In Jose’s class we did a live improvised performance using amps, percussion, synths and anything that was available to us to make an interesting, live improvised sound piece, I enjoyed this as it confirmed to me how I wanted to create my second Creative Sound Project. I like the means of using improvisation with a plan to create the basis of a piece for many reasons.
It allows you to be present in the moment as a human being. As humans we are often thinking about the past or the future but whilst improvising music & sound live we are truly in the present as all we are thinking about is getting what we have in our head out into the world in a bid to ‘Capture the special moment’
It gives you a basis in which to build from in the editing phases in which you may not have stumbled upon if you weren’t improvising.
It links back to my roots in Jazz which involves a lot of improv, so it’s where I am comfortable.
It allows you to find who you are in that current moment, a feeling of perfect stillness.
I like improvisational pieces as instead of taking ages to truly figure out a piece of equipment, or an instrument it forces you to make a good sound out of it in the moment. which is cool.
The sp404…where do I begin with this beautiful machine, I first encountered this machine as a betaking,sampling obsessed young teen after watching artists like Madlib & Flying Lotus reap absolute havoc on this machine on youtube videos. It wasn’t until I saw it live in action when some of my older peers in the London beatmaking scene use it in live sets & the studio. Today, it is a centrepiece of my creative process, I use it to sample audio from all kinds of sources be it, vinyl, my phone, directly onto the SD card, TV shows, whatever…you name it, I’ve probably flipped it. In my studio I also use it as an always-on efx processor which I run sounds and instruments through, in live settings I use it to trigger samples on the fly and manipulate audio coming in through a mixer. In my second creative project the SP will be the centrepiece, triggering samples live on the fly and manipulating sound live through it’s Mfx. I love this machine as it’s tactile no-screen interface makes it incredibly easy to use but due to its proficiency and complexity it allows you to make it yours and find the workflow that works best for you.
My final piece!, I’m very pleased with the result, this piece was an amalgamation of manipulating all the synthesis experiments I had done throughout the term combing that with field recordings and sampling Lex. I like duality between the non rhythmic parts to the rhythmic it creates a good split and the fact they are both products of the same samples helps back up the overall concept of the piece. Also I liked how I used the field recordings to create a more tactical texture within the piece, this was beneficial to the overall process as I believe the process of finding and recording field recordings is one that really helped pushed outside of my ‘musical’ brain and more into the world of psychoacoustics and using sound as a way to create feelings of a physical, tangible space. Next time I would have hoped to maybe get deeper into the psychoacoustic elements of this project and make it slightly more immersive with field recordings. But overall I’m pretty chuffed with the result.
As we are making something for the compilation cassette format & relating back to what we were learning in Jose’s lectures. I decided to look into some of my favourite mixtapes and compilations.
This compilation is called Black Rio 2 1968-1981 complied by DJ Cliffy
This compilation is up first because this compilation is a mind-bending beautiful rhythmic and spiritual journey through seventies Brazil all under an hour, the songs roll into each other effortlessly but at the same time they all have an individuality to them that makes them stand out from the others, its like the streets of Rio, all in different places but they are all apart of a greater entity like leaves on a tree. I don’t need to even say much about this compilation, the music speaks for itself. My mums been running this CD on loop for years now. Just listen and let the music speak for itself.
This compilation by Analogue Africa is called Edo Funk vol1. This brilliant compilation from the brilliant label Analogue Africa, who do a great job in retrieving archived old African tapes and records, getting them mastered and released for the world to hear and also to help the artists in Africa who may not have a means to distribute their records globally. This is a compilation I am loving at the moment and one I recently bought on Vinyl. This is compilation highlights a period of Music in in the Edo area of Nigeria, where the music is a little different to Lagos and the capital city is Benin City, this hugely historical and powerful part of the world in the 70’s was producing a music that was ahead of its time, it was making almost traditional style African Yoruba and Igbo music but with a soul funk twist combined with cutting edge synth sounds used and mixed very bravely into these lo-fi, hard hitting, warm, funky and just amazing records. This style of music has been a big inspiration to me of recent. This compilation in particular is great as it really hones in on that sound in particular and , because it is such a special and individual sound in itself all analogue Africa had to do was find the bangers.
This compilation beat tape by one of my favourite producers DJ Harrison is a journey through tape hissy grooves inspired by one of the all time greats Sly Stone (hence the name Slyish). This tape is a great journey of tape hissy beats and grooves. Very cohesive and full of character, something very important in mixtape culture.
These 3 tapes although they aren’t from very sound arty genres show me and my group some key elements of what a good mixtape needs and that’s, cohesion, eclecticism and making sure that its some sort of journey. These will be elements we will take into account when making our mixtape.
