This week’s session was concerned with alternative setups for Multichannel, particularly making us think about what we are composing for and how it should influence our composition choices, reminding us to be mindful of how we treat the medium when creating for it and how to use it to our best advantage. A lot of the session though was more running through ideas already discussed as well as talking through Gareth’s own tree based composition as a means of inspiration for ourselves, as it showcased a minimal live approach whilst still being compositionally and texturally rich.
I started to add more to my piece than the draft I showed last week, thinking about what is missing from my track compositionally and spatially, while still not being able to book a slot to spatialise my piece because of my current work situation meaning in only in London for 2 full days a week, the spatial ideas are still just concepts rather than reality which I am finding kind of irritating. Something I noticed is that the track kind of gets into a meditative stagnant state that I feel like might need some kind of revising to suit more general appeal, so I put the violin sample through the plugdata plugin Morph, which I have been using a lot for a really excessive psychedelic pitch shift effect on a lot of things I’m making at the moment (mostly for Nightcore purposes), which fades in toward the end.
I also added a variant of this with a vocoder on so that there is some more depth for the stereo pair, I am thinking of having them desync at some point in some way but it isn’t so much a solid idea.
I also have been thinking of adding a chord change at the end for a more impactful cathartic ending, I always think that the start and the end of a track are the most important points, and at the moment the ending is lacking quite heavily. Even with this, I am a bit unsure it even works and might end up trying to find something else to satisfy reaching a similar effect, but at the moment I think it works. The loop itself is another section of Piano Music by Simon Jeffes, and I just really like the loop, too much to not use it for something really.
I tweaked the track a little more, but it still doesn’t really feel finished, I think I need some kind of spoken word sample to hold this together, I really enjoy the harsh reality kind of sampling employed by certain noise groups, drone groups, tape obsessives, ect, feels like brute forcing a reaction which is a lot of what I find appealing anyway.
Here is the draft for this week’s iteration;