II

Mr Sandbags

When I uploaded this last night I thought it was a failure, this morning I am not so sure. I’ve just listened to it again and, while it fails to live up to my expectations when I started, there’s something about it that I like.

The initial premise was to take recordings of myself (using my Zoom H2 as a Mic & audio interface) reading passages from Chamfort’s”Reflections on Life, Love, & Society” (as well as my laughter at some of those passages) and mangle them.

I picked the best 8 or 9 and arranged them in Ableton Live along with a very basic arrangement of Alchemy choirs which I played on the SP3X (improvising on the chords and melody of ‘Did You Know Him’ from Michael Andrews Donnie Darko score).

I ran the vocal stuff through DubStation after which it joined the choirs and headed into Reaktor where I used MIDI loops to chop & dice it with The Finger before passing it to the Aetheriser grain effect.

I put that lot through another Reaktor instance running the GrainStates ensemble. Finally I used Eos to create space and CamelSpace to create movement.

I think the biggest problem is that - bare - the arrangement isn’t at all musical but, in compensating for that, I rather overcooked it: my voice is too incoherent, the choirs get totally lost, and the mix is too muddy. I made a number of attempts at fixing this but couldn’t come up with a better balance than this.

I think perhaps I should adopt Thoreau’s maxim “Simplify! Simplify!” and start taking things away, pare the process down to it’s essentials.

One thing I am finding very hard is to get the Absynth Aetherizer effect to sound anything like some of the better presets that use it. I suspect this is because I am struggling to figure out Absynth modulation. It seems very peculiar.

Still I enjoyed using my voice and there is a dark & sinister quality to some parts of this that I like very much so it’s not all bad.

There’s also a big chunk of sample material I didn’t use yet. So fodder for something else.