I feel all over the place, just keep finding new cool ideas to obsess over for a week and lose interest just as quickly. Stuart’s EDM class has inspired me to practice more electronic music production and I’m thinking a lot about technology and how it could be the structure/body of the work instead of just facilitating the exchange/process.
Play, empathy, radical, reflecting on my lack of confidence due to my womanish upbringing, doubt, denial, support, peace. Trying to find the spot between instant gratification and a disciplined slow-down when composing/thinking, quality over quantity. Trying to understand the transaction between computer music and its social environment.
I have been working in Glimmer, writing new guitar parts for our EP which is being released throughout November, and we are recording 2 more songs in November as well. Performing live is so fun.
DJing has been good for play, reminds me that music is really fun/instinctual.
I am going on a compilation by Evia with some really cool artists which is exciting.
Keen to learn MAX MSP next year and get into circuit bending, coding (Supercollider).
Listening: ML Buch, free version, Flute, tibscl*, otherjoe, Geography
Reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell, Posthuman Production (thesis) by Eva Sophie Ogilvie-Hanson, Sampling Sexuality (article) by Barbara Bradby
Other projects:
Structures of Composition
I created 4 pieces to be listened to together. I wanted the pieces flow into each other, linked by certain motifs/textures/sound objects. So listening order is Scrunch 1, Intermezzi, No Mistake, Le Pris (Rain). This could be seen as a song cycle/EP structure. Aesthetics I was exploring were electronic music production, using laptop as instrument, glitch techniques and field recording.
Scrunch 1
My first piece is exploring a sectional and also found structure, using field recordings I have made with a contact mic dropped into water, and Ableton synth plugins. Towards the end of the piece the contact mic provides the found structure. Throughout the piece a more cohesive development begins to emerge, as each section builds or emerges out of the previous one. I think the different attacky sounds contribute to the cohesive unfolding of a structure at the beginning, and towards the end of the piece there is a more ‘song’ form, with a chord progression and a pulse. Listeners can hear sub-structures which begin to make sense towards the end.
Intermezzi
Nonlinear piece, trying to evoke a disrupted and processual narrative, while the piece has a sense of continuity, time feels jumbled. Layers of archival recordings and improvisations are compiled and slowly grow and fade, duration and dynamics are used to explore multiple pathways and timbres. Sonic events are hard to predict. Mixing with no inhibition, collage. Sections could be reordered, and flow between them is not contingent, the piece could be re-interpreted and more open.
There is a field recording of Heinrich Heine Platz in Berlin that I took on a walk, sound events are hard to predict. There was a protest about gentrification of the area. I then reversed it as well, and took out a lot of low end because it is wind noise which permeates a lot of my recordings.
No Mistake
Developmental, a structure emerges out of blurred lines and ambiguity. There is a sense of development but events seem disconnected, there isn’t a chronological order. There are a few small musical ideas that get multiplied outwards, like intricate high frequency textures and stretching of guitar chords. Harsh beats slowly emerge and rhythm ebbs and flows. The vocals are very soft and subtle which is a feature in the other pieces, and I used a vocal doubler and synth to create subtle 'denatured' voices. The percussive sounds have an arpeggiator and random MIDI effect, which makes them sound quite generative and glitched, or uninhibited. I think the main guitar line is what provides listeners with structure, it is repeated for the whole piece but slowly expands, and the other guitar part helps this too. Finally the last few bars where the synth enters, listeners can hear all of the elements come together, including drums and vocals heard earlier in the piece.
Le Pris (Rain)
I think this is sectional structure, maybe ABC(?) with some blurred lines. Section A features cut up vocals, section B is a pretty ambient section with some overlapping textures, but feels quite static, and section C is a more harmonically moving bit right at the end. I think this messes with the listeners' sense of time and makes the piece feel quite fragmented and unpredictable.
Throughout the whole piece there is a field recording I made a while ago, but I put 5 resonators on it so it sounds kind of droney, and automation on the track volume. I think this links all sections together well. The church bells also come in at section B, and the guitar recording from Intermezzi but pitched and stretched differently , and a vital synth patch with random, scale and octave transposition MIDI effects so some of the notes are really high.
