collaboration - inksnail improv.
After two of my plans for the collaboration piece failed (I "wasn't needed" for the short film anymore, and a combination of a lack of planning, printing and member attendance made my big band piece impossible to do before the deadline), I needed someone to collaborate with, and quickly. Enter Matthew R. F. Balousek, a game designer and new media artist from New York. One of his projects was inksnails, a project that randomly generates a piece of digital art based off of plotter art every three hours and posts it on twitter. Each line is jokingly referred to as a snail, which is where the name comes from. I contacted Matthew after realising my big band piece wasn't going to work, and to my surprise, he responded.
Getting the (kind of) go ahead, I looked through the collection and nabbed five images to interpret as a graphic score on solo piano. I would've recorded at home, but my baby brother was home that day, screaming and stomping around, and decided to book a piano room. When I got into the room, I discovered there was a very large and loud air conditioning unit, but time was running out, so I just had to make do.
common themes:
- Too much reverb
- A lot of bitcrushing (I wanted to experiment with Tritik's Krush)
- Pitchshifting the original track up and down
- A bunch of phasers
This was mixed with headphones, and I recommend you listen to it with headphones, although I don't know what it sounds like with speakers, and I am curious.
inksnails #1 20201109090503 (100 snails)
I read this one from bottom to top, and interpreted the lines moving away from each other as notes becoming further and further away. Almost all of the lines end in a hook, so most notes are either proceeded or finished with a fall or rise.
It's very spacey production-wise, with multiple tracks with phaser, reverb, bitcrush and pitchshift to make the original more interesting, but it definitely is one of the more restricted ones. |
inksnails #220201109030502 (76 snails)
I saw this one and immediately thought of it as a shattered clock, and thought that reading it in the exact opposite way you would read a clock would be interesting. I started at the bottom and moved my eyes counter-clockwise.
This one was fun with all of the effects, with not only a lot of reverb in the tracks pitch-shifted down an octave, but also the very slowed down constant ticking of a clock, which was also bitcrushed to death. |
inksnails #320201107000503 (510 snails)
To me, this looks like an attempt of perfection, only to be ruined by the chaos of nature. That sounds pretentious (it is), but the viney, natural lines colliding with the perfect squares really intruiged me.
The main thing production-wise here is the constant glitching arpeggios, contrasts against the naturalistic timbre of the piano. |
inksnails #420201106120503 (6,528 snails)
This one looks like a bunch of dancing people to me, almost like the painting Dance by Matisse. It's a chaotic image, and I wanted my improvisation to reflect that, hence all the banging on the keys at the start.
The fun thing about this piece is the reversed sounds, which is just the original recording thrown into the reverse plugin in Audacity, then into a couple of other ridiculous effects after for good measure. This also has two very bitcrushed tracks playing into either output. It's a fun technique I like to do every so often, and it means if you're sharing headphones with someone, your experience will be fairly different to your headphone-buddy. |
inksnails #520201108090503 (41,670 snails)
When I was playing this one, the snail-lines started to flow like a constant, everchanging river, so I attempted to catch that in the performance as close as possible with my subpar piano skills.
There's a couple fun features that haven't been done before on the album, including slightly stretching one of the tracks so it slowly becomes out of sync, and the more prominent one, which is a track of just white noise through a whole bunch of effects, which is slowly rising in volume throughout the entire piece. |
Thank you once again to Matthew R. F. Balousek for letting me use these strange and wonderful images. His website is https://matthew.balousek.net/, and inksnails can be found on twitter under the username @inksnails.