Category: Contemporary Issues in Sound Art

As year two comes to an end I find myself thinking more and more about what I am going to do after year three. A masters would be interesting, but I feel a break would be beneficial for myself and my work. The future after university is scary, especially with the cost-of-living crisis and living crisis in London. It is near impossible to live in London on a graduate job salary. Especially as everything seems to be rising in price.  

My ideal job would be a film composer, I have practised scoring for film scenes and have done it for projects during my time on the sound arts course. Especially this year where I created my own score and sound design for David Lynch’s – The Alphabet, and Kurt Krens – 10/65: Self-Mutilation. I personally love working with film, I find it a good way to challenge myself as an artist by trying out different composing techniques. It also forces you to collaborate with other artists such as the director and writer.  

I find composing for film as the most fulfilling job when it comes to a day job doing something sound related. Throughout the next year I will be doing research into junior composing roles and graduate jobs that could lead to a position like that.  

The visiting practioner series is always a great source of education, whether it is hearing a new type of music, learning the techniques, or the biography of the person speaking. I get a lot out of the series. In this blog I want to talk about Audery Chen, who is a sound artist, vocalist, and sound artist who makes a wide variety of sound-based work, typically built around voice. 

Audery started of her lecture by giving us a 10-minute demonstration of her artistic practise. This performance was only comprised of a synthesiser drone and her voice, her voice had no processing at all apart from the mic amplifying her voice. Chen created a wide variety of noises and sounds just by using her voice. Here is a performance by Chen from 2007, in this performance it is just synthesiser, voice and cello. She is a trained celloist, but she said she has stopped using it in recent years. In this video you can see the wide dynamic range of her voice and what sounds she can create.  

Chen inspired me and this project not necessary in the case of sound, but more in her method. In the talk Chen says she does most of her recordings in one long continuous take. After the recording she will then edit and think of titles and such. I really liked this approach to making music. As it feels a lot freer and more improvisational. This is also a great way to capture moments and ideas you wouldn’t have if you were not recording.  

This gave me the inspiration to try and make my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ in as little takes as possible. In the creation of the piece, I would take random 10 or so second sections of the song ‘Stella by Starlight’. I made ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ in two sessions. The first session was improvising with the samples by using different effects and transposing them to different pitches. And getting what would be ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’. The second session was a more focused look at the piece, editing certain parts, mixing and mastering. I really liked doing this approach to recording and creating. As it made the process feel less clinical and more open and freer. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Audrey Chen – concert from MÓZG. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvuZi9vpfxo

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This project was a big undertaking for me, I had never written an essay over 2000s words, and up to this point never even knew what a literature review was. So, there was a lot for me to take in. Personally, I work better in practical work instead of more written work, but I thought this project was a great learning experience for me, and gave me a better understanding of academic writing, long form essays, and Harvard referencing.  

The creative sound project was so much fun, I’ve always enjoyed sampling records, whether it is to create something in the vein of plunderphonics, techno, or ambient music. I find the possibilities with sampling endless and very inspiring. When I decided to write about magnetic tape in my essay, and also write a chapter on hauntology. Doing a sound piece that relates to both was a no brainer. This also gave me an excuse to dig deeper into both The Caretaker, William Basinski’s, and (for the essay only) Daniel Johnston. All three of these artists have decade spanning careers with many interesting albums and concepts. Researching into concepts such as hauntology, and memory made me consider looking at writing about this for my dissertation. The idea of ‘Hauntology: The Representation of Memory in Sound Art?’  

Overall, this project was great, the heavier workload and more literature-based work was a big learning curve for me but has prepared me for what year 3 will be more like. 

