SOUND WORK Picture this: it's the day before you have to show the people in charge of your unit your collaborationproject, a thing due every semester where you have to go out into the world, show other people you have good-enough people skills to collaborate on a project together. This semester I was lucky enough to join the Fremantle Biennale INCOMING young artists lab, and it only just hit me a week ago that I don't particularly have anything to show aside from a list of text scores. Thankfully for me, on this fine Monday before I need to show something, we (as a lab) got the chance to listen Lasse Høgenhof and Jonatan Spejlborg, two artists working with radio and are involved with both the LungA School and HEIMA Collective. They talked to us through the medium of radio itself, and talked to us about a lot of interesting things (see the weekly reflection), and at the end, tasked us to create a piece of art that could be adapted to radio based on the act of memorial services, and services to memory. After grinding at it for a while, I wrote in memory of whatever i was thinking about two minutes ago, a piece about the physical thought process.
in memory of whatever i was thinking about two minutes ago (or in memory for short) is my attempt to represent thought process, something I have been trying to wrap my head around. The fact that a slab of pink, squishy meat can be electrocuted in such a way that I can remember going up the escalator in the Myer in the city when I was around five is WILD, and lately I've been trying to pay more attention to my thought process. When Lasse and Jonatan spoke about memorial services and doing physical services for the mental service of remembering, my mind wandered straight to my late-night pondering on how the brain physically worked, and was what I focused on for the entire day.
For this project, I primarily used Bespoke, a new modular DAW that is very intuitive to create nice electronic sounds, but due to it being new, I'll run down quickly what each bits do so you can understand how it works. 1: The transport is fairly simple and isn't that necessary for in memory. The only thing that I used was the tempo, though Bespoke does have a neat scale module. Sadly I didn't particularly need it. 2. The instrument (the thing that triggers the sound) used is the "slider sequencer", which is comprised of a playback line that goes for one bar (as determined from the transport) and a group of sliders with a mark on them. When the mark and line meet, a note, as determined by the numbers in the bubbles on the far right of the module, is triggered. Next to the bubbles are sliders for velocity, and the number the marker is at when the note is triggered is the velocity of said note. You'll notice that the marks aren't single positions, but are two, marked in light green, with a faded green in-between. This is to add a chance of randomness, for the "mark" moves between the two light green lines. 3. The synth chose for this piece was a Karplus-Strong synth, typically used to synthesise string sounds. I kinda bend with it a little, but I don't bother with it too much. I'm not a expert on the Karplus-Strong synth, so I'm not going to describe it. 4A. The effect chain, my favourite thing in Bespoke. Essentially, just a collection of effects. 4A is comprised of a granulator, a Butterworth filter, a free reverb plugin called "freeverb", yet another granulator (I love granulators now), a basic EQ and a compressor. 4B. So you might have noticed that there is another chain of sounds with a similar instrument and and synth. This is the more percussive sounds that kind of sound like the water that drips off of stalactites, which you can get by using a Karplus-Strong synth, hitting MIDI note 0 and accentuating the Q on the biquad filter. This leads us into it's effect chain, way more simpler, with an EQ, a butterworth, freeverb and a compressor. This goes into a gain just so I can control the volume when playing. 5. The top chain then goes into a splitter, then two gains, both with the two green sliders. This is just to make an interesting panning effect. 6. This is a multitrack recorder, which records a performance, and then bounces it into files. This is how I got the sounds into REAPER, where I mixed this. 7. If you click to the next slide, you'll see another session, because I wanted my piece to have more percussion during the mixing phase, so I made another session. I must note that this isn't the session I used, because I forgot to save it in the mess of my day. It's nothing too fancy, just a sequencer made for the drum synth which is... 8. ...This one. Each box contains an oscillator and a noise generator, and a basic filter and an ASDR graph. It's very easy to use. I tried to use mainly filtered noise to create this nostalgic sound, but obviously it doesn't show here. This goes into an effect chain, yada yada and so forth.
I should note that this was "performed", as in I pressed the record, messed with the session, took the first take bounced it, so technically I could do it "live"... maybe sometime later.
There is something to be said about listening to your work while others are also listening. It's a more critical listening experience, and it digs out a lot of themes that previously weren't apparent. So, while listening it on the radio, knowing others were listening to it, I thought more about my piece. In particular, I really felt a strange sense of joy. Almost joy, maybe not even human. In memory does really feel like a dance of the faeries, with intentions unknown, the number of questions vast, but enjoyable nonetheless. It's hard to put into words, but I do enjoy the term "almost-joy". I might keep that around.
Points Jonatan and Lasse talked about after listening to my mess included interesting thoughts how it expands the understanding of what thinking and memory is (as planned), and how memories aren't always this delicate thing: they're rough, they speed through your brain, go out your mouth, and come back in again (also planned). I didn't plan on them having an existential crisis, thinking about the meta of it all, but I guess that's what happens. Responses from my friends in the INCOMING program were all positive, and were all in a much more enjoyable manner. I guess there's a sense of Australian style of humour that doesn't translate well to an Icelandic audience; there's more of a familiarity and colloquialism to the dark, the scary and the taboo. I don't think they go around calling people they are fond of... c**ts.
Either way, thank you very much to Jonatan and Lasse for the opportunity, and thank you very much to Kat Wilkinson and Claire Krouzecky for organising not only this week but EVERY week, and finally, to the INCOMING crew (Claire, Rebecca, Chandler, Rosie, Georgia and Elham) for making this a great, once-in-a-lifetime experience.