Seventeen/Thirtyone

Seventeen/Thirtyone is a very small release, but I still think it makes sense on its own. Both tracks were made in 2024 and were originally meant for what later became Nuke In Transit. At that point, though, that project was still an unnamed hip-hop/rap album, and these pieces were imagined more as instrumental interludes inside it.

That history still matters, but the tracks themselves no longer really behave like interludes. Seventeen especially does not feel that way to me at all. It speaks too strongly on its own. The piece has a very large gesture to it: an almost exaggeratedly full mix, a slow grand buildup, explosive bursts, and huge synth solos in a way I almost never do elsewhere. At moments it gets close to a kind of wall-of-sound effect, with a lot of drive and large synth layers all smeared together in reverb. It is also the more melancholic of the two tracks.

The 17-EDO tuning is a big part of why that track works for me. It keeps the intervals from becoming too sterile, but it also never turns into the main point of the piece. The tuning does not announce itself in a flashy way. It stays fairly close to the logic of 12-EDO, but with more color and extra intermediate steps, which makes the whole track feel looser and dirtier without breaking its sense of shape.

Thirtyone works very differently. It is softer, less intense, and much more minimal. Where Seventeen uses microtonality to pull familiar intervals slightly off their axis, Thirtyone uses 31-EDO almost in the opposite direction, to make that harmonic world feel even more resolved and smooth. The result is a very short piece, but for me it says exactly what it needs to say and then stops. I like that about it. If I had tried to stretch it into a more conventionally full track, I think it would have lost a lot of its value.

The title is completely literal. Seventeen uses 17-EDO and Thirtyone uses 31-EDO. There had also been plans for two more pieces in the same line, called Eleven and Twentyone. Eleven would have been shorter and more overtly interlude-like, closer in function to Thirtyone, while Twentyone would have worked more as a full track. The concepts and sketches for those did exist, but once I decided to pull Seventeen and Thirtyone out of the larger project, I no longer felt much need to finish the others, especially because I was still mainly focused on the record that would later become Nuke In Transit. Those sketches are probably still somewhere on my computer, so I might come back to them one day, but probably not. I am still interested in this kind of sound, though, and I do have vague plans for a full-length microtonal album in a related style.

The main reason these tracks separated from Nuke In Transit was that the difference in language became too large. Even at that stage, that project was built around hip-hop/rap with strong IDM and drill'n'bass influences, and these tracks were speaking from somewhere else entirely. The original idea had been for them to appear between that material as another current moving through the album, but in the end the contrast was too strong. As their own release, that difference stops being a problem and becomes the whole point.

I do not really think of one track as stronger than the other. They belong together. The contrast between them is what gives the release its shape.

Text written in May 2026.