a result of the ratios between the loop lengths. A lot of my favourite new tracks recently have used these types of techniques, so I decided to base a mix around them - Semiosis.
Semiosis is a process by which we create meaning from comparison. If I tell you a made up word that doesn’t relate to anything you know, you can get little meaning from it - meaning comes from what something isn’t, how it relates to other things you know. Music works in exactly this way, with us comparing meaningless wave frequencies to find feeling in how one value relates to another - a ratio.
Whether or not you like it, your subconscious mind is a massive maths geek, and it gets really excited when it finds a 1:3:5 ratio in the stream of air pressure information being received by your ears. Ratio has the capacity to make us feel and make us dance. But it all happens without us being aware of it.
When you listen to long drawn out chords and syncopating rhythms however, you can’t really get the full feeling from just a quick dip in, I find that it needs time for the ratios to wash over and sink in. The more time you give to it the more beauty you can find hidden in there. So the mix is very much of this long form, it doesn’t jump from one extreme to another like some of my other mixes, and needs to have some time to develop.