Disquiet

The combination of performed and everyday sound is a many-splendored thing. Often as not, the former is provided a backdrop by the latter. The relative distinctions lend much of such a work’s tension. The performed music expresses the impact of the human mind and physicality on an instrument, while the everyday noises express the external chaos of life beyond our control. It’s a kind of after-and-before shot of the cooked and the raw of the noise of our lives: that which we make of sound, and the sounds that surround us. Different musicians handle the balance in different ways, sometimes leveling the playing field, making the distinction between these two sides less self-evident, perhaps by “playing” the everyday sounds through sampling and processing, or perhaps by bringing random or less formal elements into their own playing.

In the track “Scattered” by ioflow, the procedure was as follows: after improvising on an electric piano, he “then went out to the park to capture some sounds. it was a bitterly cold, intermittently rainy day. came back and combined the two recordings, slicing, processing, effecting, and sequencing.” It’s a lovely combination. Indeed, the processing of the “real” sounds and the electronic nature of the “played” sounds helps find a common ground. Perhaps the strongest association, though, is provided by the improvised nature of the piano playing, the loose correlation of melodic elements that engages the imagination rather than directing it as a formal composition might have.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ioflow/scattered. More on ioflow, aka Josh Saddler, at museimpromptu.net and twitter.com/ioflow.

Sonic source material exists anywhere and everywhere. Often the most ordinary sounds yield the most fantastic results, and not only because their content is so ignored as to serve as a secret well of audio fodder. Perhaps the main reason everyday noises can yield alarming results through experimental electronic audio processing is because by focusing on these sounds, the composer employing them simultaneously exposes the noises elsewhere, and in turn asks what is inside of those sounds. If, for example, the supermarket doors that serve as Ambienteer‘s quotidian muse in a recent track can yield the sort of anxiety generally associated with a Francis Bacon portrait, what of other doors: the locked one that leads to the bedroom, or the mechanical one enclosing the garage, or the hinged one that covers the front of the oven?

He explains his process on “Automatic Doors” as follows:

This v.experimental piece is a recording taken 5/3/2012 of the automatic doors of a supermarket in Addlestone, Surrey. It’s a really amazing sound yet I can’t think why they’ve chosen such noisy, if harmonic motors.

I’ve simply layered three versions of the recording, each warped a little in pitch, to thicken things, and slightly effected the overall mix with some eq and a little reverb.

I hear a sound that reminds me of childhood days playing in tower block lifts, with the sound of the wind whistling through the elevator shafts in which we travelled along with the clunks, clicks and the singing electrical motors.

The result is a quietly harrowing tour, the rattling of chains as if in some paraphysical prison. Often a fade-out can sound at a track’s end like an easy way out for the composer, the close of a piece of music just decreasing in volume until it hits silence. But here, it is as if some nightmare train is slowly pulling away from the station, going into the dark distance. And just as it’s almost out of earshot, there is one final primal whine.

Track originally posted for free download at soundcloud.com/ambienteer. More on Ambienteer, aka James Fahy, at ambienteer.com and twitter.com/ambienteer. He’s based in Guildford, Britain.