The Sound of Violence
For Acoustic Box and A Million People
I made this art-y thing for the scratch orchestra (collage?) concert we did. I wanted to have this texture of tearing boxes all at once. It was meant to be fun but it felt kinda angry when we were doing it, also I didn't give much direction to the performers so I was glad it worked and they followed in tearing the medium. Thanks to M.T for teaching us about sound art in 1st year. Also I think a cute observation is that we're studying developmental forms this semester and there is a kind of visual development in the piece, detailed more in my journal.
Occupy Space
This was driven mainly by emotion (as with all my songs) and I wanted to create a gradual build, kind of like a giant crescendo. It's a similar idea to the developmental music I made this semester as well, there's actually a piece by Stockhausen called inori that is built like this with the dynamics getting louder and louder. I think it's the easiest way to conceptualise developmental forms because it's very visual. I wouldn't call this necessarily developmental but I mention is because I continued the method I have been using in the second half of this semester where I have been thinking a lot about Eliane Radigue and making my music to have more timbral developments rather than a lot of melodic material.
The actual process involved a few recordings - one guitar, one epiano, a recording I had taken a while ago of a room, and two vocal tracks which were then duplicated and subjected to a number of edits, filters and effects. So it's mostly computer but I like this kind of minimalist approach (if you can call it that) at the moment, it's fun for me to squeeze as much variation out of one sound that I can and then make the machine do different things with it. I do feel though that it's a bit suface-y still and while it is fun, I would like to explore synthesis more in depth/intricate way.
So Beautiful I Could Die
When I was first listening to block form pieces I didn't really like them jumping around so much - it was too harsh for my ears so I decided (after taking influence from Frank Zappa and Vampire Weekend) to try and have a string "connecting" the blocks. I have also taken Electronic Music History this semester and I noticed in a few styles it feels a bit like they've created this kind of environment with sounds and then bring different things in and out and I thought you could think of those events as kind of blocks, so that has been influencing me as well. The idea is that there would be an electronic track trying together the acoustic instruments, it ended up that I built the whole thing from 1 riff - may have been a mistake considering they were meant to be seperate blocks. It wasn't written very well by me so it (fortunately) didn't get played though I value the experience I gained from the experience of trying to get people to play it.
I also am a little bit obsessed with Jesus - I'm not religious but I love the character of him and so during one of my research spurts, I happened upon some information courtesy of Dr. Richard Carrier about a technique called Ring Structure that (if you look at them as a set of parables or literary works, rather than an historical record or the word of god) you can see that they used it to write the Gospels. It's a kind of block structure as well that gets built like an onion, or mirrored, around one chapter/section that isn't repeated at all - and that is the main teaching in the piece. I thought this is really dramatic and might be an effective thing to use, so this piece was created in the image of that ancient literary device.
Plant Medicine
In this one I have tried to make the sound unfold like a flower or fern, I have personally been really opening up to people and showing what I really think and feel more lately and I think this process has a real likeness to the symbolism inherent in plants like these. There is a shamanic idea of "medicine" (lessons, or 'vibrations' given to a person from a specific plant or animal or crystal that helps them understand, embody and live that thing) and I felt that was a good way to describe the healing I've witnessed in myself through this new way of being - that is what I'm trying to express. I would call it "minimalist" in the same way Bjork speaks about Homogenic (Rene, 2003) because there are only really 2 actual recorded sound sources in the entire thing. I must say I was very influenced by Eliane Radigue and the way she worked with electronic sound, when I was reading her chapter in Pink Noises it seemed like she was thinking about little specific technicalities of the sound like frequencies rather than more traditionally musical parameters. She said something like it's all one frequency (oscillator?) because as soon as you introduce a new one it changes the identity of the piece, I couldn't quite do that so I guess I'm not as eccentric as she is.. I actually don't find alignment in this way of thinking though anyway because I'm approaching electronic music like it's a painting. I like it because it's fixed and though I think it's really amazing the depth she gets out of such a small amount of material, I actually think I prefer to think about blending the different sounds to make an identity for it.
There's an interesting observation I had about my process here - I have basically recorded my guitar amp for 7 minutes and then copied the track a number of times in order to create different timbral developments, mostly through the use of filters so on an individual level there is a subtractive synthesis technique being applied but then I've added them all together which to me seems almost additive. I just think it's a cute little contradiction to use both these (opposite?) concepts at once, even if it's just symbolically. I noticed as well that initially subconsciously worked the whole thing into a rough kind of Sonata Deformation-ish form, which I realised in one of our classes and I have tried to intentionally go back and make this more obvious but it may not have worked that much.
Rodgers, T. (2010). Pink noises : Women on electronic music and sound. Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Lysloff, R., & Gay, L. (2003). Music and technoculture (Music/culture). Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press.
I was thinking very visually, trying to unfold the song like a fern. The scary noisy part at the beginning is the creation of the stem. Ferns are like people, and like the whole entire Universe - they expand and unfold. Let yourself be open, you'll heal through authenticity.
Something I've noticed more and more as I listen to/experience electronic music is that a lot of the time it kind of takes you somewhere else. I'm not sure why specifically this style does that for me but it does so that is something I want to work on creating in the future - I think it might be the intricacy? I like it when there feels like there's more depth in a piece as well, it's really nice. But then I guess another question is how can you connect with people as well? That was the reason I added voice - it made it more interesting and connectable, and also more beautiful than it already was because I feel like a lot of people have trouble finding meaning in this kind of music.. I tend towards making music to actually have an impact on the people who experience it - otherwise what's the point?
An important thing I've learned while making this is that your music is probably better if you just slow down.
