No doubt Mystified and Random Coil weren’t the only individuals this past week to appreciate the splendid sonic properties of plastic bottles. But they were certainly among the smaller subset of people who beyond merely appreciating the slurry and echo-friendly wonder of those plastic containers took the subsequent steps of (1) turning those sounds into something more broadly understood as music and (2) uploading recordings of their experiments to Soundcloud.com.
Mystified’s track, “Soda Bottle Drone” (at soundcloud.com/mystifiedthomas), is a high-pitched drone with a horror-movie aura, like the plaintive utterance of an especially anemic ghost:
Random Coil’s entry, “Fill It” (at soundcloud.com/random-coil), is more rhythmic and song-like, using the saliva-enhanced sibilance of the plastic bottle for both its texture and its propensity to provide percussive nuance:
It’s interesting how different the two tracks are from each other. The Mystified one uses the bottle as a source of hazy ambience, like an especially lo-fi analog synthesizer, while for Random Coil that bottle provides something along the lines of what hip-hop producers make from the surface noise of vinyl LPs.
More on Random Coil (of Berlin, Germany) at soundcloud.com/random-coil, and on Mystified, aka Thomas Park (of Saint Louis, Missouri) at mystifiedmusic.com.