William Basinski is an American ambient composer, most known for their use of tape loops and their album series ‘The Disintegration Loops’. Basinski started composing ambient music during the 1980s with his first album ‘Shortwavemusic’ being recorded in 1983, but not being release till 1998. He rose to prominence in 2001/2002 with his series of albums ‘The Disintegration Loops’ which was series of 4 records. Basinski finished recording the album on the date of the 9/11 attacks, he was living in New York at the time and was greatly affected by it. The albums are comprised of reel-to-reel tape loops Basinski recorded 20 years prior to ‘The Disintegration Loops’. While transferring these tape loops to his daw to preserve them, he found the tape started disintegrating. He made the best of out of this situation and recorded the whole tape playing until all the sound had dropped out. 

The Disintegration Loops where a big inspiration of my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’. The idea of a loop slowly disintegrating over time is very fascinating to me. It is a great exercise in time and how time effects music and sounds, just like how time effected Basinskis tape loops. Disintegration in music also has an emotional tie, like with the disintegration loops and its ties to 9/11. The sound of the tape crumbling and disappearing is like how the twin towers both disintegrated and crumbled. That is why the disintegration loops are so emotional. Disintegration also works with memory, the dropout in tape can be used to represent medical disorders like amnesia and dementia. 

For the track I meshed the sample based ambient style of artists like The Caretaker and the disintegration technique of Basinski. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnAE5go9dI&t=38s.

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The Caretaker is the main moniker used by British electronic artist Leyland James Kirby. Kirby started out as The Caretaker in 1999 with his record ‘Selected Memories from The Haunted Ballroom’. Which features exclusively sampling of old 1920s-1940s ballroom music. Kirby quit The Caretaker name after releasing his 6 and a half hour, 6 record spanning series ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’. An audible look at the effects of dementia.  

Kirby’s work was a massive inspiration on this piece, I really admire how he can take a ballroom sample and make something either Melancholy and somewhat upbeat, to completely depressing, chopped up and dissonant. Some examples being the first track on ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ titled ‘A1 – It’s Just a burning memory’ having a melancholy and somewhat eerie sound, compared to the track the track G1 – Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusions on ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ which is a much scarier, uncomfortable and dissonant example of Kirby’s way of using samples in many ways.  

On my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight” I wanted to make an uncomfortable atmosphere using old ballroom samples. I took influence from The Caretaker resampling over songs in ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’. For example on the track ‘G1 – Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusion’ Kirby resamples songs that have been used throughout the series. This is because as the album goes on the songs become more and more abstract, so resampling songs you would’ve heard at the beginning shows how far the effect of dementia has gone.  

In my piece I use the same samples throughout, and they continue to transpose each time they loop. But as the tape disintegrates more and more near the end, I put the first loop which is at a much higher pitch then the others. This gives a sense of familiarity, but it is much different due to the dropout of the tape. I think this is a very effective technique, especially for a project like ‘Everywhere at the End of Time’ where the focus is memory. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – It’s just a burning memory (2016). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xADSDapqn9o.

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – G1 – Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusions. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNtiXDRJujs

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – G1 – Stage 4 Post Awareness Confusions (Remastered sample Guide). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqMXw_xfoUs

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Sampling ballroom music is an interesting task to experiment with. As a challenge I pick random 10 second clips of ballroom music from the 1920s-1940s and try to make a piece out of it. The technique I most often do is sample physical vinyl records into a cassette 4 track. I would normally be running a tape loop that consist of normally 10-20 seconds and pick 4 clips of the vinyl record that fit into that time frame. Once I record them onto the tape, I try different clips together and figure out how I am going to perform the song. I run the tape machine into Ableton and through Valhalla Supermassive (reverb) and a simple eq.  

With this project I had to utilise using just a daw, as I do not have that equipment on hand where I live currently. I tried to keep a similar workflow, picking a ballroom record, skipping through and finding a 10 second or so clip I can sample. Once the sample is in Ableton I can then experiment with transposition and effects.  

Below I have linked 3 demo versions of ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ that I experimented with before landing on the sample I would eventually use on the piece.  

Demo 1 

I really enjoyed this first demo, but it felt too like my piece ‘the dancing pig’ so I decided to scrap it. 

