Disquiet Junto 0220 Rhythmic Arrhythmic

The instructions for the Junto this week come from Dennis DeSantis, whose book Making Music: 74 Creative Strategies for Electronic Music Producers I've read about and looked at the online material.

The direction was to use short loops of arrhythmic material to find rhythms and I'd initially thought of the remix I'd made of a field recording from outside Wagga. That process drew on my experiences remixing playgrounds, to use suitable transients to make beats and also a bassline from a passing bee.

One thing I've observed is that gating loops makes it easy to focus on a transient, as it removes the background noise (and can sometimes even create the transient). Then the question is where you put the starting point for the loop, as this will determine whether the transient sits on or off the beat of the rhythm.

As a result, it's fairly straightforward to create a beat from most material. The interesting variations come from the loop selection and how the resulting transients swing as a rhythm. For this reason I resisted the initial idea to use a recording of me 'playing' an object as it mean I made the rhythm.

So I ended up thinking it would be interesting to make a track from the recording of the Rice Co-op that was made for the Junto proposed by Kate Carr. The occassional hisses seemed ideal and the passing mosquitoes were good too. I also found there was some deep rumble, likely from a breeze.

Using the gated hisses, mosquitoes and rumble to create a rhythm, I then accentuated it with a programmed drum machine in Ableton Live. Then I jammed on a few bass riffs to give the track a song structure, which develops from F# minor to A major I think.