Even though this project is an individually assessed on our individual works will be presented in a mixtape format, because of this my group worked on deciding a concept for our side of the tape. Due to the fact we all different tastes and overall directions for our project we decided it would be best to choose a broad artistic basis in which we could use as a potential subject matter or muse for our work. Together we came to the conclusion that it would be cool for everyones work to have a designated colour. We thought this would be good as it is an interesting almost omnipresent topic of life that can go very deep sonically if you wish to delve into the worlds of psychology and synathesea or, on the flip side it can be as simple thinking about what colour your already chosen topic is.
I decided on the.colour purple as due to my somewhat cliche spiritual topic choice I know that purple is the colour of your Sahasrara (crown chakra), which is your connection to the Divine, or what I interpret these days as the seen to the unseen.
This is a recent, really rough demo of a tune by me and artist Lex amor, her lyric on the ‘chorus’ of this song reminds me slightly of the feelings I get out of living in the city, how even in complete emptyness, or in moments that you find yourself alone, or in moments where you are doing completely nothing, there is something still going on somewhere in the city and there are still things at play all the time.I will use excerpts of her hook in my final sound project. This goes with my project idea for my track which is the idea of things always happening behind the scenes. This is also reflected in the sounds of the beat, I used Ableton simpler to chop up an old record of traditional music from Benin using techniques I learnt with Gareth. I then used granular techniques to chop up foley sounds to create percussion and rhythmic textures.
In todays lecture we learnt about Granular synthesis, granular synthesis is when a synthesiser or program chops audio into tiny grains and manipulates it into something new. Here are some granular experiments which I will include in my final piece, these synthy compositions are meant to represent the physical mundane of living in the city.
I like Granular synthesis as on Pigments 2 by Arturia that I used to do it, it really had a feel of something ‘other’ and outside the world of classic modular synthesis or the age-old of art of flicking through presets on a shiny retro looking VST or piece of hardware. Also it allows me to continue my sample centric production style but broaden that way of thinking into ‘synth-world’.
One subject I plan to base a lot of my project around is the ‘Akan World View’. As someone who originated from the Akan/Ashanti peoples I have been learning more and more about my cultures history and belief system that was taken away from my family after slavery, it is one of my life goals to re-instate these ways of being into my lifestyle and practice.
‘In Akan cosmology there is The Akan cosmos, like other African peoples, is divided into “two inter-penetrating and inseparable, yet distinguishable, parts”3, namely, the world of spirits and the world of human’
This will show itself in my piece as hopefully a strong divide in the piece. I want my piece to show the spiritual behind the physical, everyday nature of city life.
I’m not going to go into too much crazy detail about the project as I am writing an 800 word piece on it but I will use this blog post as a rough guide to my mind going into it.
In terms of sound design and audio quality I wanted my excerpt to have an immersive feel, something nice and reverby that really feels like it has space. In research I listened to some BBC Radiophonic works and saw myself loving the looping effects they had on their pieces, similar to the works of Steve Reich. I don’t know whether it’s my Hip-Hop background but I LOVE a good loop so because of this I decided it would be most fitting to include a loop of some sort into my piece. After deciding what loops I wanted to use ( the decision was definitely an emotionally based one, it actually had nothing to do with sound of the pieces itself, more what they meant to me) I began using effects and envelopes to manipulate them into something which brought the texture that I desired. Then I listened to the piece figured how I could incorporate it & it was done.
In this post I’m to talk about some of my favourite times on radio!
This is me and another producer/dj IZCO on Rinse FM with an artist I work with called DOCHI on mic. This set was great, me and Izco going back to back playing our productions and beats we were into at the time. This was broadcast live and there definitely was an air of pressure before it started to deliver a good set but we prepared some good tunes and made sure our mixes were tight, as my.mum says, ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail!’
This is another set of mine with dochi again, this one was really fun, Balamii is an online radio station with plenty great DJ’s, however it does have that community feel this is made it almost more fun than Rinse FM sets as there was an added sense of freedom and fun to be had when we was in the building.
Me and my mates have a show on Balamii called CUPPA sounds, this is where we play sounds we grew up on like reggae, jazz and music from all over the world, strictly vinyl only as well. This experience is really fun simply because the vinyl element makes it feel a lot more authentic and old school and also makes it feel like I’m doing the radio tradition that my brother and my dad did (and still do) and continuing it through me, there is something to be said for the added authenticity and originality that using analogue equipment and vinyl brings to the table.
Theres something so magical about the radio experience, preparing your set the night before, getting the bus there on the day drinking your coffee & smoking you’re cig before in preparation, there’s something so cool about the whole experience.
