The works of artists like Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman are very integral to me as a creative spirit as, I believe they embody something which is key to sound in general which is Freedom. As this is one of the main crux’s of my piece it is important that I once again revisit their amazing works and try and channel some of their free spirit into my work.
This piece is a journey through an introspective quest for freedom from the point of view from a seagull migrating from London back to the seaside, an improvised quest through rhythm with live vibraphone, drums and sax with samples and vocal manipulations being triggered on the fly.
The score of the film bird man by Antonio Sanchez is a big inspiration to this project, I love the use of live drums as a soundbed for narrative and emotion, this is something I definitely wish to endeavour into for this project. Also for me rhythm is freedom, the drum kit is the humans most common connotation for rhythm combined with the freedom motif I am going for it all makes sense that the live drum is going to be a central element of this piece. I will mic up a drum kit fairly loosely in the style of 60’s free jazz with minimal mic’ing and see where we go!. this combined with live samples will make for an interesting experience for me as both the performer and the listener.
This is a demo of a song I made today with artist Nega Brandon, the song is about a seagull, the freedom of the seagull and the violins recorded will form a basis of this track the freedom of a pesky seagull stealing your chips is something that interests me as the freedom of a seagull with its ability to fly is something that always occurs to me in my dreams, it is this I wish to endeavour into within my work for this creative sound project.
The improvisational nature of which my piece will embody will aim to reflect the freedom of an urban flying animal migrating from the seaside to the city in search of survival and to fulfil its natural given instincts. Take a listen to the song.
In todays lecture we learnt about spacial audio, we did tests of seeing how moving a sound source in different areas around your head can alter your hearing of a sound, this was a very interesting experience for me as I began really getting into the nitty gritty of the minute differences in what ‘space’ does to sound almost trying to visualise the EQ and panning of the sound as if it was a channel strip on my DAW, very intriguing experience.
I will definitely use it in my final piece!
Also interesting to see Apple are coming out with there own version of a Spacial Audio system. https://www.whathifi.com/advice/what-is-apple-spatial-audio
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.