Demo 2 

Demo 2 ended up having the same issues as demo 1, it felt to derivative of ‘the dancing pig’. It sounds good and a bit cleaner then the first demo, but overall was left on the cutting room floor. 

Demo 3 

Demo 3 was the final and the best out of the demo pieces. It sounds much more cohesive and better put together then the other two. I do feel like it could have stood on its own as a standalone track. But just like the first 2 demos, it felt slightly too like ‘the dancing pig’. The next attempt which would become ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ felt like it had enough originality to stand as a track on its own but worked well as a ‘the dancing pig’ companion piece. 

Tape disintegration is common when a tape has been left for 10-20 years after being recorded onto. Basinski explains what tape dropout and disintegration is in the documentary ‘Disintegration Loops’ that “It is when a piece of analogue tape is plastic and glue and basically rust. The music is on the iron oxide particles which is glued onto the plastic. When the glue loses its integrity, the dust turns back to dust and falls into the tape path and you get dropout or periods of silence, because there is no sound there anymore.” 

Dropout for many people is a nightmare, as your music that was once clear and had no interference is now disappearing slowly. Basinski used this to his advantage while he is transferring his old reel-to-reel loops into a digital format.  

Achieving tape disintegration unnaturally is a difficult task, ambient artist and youtuber Hainbach made a video in which he tries to make his own disintegration loops by having 3 reel to reel machines run tape loops across knives, scissors, and box cutters. The experiment was successful, as by the 120-minute mark, most of the tapes had disintegrated. I would like to try this technique in the future, but I do not own any reel-to-reel machines in which I could try this on. And when it comes to cassettes it is near impossible to do it artificially due to the tape being stuck inside a plastic container. My best bet was to use a digital tape emulator. 

Aberrant DSP made a plug in called SketchCassette II, which is a plug in that emulates the sound of recording to cassette. The plug in comes with the standard 3 types of tape, Type 1 & Type 2 which were the most common and lowest fidelity, and type 4, which is a higher quality tape cased in a metal case instead of plastic. They included presets which are great for achieving a specific sound. For example, they have a preset titled ‘Hi, How Are You?’ which is supposed to emulate the tape sound of Daniel Johnston. They also have much more experimental tape presets that are great for experimentation.  

With the making of my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’, I used Sketch Cassette on the master track on my Ableton session. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Destruction Loops | Creating Sounds of Decay and Magnetic Distortion. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVy9ABT5-iY.

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*Spoilers for the whole of The Shining* 

The Shining is a psychological horror film directed by Stanley Kubrick, that was released in 1980. The film stars Jack Nicholson (as Jack) and Shelley Duvall (as Wendy). In the film Jack takes his wife and son to a hotel in the Rocky Mountains for a 5-month stay over the winter where they are supposed to be the caretakers of the hotel. Over the stay Jack starts to lose his sanity and tries to kill his family. We learn during the film that a previous temporary caretaker murdered his family and then committed suicide, we find out in a hallucination that jack has where he is at a ballroom party, while in the bathroom at this party where he talks to the butler. The butler states that “You’ve always been the caretaker. I should know, sir. I’ve always been here.” Meaning that Jack was the caretaker, and that the spirit has never left the hotel. This is a perfect summary of the concept of Hauntology which is the concept of the past haunting the future.  

One of the best parts of The Shining is the soundtrack, mostly comprised of prerecorded Krzysztof Penderecki pieces, the film also utilises 1920s ballroom music, primarily that of Al Bowlley. The ballroom music is used in the scene where Jack hallucinates that he is at a ballroom party, and at the end of the film. The film was a big inspiration for The Caretaker (his name comes from the film) and the ballroom music has been sampled by him in his music. For example, the final piece heard in the film is a song titled ‘Midnight, the stars, and you” by Al Bowlley. The Caretaker sampled this song on the closing tack of his debut record ‘Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom.’  

