Music on Evan King

Engram: Generative audio sampler

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR: I’m launching the Engram, a hardware sampler that generates new sounds in real-time using embedded generative audio models. It combines traditional sampling with voice control and audio “model bending”, giving musicians new ways to explore and create unique sounds.

Contact me or sign up as a tester to help shape Engram’s future. EDIT: The call for testers is now closed.

How do we make AI art less boring?

People have mixed feelings about AI. Everyone I talk to – from engineers to physicians to artists – agrees on one thing: AI changes their relationship with their labor. The response to this, however, varies quite a bit. This ambivalence is most apparent in creative fields, where AI boosters are selling the ability to generate whole books, movies, albums, and works of visual art from a few prompts. From an efficiency perspective, this is optimal. But art has never been about efficiency: it’s about history, the artist’s abilities and limits, and the artistic process. Many artists are responding to these efficiency promises with rightful animus and distrust. The artists, in fact, are not the customer. Their bosses are.

Adding eurorack features to a tape recorder

Sat, 30 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

One of my favorite pieces of music hardware is a 4-track TASCAM Porta 03 mkII tape recorder that I acquired back in ~2013. Having grown up with a DAW, I’d gotten the itch to record music with some self-imposed creative limitations, and a coworker at the time kindly gifted it to me (thanks Carol, if you’re out there). Though I’ve yet to use it for producing any full songs, it has found a home in my modular synth setup. I use it there to record, manipuate, and play back tape loops.

The Sky Doesn't End at the Top of the Page

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Featured on KUTX Song of the Day, November 2023

“The Sky Doesn’t End at the Top of the Page” is a euphoric, genre-hopping exploration of the way our mental models of the world develop—or cease to develop—as we age.

The album’s title recalls a childhood epiphany–the kind that so firmly demarcates iterations of our understanding of the world that we retain a memory of it long into adulthood. As a child learns to draw, their depiction of the sky begins with scribbles. Yet, as we age, we realize how crude a representation that is: our skies accordingly grow in fidelity, first to include solid blocks of color, then gradients of multiple shades. Our mental models of wants and needs, fact and fiction, and meaning undergo the same incremental progression and occasional plateau. Ultimately, no matter how good the model is, it’s just an estimation. Only through experience, occasional exploration, and repeated failure can we develop an understanding of ourselves, our relationships, and the world around us.

My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 +0000

“My Plants Are Hanging on by a Thread” is a cozy, hazy art-pop exploration of the interplay between everyday human life and the natural world. I released this EP as Olivia Nowadays in 2022 along with my friend and collaborator, Kent Carson.

Blending field recordings with lush instrumentation, warm rhythms, and lyrics imbued with the whimsy of magical realism, the five songs on MPAHOBAT dip in and out of the experiences of different people, animals, and automatons to explore this fraught relationship between human lifestyles and nature.

Curvature of the Earth

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Featured in Bandcamp’s New and Notable, December 2021

A series of experimentations by my collaborator Kent Carson and I with a trove of recordings we’d gathered during travels abroad ultimately became the genesis of our musical project and pseudonym Alex Green: an outlet for sonic collages of synth textures, found sounds, and fluid input from collaborators that form a proxy for the lived experience of different locales.

In late 2021, we released “Curvature of the Earth” as Alex Green. Seen through the eyes of Alex as a lone, anonymous traveler, the album is an ambient, spiritual, and sometimes humorous journey drawing upon samples collected around the globe.

Petri: Cellular rhythm generator for eurorack

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Eurorack is an open format for modular synthesizers—hardware-based audio devices that enable you to craft compositions (called “patches”) by routing voltage signals between different modules. Some modules produce sound, others only produce voltages that you can use to build rhythms, melodies, etc. It’s a highly-flexible way of creating music: one that rewards experimentation, and an analytical approach to composition.

Having played with (and made small code contributions to) the open-source modular synthesizer project VCV Rack, I decided sometime in 2019 that I should learn more about the “real thing”. I first started by building popular DIY modules like the Turing Machine and the Penrose and eventually graduated to designing my own module, which I call the petri. I’ve always found computational processes that model natural systems interesting, so I set out to build something with that in mind. Petri (named for Julius Richard Petri, inventor of the Petri dish) embodies that principle, using selectable cellular automata rule sets and starting populations to generate rhythmic sequences of control voltage pulses. It’s like a little ecosystem of cell life in modular form.

From sea levels to music with CSV to MIDI

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Data sonification describes the process by which data is translated into sound. There’s a variety of reasons this might be worthwhile, from purely artistic or aesthetic purposes to its potential as an assistive technology for the visually impaired. I like to think of it as synesthesia: it allows us to experience information in a different modality than it was originally expressed.

There’s no one-size-fits-all way to design a data sonification algorithm—it’s highly dependent on the structure of the data you’re working with and the type of sound you’re trying to create. Since comma-separated values (CSV) are a common way of storing numerical datasets and MIDI is the standard for representing melodic information, it struck me that a tool that could convert between the two formats would come in handy as a generative composition tool. So back in 2018, I made one.