When in Rome

Disquiet Junto 0286 Found in Translation

The Junto instructions this week ask for multiple versions of a track:

Consider what it means to “transliterate” something, and how that differs from “translating” something, and how both differ from “interpreting” something.

This spoke to my process of recording and then remixing tracks and there was a track that I'd already processed in various ways.

'Smoke' was a song very quickly recorded at the end of 2015, when I'd been keen to put something down without a clear idea what it might be.

At the time I'd written lyrics very quickly, recorded two takes and decided to layer them up rather than edit bits together.

Then in March this year I'd revisited the track, adding a bass part that was recorded for another song.

I'd experimented with repitching the vocals and added drums using Live's samples.

More recently I'd come back to the original and attempted to more drastically remix the parts.

In the third section of the video above, you can see I've layered much shorter samples and you can hear I've used Live's Beatrepeat effect to create new melodies.

Disquiet Junto 0285 Live Barcoding

The Junto this week asked for music from the three barcodes nearest to me.

When I started looking I found this sales gimmick from Woolworths that used a kind of a barcode on cards with various fauna and insects to trigger recordings.

I'd quietly waited until my kids lost interest in the cards and player, which had to be purchased seperately, but haven't yet taken the step of soldering an output.

For this project I picked three barcodes that offered a variety of wide and thin stripes.

I interpreted the stripes as notes quickly recording a single take singing each card. Then I thought it'd be fun to add the sounds of the card being read by the player.

In Ableton Live I looped the card sounds but kept my singing as single takes, then decided to add more variety by dropping one part down a fifth. Then I extended the parts so they repeated, then edited one with another to get a length of nearly three minutes.

I layered up these six parts and had an idea to duplicate the card sounds, slightly offset some then pan each into opposite channels.

Roger Dean on Sydney in the early '80s

I’m trying to think of one event where Rik and I were involved that would encapsulate the urban culture of the early 1980s in Sydney. Louis Burdett is/was one of the most naturally talented of musicians anywhere, but often captured by circumstance. On one occasion, he ended up in hospital after somebody hit him in the head with a crowbar. He was hospitalised with mercury poisoning on another occasion after putting his arm through a television set installation as part of his solo performance at ICE. So no surprise that we were also witness to the notorious concert when he was attacked by a group of outraged women while running around his drum kit naked with a functioning firework displayed in, and being emitted from, his posterior. Later in the concert, one enthusiastic male member of the audience grabbed Louis’ penis as a dancer was being asphyxiated from the smoke in an overhead net (having dropped the knife with which to cut himself free from the net and jump into the hopefully surprised audience at a peak point in the performance — the peak came and went and only weak cries of ‘help, help’ from above alerted us to the near-death experience attached to the ceiling).

Naviarhaiku179 – where feet fall softly

Quickly recorded this track responding to the haiku shared by Naviar Records last week.

Africans hear Autechre

Un-P.C. but works a treat. Also reminds me that I was grooving to these Nigerian musicians this time last year.

Disquiet Junto 0284 Creative Commonfield

The Junto this week asks for an interpretation of audio by Chris Kallmyer, a recording of his performance using ceramic chimes.

My process here was to EQ and compress a section of the MP3 recording and export it as a WAV file, which was then opened with Phatmatik Pro. This plug-in makes short loops and assigns them to MIDI, so I could find sections that worked together and layer parts of the recording.

When I'd found the parts that I wanted to use, I added reverb and delay on the buses to give it more shape. My idea was to create something that reflected the sense of sitting by a large river, imagining the source of the clay that made the instruments.

Because I needed to upload the result to Youtube, I went looking for a visual to accompany the recording and settled on using two takes of steam rising above the nearby rice coop.

Cliff Thorburn

New remix chain album from Shinobi Cuts features a remix of a remix of a remix etc. Great vibe on this chain.

The cover image comes from Matong last weekend.

Riding waves

Via FB

Disquiet Junto 0283 Rooms Within Rooms

1. Record the inherent sound, the room tone, of three different rooms. Label them A, B, and C.
2. Create three distinct ambient beds from the rooms by editing the source material down. Label the ambient beds A, B, and C to align them with the source rooms. Don’t add any other effects or sonic material.
3. Create a loose song structure alternating two of the rooms as verse (bed A) and chorus (bed B), and dropping in the third room (bed C) as a bridge at some point. The full piece should be about three minutes long.
4. Go back into the audio and into each bed add tiny elements from the other source rooms. In other words, in the verse (bed A, based on room A), insert elements from room B and room C. Do this as well for bed B (with elements from room A and room C) and bed C (with elements from room A and B).

For the Junto this week I used a FMR RNP and Rode NT4 to record different rooms, picking up passing cars and galahs and the creaking of the fireplace to structure into a song.