Disquiet on EARLabs 3

Marc Weidenbaum, the omnivorous soundart journalist gave the EARLabs3 disc a spin and dedicated a review to it:

"There are ghastly, dead winds that rotate slowly in the distance, and sudden sounds that signify something happening, and just as quickly disappear. There are what could be muffled calls for help, and quick edits that make it easy to lose one’s sense of time during the five-minute recording.

And what there is, foremost, is a balance between calm and tension. This is not music to relax to, nor is it the score to a slasher film. It’s an investigation, painstaking in its rectitude and attention to detail, that commands attention — attention to every brittle cue, every choking gasp, every abstract fragment."

[ read all ]

and after that buy the disc at

[ entr'acte ]

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The river sings

Yet another blorp: the thought that the river has its own voice, which concealed by the never ending spattering of water on the surface. But it's still there. When I do a spectral view on the recording at very fine grain then I can see that certain frequencies are stronger than others and that they are continuous. I made a filtering, leaving only those frequencies intact.

Listen [ here ]
and the original [ here ]

It's almost like singing, isn't it?

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Bird dissolves into water

Working on some ideas and samples and edits. And as I promised at the beginning of the year that I would come forward with more samples, here's a large one. The call of a bird is slowly granulated and then flows into the sound of the river Taurion.

[ Listen ]

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k146 started

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon browsing through the hundreds of soundfiles that Cedric had sent me. I catalogued the files (loud and wild water vs. easy stream vs. no or hardly any water) and then re-listened to some of them.

I also tried some specific filtering (using a spectral interface) and running the files through compression settings. Some recordings are really beautiful (24 bit, stereo) and I'm tempted to use them in other compositions (but I won't, don't worry ;) ). It's your typical messing-around-with-the-material-fase.

Want to know more about the project ? click [ here ]

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Moving Furniture is finished

Today I did some final tweaking of the music for Moving Furniture. In the end I added a tail to the first part so that the transition into the second part is more smoothly and also fits better, timing wise. So, currently the stuff is being rendered to 16bits (see if there are no nasty glitches as a result from the transition from 24bits to 16bits) and then I leave the master disc for Sietse to come and get it.

There are now two pieces with a total length of some 25-30 minutes. They concentrate for the most part on droney layers of sound, sometimes harmonical, at other times noisy. Sometimes quiet, at other times loud. Keep checking the [ Moving Furniture Records ] site.

Below is a link to a special lo-res mp3 which gives you an idea of what the first composition is like. You get the picture of the structure :) and the cdr will give you the extremely brilliant soundquality 'en plus'.

[ movingfurniture1 - specialmix ]

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Yay ! Ouch!!

I can be such a goddamn calvinist. I feel a pique of pride and immediately some little devil stings me in the back of my head, telling me I shouldn't. But I AM proud. The first review of EARLabs 3 arrived today, from no less a magazine than The Wire. So why shouldn't I be proud? Here it is.

Yes, yes I know. We are just one of many. And I really am puzzled by the strange remark about the Northern European potting shed.

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David Jackman gets a warning

Further progress moving Sietse's furniture. I decided to add a tail to the new tail of the Nautilus (can you follow?). The first tail ends with an extensive reverberated and delayed loopyloop. I was in the mood of trying to get a very big reverb. But listening to the reverbed loop I heard noise. Reverb just blurs any detail and what you get is smudgy layer of coloured noise. With some details in it. Like peanut butter with little parts in it. Actually I like the parts better than the butter. And so it is with the reverbed noise.

Okay, so when 'noise' entered my inner ear I remembered that I still had a noise piece in my directory of unpublished works. It carries the ominous title "admonition for David Jackman" and those of you who know the works of this particular gentleman can see something coming. So, next to a 2nd rendition of Nautilus Pompilius we now also have a new version of the Jackman-inspired compo. There is also a Masami Akita admonition by the way. And Steven Stapleton and Andrew MacKenzie. It was just a series in which I addressed the sonic language of those 80s heroes.

But anyway, the addition of this noise piece really spices things up. It's not for the weak, but the end of this part yields some interesting sonic phenomena. So. Check it out.

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2008

Okay thanks, TJ. And others who put my GT(M) in their [ list ].

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rather silent?

Yes, have been busy on other topics this week. Have managed to finish the 2nd piece for Moving Furniture, though. Another one? Let's chew on that this coming week.

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