WeeklyBeats #40: Aulus

Jet Jaguar

Here’s my 40th free track made in as many weeks.

A photo of a small cloudy alpine village and a lot of trees and mountains.

Aims

I’ve been away at CAMP, in the location in the above pic. My aim this week was to take the field recordings I had been making over the week and create a collage using only them. The photo was taken on the same day I made the recordings.

Reckons

In line with the course I linked to above, I was thinking a lot about ways of mapping a space through sound. I thought a lot about how much I wanted to impose rhythm or harmony, because doing this at all felt pretty contrary to what the course was asking of us, but I also wanted to do something of what I’m used to doing and see how it felt. I’m not super convinced on how the more “musical” stuff interacts with the field recordings. Lots of cool material to return to.

Process

Largely it’s a collage of multiple recordings. I started by exploring two different recordings of the same cow herd (and their cowbells!) at two different distances, and seeing what it was like to cross fade between those.

In order of appearance:

  1. A rainy valley in the Pyrenees with a small herd of cows in the middle distance.
  2. The sounds of horses brushing against a wire fence while I fed them, recorded via contact mic.
  3. A bass-heavy snippet of mic handling noise, EQed and slightly timestretched, to make a kick drum.
  4. Another rhythmic snippet of mic handing noise from the same recording as #3, EQed in two bands to leave only bassy bits and a kind of rim shot clack. The shape of the rhythm was in the recording, I grabbed it because of that rhythm.
  5. A much closer recording of the cows with their cowbells, which is fading in via a highpass filter opening up.
  6. At the same time, about 20 bars of the #5 cowbells fed into a spectral splitter that removes the transients, then a big washy reverb. I bounced this and mixed overlapping copies together so it forms a continuous sound. Then I duplicated this twice, and pitched one copy up a major 3rd and the other up an octave.
  7. Another snippet of the #5 cowbells, this one slowed and pitched down. It just forms punctuation at about 2:23 and 2:43.
  8. Tapping a large flat stone with smaller stones, recorded via contact mic. This arrives at 2:23.

Sounds 3, 4, 6, 7 involve more processing than just EQs and fades.