machine xi is a music project that was born in 2015. So far, only one official full album release is available (manifest).
machine xi is composed of:
Ryan Spellman: synth, keyboards, programming, percussion, sample generation, vocals, miscellaneous instruments (harp, guitar, many non-traditional objects turned into musical apparatuses), mixing
Lee Spellman: vocals, analog ambiance, sample generation
Lee and I were debating on the best name for a collaborative music project that comes from our collective gray matter. The name reads “machine eleven”. Eleven has been a prominent number in our life ever since we met. As for the “machine” part — even though I opt to record as live as possible (I do multitrack, but refrain from using “loops” in my DAW as much as possible) we have a heavy industrial genre influence that permeates most all of our tracks. Hence the “machine” part of the name. Simple as that.
I use a variety of synths (both hardware and softsynths), drum machines, unique instruments, and samples. Currently, my repertoire includes:
The music I write is often repetitive and mantra-like. This style of writing stems from endeavoring to use each song to conjure imagery and be more than just an auditory experience.
Some of my earliest personal experiences with music involve mental visual imagery that takes shape on its own, guided by the flow of the music I was listening to — a dream-like experience. I just lean back, relax, close my eyes and let my mind give form to the tempo, melody and atmosphere of the music. When I write music, I am attempting to bring this out of my mind and into the universe outside of myself. From one universe into another, in a manner of speaking.
Dreams play a large part in making the songs take shape (manifest was actually almost entirely themed around dreams that Lee and I have experienced). While writing most of manifest, I would close my eyes and visualize the dream that was inspiring the song and attempt to reverse engineer the process so that the song was eliciting the imagery from the dream in my mind. In other words, rather than music creating mental imagery, I often take mental imagery and convert that into music.
The overall idea is that using music to pull emotions, ideas and experiences from the universe inside of myself into the universe outside of myself gives those experiences more power and strengthens my will. Pure psychodrama, nothing more, nothing less. Even so, there is still power in such things.
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