omg. the first weekend in January 2019; i know it was in some sense inevitable but equally, somehow, i never quite expected it - my relationship with time is… i dunno… both somehow arrested and faintly delirious, i guess. & yet in spite of - maybe beacuse of? - this i keep fiddling with sounds…
To the matter in hand: I got three glasses (an old Nutella jar, a larger tumbler sort of thing and a ahem liberated pint glass) out and filled one with water, the others with ice cubes and proceeded to record my faffing - pouring, shaking - for three and half minutes or so.
Before actually doing anything with the new sounds i - kinda self-indulgently - relistened to the previous six submissions i’ve made for this annual project; guess it’s a body of work at this point, huh? (!) Most years i’ve been trying to hold previous submissions in mind, either as inspirations or as, uh, anti-inspirations; something to respond to, anyhow. As i’ve been using so many effects in the past few years I felt i ought to make a point of using as few as possible this time; in the end beyond some compression and eq-ing i’ve used nothing. In addition, i made a point of not pitching samples up or down. Instead, i’ve simply made an awkward cut and paste abstraction, with a bias towards reasonably seamless loops interspersed with sharp and definite splices. Some of the loops are tiny, in order to create buzzes and ersatz sines, others work more conventionally, if scarcely in any sense musically. I had this temptation to keep refining, condensing this piece - to a sort of seething, over-eventful, brittle mush but also wanted it to breathe or at least stop and start, pulse and jitter… this is, i guess, a sort of compromise between those two inclinations.
A really soothing afternoon in all; clicking about in various Audacity projects, shuffling, fiddling, reviewing… gonna head off and watch Tokyo Story now, something that’s not quite not a New Year tradition 'round these parts. Thanks again, always, to Marc & peace to all Junto folks. &, it occurs to me now, thanks to Kirk, who gave me the ice cube mold i’ve been using for at least five of these projects now.
More on this 366th weekly Disquiet Junto project — Ice Breaker / The Assignment: Record the sound of ice in a glass and make something of it — at:
https://disquiet.com/0366/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co :
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0366-ice-breaker/ 5
There’s also a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet 1 to join in.
