Hey, I’ve made it five days into Jamuary, so not so bad. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, but since I was pretty happy with the fifth one, I figured I’d tie the most recent three into one post.
▰ 05\31 — “Ives Talkin'”: I’ve lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I’m not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I’m not sure I’d share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I’ve done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion.
▰ 04\31 — “Chatter Boxing”: Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack.
▰ 03\31 — “Re: Generators”: Third day of Jamuary, working just in VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma.