Deciding what the sound piece should be is the first and sometimes the most challenging part of the whole process. The great thing about creating a sound piece is that there are so many types of sound to make. Whether it’s more Musique Concréte based (e.g. John Cage) or Dark Ambient (Tod Dockstader) or a collection of field recordings (‘Secret Piece’ – Clipping). There are also many more examples of unique sounds to make.
In the past, I have often defaulted to creating noise/power electronics pieces. I still continue to make those compositions for my solo work, but I wanted to try something different for this piece and composition to show more of my versatility as an artist. So after some contemplation, I decided to do a dark ambient sound piece.
Dark Ambient as a genre contains characteristics such as dark and deep drones, long repeating notes, and eerie sound design techniques. An example of Dark Ambient music that inspired my piece was Tod Dockstaders track ‘Shout’ of his record ‘Ariels 1’. Tod Dockstader was a sound designer and experimental music artist. He worked on television shows such as ‘Tom & Jerry’ in the 60s, creating cartoonish and playful sound design for the children’s television show. During that time he was also creating avant-garde music, which started to gain some traction during the ’70s-’80s, working with sound artists like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. One of his most notable works was used in Federico Fellini’s film ‘Fellini Satyricon’.
The aforementioned track ‘Shout’ was what inspired me to use this style for my track, as I wanted to try my hand at that genre and push my boundaries as a sound artist. The track fades in with wishy-washy drones that sound like they are flanged slightly, with harmonies barely breaking through the heavily reverberated drones. This gives it a melancholy and hopeless feeling. I find it to be a beautiful piece, but equally haunting. This is what I endeavored to accomplish.