In this video I am playing an improvised piece of music which I named Uncanny Cloud. I pictured floating clouds, but underneath their soft, fluffy, benign exterior you can sense there’s something not quite right, something ominous — perhaps they’re too perfect to be real, like in a dream that turns into a nightmare; or perhaps their pretty surface appearance is hiding a toxic storm cloud. Sometimes in life and nature, a perfect exterior can be a cover for something less benign and more foreboding; and in the non-natural world, artificially beautiful constructs can mask something more sinister. The eerie and uncanny C Lydian Augmented mode conveyed these feelings for me, and the other modes conveyed a lamenting and searching feel — like an elegy for what is discovered beneath and beyond.
I started in C Lydian Augmented with a texture that conveyed the shifting shapes, curling, roiling, floating and fragmenting of clouds. The Lydian Augmented mode has ethereal and unstable brightness in its raised 4th degree (like the Lydian mode), but the sharpened 5th (augmented 5th) takes that instability and light a step further and turns it into something more ominous — the augmented tonic triad of the mode gives a sense of bright light coupled with something feeling not quite right.
The E Lydian sharp 2 mode has brightness in its Lydian raised 4th, and a piercing and unsettling light in its augmented 2nd. Its ambiguous sound conveyed a sense of slow dawning, and a kind of precursor to the elegiac melodies that appeared later.
An altered chord within a return to C Lydian Augmented — C major 7(♯5) but with a ♭9 (Cmaj7♯5♭9) — created an ominous sound, a shiver within the brightness of the augmented tonic chord, with the flat 9 bridging the gap between the unsettled C Lydian Augmented and the more grounded E Mixolydian mode.
Later, a modulation to the mournful B Aeolian mode brought the lament fully into the air.
Throughout the piece, the opening texture of fast broken chords with varying directions alternated with a slower and more melodic texture with simple broken chord accompaniment — the emergent melodies within their simpler textures conveyed a sense of spaciousness around an emerging and lamenting truth.
Mode Table With Note Names and Parent Scales
| Mode | Parent Scale | Note Names | Modal Relationship |
|---|---|---|---|
| C Lydian Augmented | A Melodic Minor | C, D, E, F♯, G♯, A, B | 3rd Mode of Melodic Minor |
| E Lydian ♯2 | G♯ Harmonic Minor | E, F𝄪, G♯, A♯, B, C♯, D♯ | 6th Mode of Harmonic Minor |
| E Mixolydian | A Major | E, F♯, G♯, A, B, C♯, D | 5th Mode of Major |
| B Aeolian | D Major | B, C♯, D, E, F♯, G, A | 6th Mode of Major |
Interval Formulas
C Lydian Augmented:
1, 2, 3, ♯4, ♯5, 6, 7
E Lydian ♯2:
1, ♯2, 3, ♯4, 5, 6, 7
E Mixolydian:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, ♭7
B Aeolian:
1, 2, ♭3, 4, 5, ♭6, ♭7
Further Reading and Listening
Complete Guide to Modes of the Major, Melodic Minor, and Harmonic Minor Scales
Seeing Into the Dark — Improvisation in G Aeolian & A Dorian ♯4
