Brain and Brain

NOT DEAD

OK, my hugely extended break working on the “River Conga” project continues, but here’s something else!

Horizon

I took two little snippets from the song “Horizon” by Genesis (from Foxtrot). Looped the first one and then after a bit brought in another copy of the same track, slightly delayed to create a clean, decayless echo effect. Did that two more times so that there were four echoes going (I like this because it really deeply affects the way the sounds…uh…sound, like how in this to me there’s a part that suddenly sounds like a cello when there’s four of them). Then brought in the other snippet, which is 2/3 the length of the other one so when looped it creates phase patterns up against the other sample. Halfway through each of the now five tracks, I reversed the playback, so gradually, almost unnoticeably at first, the whole thing becomes backwards (all of a sudden I like using backwards effects).

The whole thing felt a little too pretty to me, so I hummed a low, slightly off-key note and worked with just a fraction of a second snippet of it. My voice is so far out of my control that there’s a noticeable warble in just this little piece of it. I looped it for a long time, added some reverb, reversed it, threw on an affect Audacity calls “Vocoder” that I honestly can’t figure out what it does (it doesn’t seem to be a vocoder in the sense I know it), and then reversed it again, so that it was going forwards but the vocoder effect was going backwards. Then I doubled it and offset one track by half a cycle to cancel out any changes in volume, and finally put this under the whole thing, including a brief moment at the beginning and end where it’s the only thing happening. The track as a whole is practically a mirror image of itself.

It’s not done; I think it’s a complete backing track, but it needs something going on in front of it. Haven’t decided what yet.

Nothing today

Doesn’t bode well for the project to be fucking off on it already, I know, but I got nothin’. No excuses, I’m just a shitbag. I’ll try to make up for it tomorrow.

Worked for twenty-seven minutes today

River Conga step two

Like I said I would, I started by fiddling with the levels of the three “Conga” tracks, accentuating the dubby one and slightly suppressing the blippy one. It’s a subtle difference but I think an improvement. I tried selectively silencing some of the tracks at various points to emphasize the “River” sample but ended up not liking that so I undid it. I spent most of the rest of the time adding progressively more and more layers of distorted “Conga” samples while simultaneously making the original three tracks (now mixed down to one track, which means I can’t work with it much anymore but which makes it a hell of a lot easier to work with everything else) slowly get quieter and quieter until we’re left just with the distortion.

I think what I have so far needs work—as a drone it’s pretty nice, I think, but I don’t picture it being just a drone, so I need some variation there. Not sure what to do about that, but I’ll think of something. Moving forward, I think it’s reached a point where it should transition to something else, I’m thinking still anchored around the “River” sample, because I find that’s what my ears try to attach themselves to most, even as it recedes into the background. It’d be nice if the next section were less abrasive, maybe actually pretty if I can manage that. My guess at this point is that the piece will end up with an ABA structure, where it’ll transition into something else for a while and then this first part will come back for the end. I suspect it might end up being fairly long. But I guess we’ll see.

A quick experiment gone fascinatingly wrong

Be My Husband by Nina Simone (in case you don’t know it)

Be My Husband (my experiment)

Nina Simone’s “Be My Husband” is one of those songs (like, for whatever reasons, The Knife’s “Kino”, The Fall’s “Barmy”, and, duh, The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”) that I keep returning to over and over, wanting to do something with. Usually with this one I’m trying to figure out a way to keep the timbre and melody of the vocals while somehow eliminating the sense of the words, because while that particular timbre and that particular melody are very good for expressing the emotions behind the “Be my husband and I’ll be your wife” lyrics, I think they’d also be good for expressing the very different emotions I’m interested in using them for.

Anyway, today I wanted to do something different and far less ambitious, which was simply to take the first four beats (or I guess actually measures) of the song, before Simone starts singing, and apply delay (or echo, whatever) to it to create crazily shifting patterns and rhythms. I didn’t get very far into it before I realized that something else entirely had happened. I knew that I hadn’t entirely cut out her vocals, but I didn’t think it’d matter so much or that they would pop up, and then take over, so late in the game. Every sound you hear in this experiment is present in the first eleven and a half seconds (of both mp3s I posted, actually), although you wouldn’t think so.

This, by the way, was not my twenty minutes for the day. That’s coming later.

Worked for twenty minutes today

River Conga step one (working title)

First I recorded the sample of Roberta Flack’s “River”, taken from my scratchy copy of Killing Me Softly, then imported the track “Conga” from the Destroy All Monsters Gospel Crusade compilation and cut it down to the bit I wanted. Looped both of them—“River” a little awkwardly, which I’m fine with, and “Conga” more carefully because it’s the rhythm track. I fiddled with the timing—I slowed down “River” quite a bit, which I liked, but when I slowed down “Conga” even a little the sludgy aspects got too strong, so I went back to the original speed. I don’t usually do this, but I tried playing “River” backwards and realized that it gave it kind of a distorted reggae rhythm, so I kept it that way and added a bunch of reverb (small roomsize, large reverb time) to make it sound dubby (and actually a little carnivalesque, which is nice). Then I duplicated the “Conga” track twice, and applied a shitload of distortion to one of them to reduce it to uncomfortable electronic-sounding blips, and a bunch of echo and distortion to the other to give it a (again) kind of dubby feel.

I need to work on getting the levels of the three “Conga” tracks just right, and I think as the song progresses and gets longer the levels of distortion need to increase until the droning feedback aspects of the sample become intensified over the percussion. I also need to figure out a way to occasionally bring out the melodic and rhythmic aspects of the “River” sample without it losing its background atmosphere qualities during the rest of the song. Other than that, I’ll see what I need when I get to it.