This week’s session I will be honest, I was not so engaged with. It was mostly to do with plugins that can be used to automate spatial panning effects around the octo ring speaker setup, as well as plugins that can emulate height through headphones. The only thing is that we were shown some of the headphone oriented plugins last year and I didn’t find any of them particularly convincing or helpful, so I tried to go of on my own a little and think about my own piece in this session so that I have a basis to start working at.
My current situation with work means that of a weekend I am on a 4-ish hour train to Liverpool on a Thursday and the same back on the Monday, meaning I have plenty of time to start making music on my Laptop but not so much time to try and put it on the octo ring. I still have not got a copy of Ableton as well which doesn’t help, as the version of FL Studio that I’m using doesnt seem to have much use with multichannel works, so it is important that I still keep the spatial element in mind while creating on headphones and kind of of work more theoretically I guess, making sounds with intent.
Something particularly on my mind at the moment is the use of loops, it is something I have been very interested in with my own practices across all genres I have tried, I enjoy things that are endless, expansive or monotonous, so my first idea was to create something that maybe disperses variations of the same loop between the speakers to create a psychedelic cluttered strobing effect, but at the moment that is just a thought.
A lot of works that inspire my use of loops are usually focused with monotony, mostly the works of Celer who creates ambient music through tape loops of sampled music and synthesiser tones, and whose work rarely ever feels the need to go anywhere. The practice is not unique to Celer of course, but I feel his music has more power than others I’ve heard, his music in particular feels like an extension of what I wrote my essay about last year with Harsh Noise Wall and stagnant sound in general being a purification of a musical genre, like a chorus being looped indefinitely as a means of creating an Ultimate version of a music.
Because of this loop fixation that I’m currently riding on, I went searching through my audio library to find something I can sample that would suit the endless loop treatment. Something I have found is that the choice of sample is extremely important as a means of putting my track within a lineage with others, as the track that you are sampling has its own history, own space ect, so it is important to aknowledge the space that you are occupying when using a sample. I chose to sample the song Piano Music from Simon Jeffes’s album of the same name, as his music had a massive effect on me growing up as well as having more commercial connotations with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (which he was the leading member of) being overused in TV Advertisements while he was alive, which I find quite amusing when recontextualising something like this to be bringing things in from completely different contexts that they are being used in.
I applied some compression and tape effects to get this more aged slowed down loop of a small phrase, which I find loops well and will be fun to work with in future sessions and try and extract as much as possible from the loop.
I also used a tool mentioned in one of the guest lectures last year, an AI Vocal Remover tool called vocalremover.org, which seperates the accapella track of any song to quite a scary degree of success. I am using this tool to extract Kath Bloom’s vocals on the song When I See You , which is one of my favourite songs but Loren Connor’s wailing guitar bends would get in the way of anything else in the track if not removed, so I felt like this would be an apt track to experiment with this tool using.
I guess the ethics of using AI at all is very ugly at the moment with its use in replacing the artist entirely in many cases, but I find this tool to be the opposite, and opens a lot more space for creative sampling when accapellas can be aquirred of any song. I pitch shifted the track down quite dramatically as well as applied some tape effects, convolution reverb and compression so that it has a dirtier sound further detatched from the original song. So far I’m liking the direction of things, but it’s a bit difficult to prioritise classwork at the moment when finding a job in London should be the main priority. Will see how things fare in the next couple of weeks.