#9 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
Mimsy and Coral are fictional identical twins. Their wildly unlikely names jumped out at me while watching a movie as part of a rather nice series of repertory screenings a local cinema runs last year.
Links across the weeks / album?
Coming near the end of the album, I find it hard not to connect this back to other tricks and sounds I’ve already covered.
The structure: the way this track builds from something slippy and hard to pin down into a looping, more grounded thing reminds me of how ‘Data, Roaming‘ works. Even a bit of a similar vibe with a percussion part that sounds like knocking on wood.
Plucked strings: those guitar harmonics are the same software instrument I used on ‘Receding Airline‘, and if you count ukulele in the mix this is the fourth track in a row with plucked or strummed string sounds. For me it’s the signature of the second side of the tape.
I pair this track with ‘Trellis‘ in my head and deliberately put them at the same position on sides 1 and 2 of the tape, from memory. It’s about the reversed sounds and spaced out synth loops, something seems similar tonally to me. Also maybe because I know how I made both tracks and they both involved writing stuff, exporting it, and a kind of self remixing…
Beginning in reverse
When I talked to Tony Stamp on RNZ National I told him this track started with the big plonk sound, which I’ll cover next, and I spent most of my time talking about that.
Maybe so, but today my memory is I began by writing a bunch of stuff that ends up reversed in the final track.
I think this might be one where I had two track ideas on the go – the plonk and this stuff – and I combined them fairly early on to make one track.
So. I’m a big fan of reversed sounds, that cliche shortcut to psychedelia. I really do just find there to be something almost always trippy about them. Sometimes I rewrite melodies in reverse, so that I can then record them and reverse the recording. Sometimes I do this with chord progressions. And sometimes with the structure of whole tracks. Like if I know I want some sound to slowly fade in I figure out a structure where it slowly fades out, export the results as an audio file, and then reverse the whole thing. This is one of those.
A chunk of the reversed stuff you hear in the final:
What it sounds like before it’s reversed:
Damn, there’s some nice bits in here… I might need to revisit the sounds going forwards and see if I can do something else with them.
The big plonk
Nope, no better name for it, sorry. This sound:
It’s a stack of eight possible instruments, mostly a mix of short synth sounds and tuned percussion like marimbas and xylophones. I throw a chord at it, with some randomisation of when the notes play (more note fx as discussed re: ‘Receding Airline’), and every note jumps about pseudo-randomly between the possible instruments. There is something happening in those fx that effectively alternates between two chords, but a lot of the variation is about which instruments the notes get sent to.
This might be my final example of what I mean by “pseudo-randomly” for this series of blog posts. The selection of possible instruments is not actually random, they’re just selected in such a way a listener would never figure it out. Why not really random? First, so it plays back the same way each time while I’m writing it, but second so I can tweak which instruments get selected more often.
So, technically, the trusty Instrument Selector (Bitwig is good at prosaic names!) is cycling through the eight instrument slots using a Steps modulator, this series of blue bars in the image below.
The also prosaically named Steps moves through, wellll, steps as the track plays, and in this situation each step selects a different instrument slot from the list alongside. When we get to a step with no blue bar, it’ll send a note to the first instrument. When we get to a step with a full blue bar, it’ll send a note to the last instrument, the eighth slot. When the bar is halfway up it probably picks the fifth instrument out of eight. And so on.
I’m sending a five-note chord into this Instrument Selector, and each time a note plays, the Steps advances one step on. So each time a jumbled, strummed chord plays, we advance five steps. At the next chord we pick up wherever we stopped in this kind of game of musical chairs. To add to the already impenetrable unpredictability, when the track reaches step 23, the sequence reverses. If you were counting along, you’d go “… 21, 22, 23, 23, 22, 21, …” at one end, then once you get back to the start, “… 3, 2, 1, 1, 2, 3 …” and so on.
After all of that, the array of instruments all runs into a big old echo, which reverses the notes sometimes and also has that nice sea sick wobble to the pitch. Techies, that’s Unfiltered Audio Sandman Pro, and another preset from emptyvessel’s pack of presets.
Outro rhythm section
I’ve kind of run out of steam to write about this, if I’m going to be honest, but we have a mix of drum sounds and repeated short synth notes that have quite a percussive feel. The Visco sample-modelling drum machine I mentioned re: ‘Ashcan Edition‘ shows up here doing most of the work. Not that much more to say!