Lucky last, #10 in a series of posts about the tracks on my latest album, Small Things.
The name of this track is after a Cat and Girl comic and might be considered political.
It’s all one cheeky recording of a band warming up
(Almost.)
I hear and think of this track as being quite distinct from the rest of the album, but a nice way to wrap it up. It does just sound different to me, but I also know how I made it and just how different that was to what I’ve written about over the last ten weeks.
I live near a place where the local city council puts on outdoor concerts in summer. So, January 2024 I went outside with my little digital recorder, when I could hear a band warming up, got a bit nearer, and recorded for a few minutes. It was an incredibly noisy recording with a main road in between my microphones and the band’s PA.
I went back home, exported the audio to my computer, and wrote this entire track straight away in one evening. It broke a dry spell for me and felt really good.
First thing I chopped out of the recording was a flute (or maybe a keyboard that sounds like one).
Second was someone playing I’m guessing congas.
The only sounds in the finished track that are not from those two sources are a shimmery organ sound and a very subby synth bass note, which you might hear on headphones or good speakers slowly fading in under the organ sound here.
Two flute drones
The track starts with a very slowed and pitched down loop made from a smeared version of the flutes. It loops every 12 bars. Slowly a version that’s up an octave and moving twice as fast fades in, and then the lower version begins to fade. This happens over a long time: the higher part is at its full volume half way through this file.
I have no memory of what I did to make these loops.
From a bit of version history archaeology, I think I:
- took the original flute sound, presumably EQed a lot to remove a bunch of noise,
- made a second version, pitched up a fourth.
- played both versions into a huge long echo chamber (Bitwig’s Delay+ with plenty of diffusion turned up),
- recorded just the echoes, none of the original signal, and
- made a loop from an even number of echoes.
Reversed flute phase
This sound also comes in right near the start and sticks around for most of the track.
I took the original flute sound, reversed it, and panned it hard left. I took a copy of that and panned it hard right. I changed the loop lengths so neither one is the length of a bar according to the master track, and the right side is 1/16th beat shorter than the left.
Because the loops aren’t the same length the relationship between them appears to shift, a technique Steve Reich first made famous in the 60s.
End of album conga party
OK, it’s no kind of party at all, but to round out the track I looped two bars of the person playing percussion. The passing car at its loudest at the start of the loop provides a kind of punctuation, like the splashiest splashy cymbal.
The pitched down flute sample plays once and echoes away as the bongos wrap up, with some final echoes following after the cold cut ending on the percussion. I remember wanting that cold cut, an unnatural, abrupt close in a very mellow setting. Until writing these posts I hadn’t thought about how I like to very quietly make sure there’s at least some kind of friction in my music!
And that’s it, ten weeks of blogging done! I’d better get back to writing some more music.
