New Ear

Still Machine - Echoes Within (Official Music Video)
Someoddpilot Records

I dunno about this tune. It's not pop-rock with snappy lyrics and a cool beat. Atmospheric is what I say now. We shall see. But this story on Willamette Week is why I'm posting the tune:

Portland’s Salvo Beta Releases New Music for the First Time in Decades by Daniel Bromfield

A cochlear implant has inspired Sean Wolfe to try making music in a new way.

Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.

His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.

“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”

In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.

“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.