Here’s my 21st free track written within a week.
Aims this week
Simple: use no notes, just noisy or percussive sounds.
(I didn’t quite make it, one chord shows up 2 minutes in.)
Reckons
I went down the field recording path and tried to keep it relatively rhythmic, even if it never settles in to a regular beat. I’m happy with the result.
I thought a lot about Abby Lee Tee, specifically his album Cohabiting Species. I think I successfully created something broadly in the vein of what he was doing there.
I kept thinking of adding a dubby bassline, but for the purposes of this WeeklyBeats project decided to not go there. I could always revisit this later.
Process
I might write about this differently to usual, because the entire process was:
- Load field recordings into my DAW,
- Slice or time stretch events in those recordings to broadly quantise them,
- Duplicate some of these field recordings and pitch them up or down,
- Get everything looping in a 12-bar pattern,
- Add a synth chord,
- Add various echoes and reverbs, and
- Structure out the loops in different arrangements.
Not neatly in that order, but that’s what I did.
There are 8 different field recording layers.
1. Office with clunks: The main bed that is constantly playing through the whole track. It’s an empty office interior after hours. It starts with a good, loud thud, which acts as the opening beat of the track and every 12 bars. In between various other clunks is mechanical rattling and humming. A lift moving? Vents and plumbing? I forget.
2. Office with clunks, up: I cloned the above and pitched it up 2 octaves. This is then gated and sliced, so only the thuds and clunks are left. The result is a layer of artificial-sounding percussive sounds. I changed the starting point of this loop, so the thuds don’t land on the same beats as in #1. A slurpy delay with a short diffusion to fill out some of the gaps.
3. Office with clunks, up more: I cloned #2 and pitched it up a second time. Now it’s just burpy Autechre noises. I changed the start point again and changed the delay settings. This version only arrives around the time of the synth chord, just after 2 minutes in, acting effectively as extra percussion.
4. Dishwasher: 4 bars into every 12-bar loop you hear a dishwasher running and then stopping. It just plays once every 12 bars, and it lasts just under 4 bars. A long, slow delay smears the sound over time.
5. Dishwasher, down: I cloned #4 and pitched down, so it’s twice as long and an octave lower. This plays directly after #4 each time, coming out from under the delay on #4 as that fades away.
6. Oimachi train: Next is a fairly short chunk of a recording I made when I lived in Japan (19 years ago, this one!). You just hear a noisy clunk, a woman speaking and a beep. It drops in first at about 0:15.
7. Chooks: Chickens chatting away, running into a delay, fade in over a long time. This was recorded at my previous house, 17 years ago. The birds almost sound like creaking in this context. This one lasts much longer than 12 bars and cuts cold when the synth drops in, then does it all again in the second half of the track.
8. Jiyugaoka station: Lastly another Japanese train recording, this one standing at a station. It basically just sounds like a wave of noise rising up at the end of every 24 bars and cut cold when the main field recording goes thud. It only shows up 5 times in the track, including right at the start.
As well as all of that stuff, there’s the synth chord, which runs into two kinds of reverb:
- The first is a convolution reverb which makes occasional depth-charge-like echoes. I only send the chord into this from time to time, for a bit of variety.
- The second is a longish reverb which ducks under the chord. This fades in over the second half of the track as I bring down the cut off frequency of a highpass filter, allowing more frequencies into the feedback tail over time.