The Shining and its use of ballroom music, and its overall very distressing atmosphere was a big inspiration on me and my piece ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight.’ The use of ballroom music in this film is very smart, as the music inherently was not supposed to be scary and or uncomfortable, but if used in the right context it can be rather unsettling. I was originally going to sample the ballroom music used in this film, but every track bar from one had already been used by The Caretaker, so I thought it would be best to search for samples elsewhere. But the sheer atmosphere in this movie alone was enough to inspire me to use sampled ballroom music in my piece. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom | Midnight, the stars, and you. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXz3MCplr6E [Accessed 17 May 2023].

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Hauntology in sound terms as stated by Mark Fisher (2014: 120) is “in terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence.” The is he term Hauntology was coined in the early 1990s by Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx, which was a term used to describe how after the fall of communism and Marxism in many European countries, the affects from it lingered for years and haunted Europe.  

Fisher takes the idea of the past haunting the future and starts referring to artists whose work is haunted by the past, whether by the theme, sampling of past records, or reviving an old genre of music. Fisher (2012: 14) labeled artists “Phillip Jeck, Burial, The Ghost Box Label, The Caretaker” as being artists who fall under the hauntology term. All these artists are British too, which seems to be a running theme in musical artists who are associated with the hauntology term.  

My piece for this project is titled ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’, the track is a 7-minute-long piece that slowly disintegrates over time. The piece is made up of one sample which was taken from a cover of ‘Stella By Starlight’ by Robert Macdonald. I sampled a different part of this song back in 2021 with my song ‘the dancing pig’. ‘Stella Dancing into the Starlight’ is a companion piece to ‘the dancing pig’. 

Bibliography

Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures. Hampshire: Zero Books 

Fisher, M. (2012). What Is Hauntology? Film Quarterly, 66(1), pp.16–24

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). the dancing pig. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ataLbCnYj7o.

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Sample based ambient is a type of ambient music that is created by or heavily features samples from other media. Some prominent artists who have used this technique are William Basinski with his ‘The Disintegration Loops‘ and The Caretaker with ‘Everywhere At The End Of Time‘ and ‘Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom‘. Sample based ambient has been a major interest for me for the past three years, releasing my own sample based ambient under the moniker ‘deaftapes’. i’ve lost my head & the dancing pig being released 2 years ago by me and were recorded using a Tascam four track and Ableton live. The sound of sample based ambient for me has this nostalgic, dreamlike and surreal quality to it which can be used to create a nice or disturbing atmosphere depending on where you want to go with the song stylistically.  

For this project I would like to record an unnerving piece of sample-based music, being inspired by films like The Shining and Blue Velvet. Though on the surface these films seem quite different, there are elements of that are quite similar. Both have a dreamlike quality that makes the films feel very unique. Blue Velvet’s dreamlike feel is prominent from the first shot of the film where we see red roses up against a white picket fence. Meanwhile the surreal feel of The Shining grows throughout the film, with blips of surrealness and ever-growing tension and hallucinations building a dreamlike feel to the film. Both the films also use old ballroom and rock ballad music. The Shining using Midnight, the Stars and You by Ray Noble Orchestra & Al Bowlly and Blue Velvet using In Dreams by Roy Orbison. 

Bibliography

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). the dancing pig. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ataLbCnYj7o [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). i’ve lost my head. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VG7n3OJmpU [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). William Basinski – The Disintegration Loops. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mjnAE5go9dI&list=RDmjnAE5go9dI [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – Everywhere At The End Of Time – Stages 1-6 (Complete). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJWksPWDKOc&list=RDwJWksPWDKOc&t=20885s [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). The Caretaker – Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (Full Album). [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ryg8_HQ0VX0&list=RDRyg8_HQ0VX0 [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

‌www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Ray Noble – Al Bowlly – Midnight The Stars And You – 1934. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ9aT-Wa_tE&list=RDvJ9aT-Wa_tE [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

www.youtube.com. (n.d.). Roy Orbison – In Dreams. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVRunwyoTMA&list=RDMVRunwyoTMA [Accessed 22 Apr. 2023].

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