codetrip

Distant Listening

Martin — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 12:06:34 +0000

I recalled an old habit today of listening to mixes of my own music from other rooms. It’s hard to explain the attraction, but maybe it’s something to do with the sounds having a transporting, ambient quality to them which is made more pronounced when given a sense of perspective.

Being close to silent spaces, with the sense of directional sound coming from elsewhere gives an extra context to the spacial nature of the sound itself. It just works as a contemplative experience for me, often leading to adjustments in the sound mix or thoughts about changes to the composition.

Anyway, I’ve been digging into the drone vault of Andrey Sadovnikov once again to find raw material to process and warp.

My old Casio Sk1 is getting more use on this piece, the fantastic 1 second of 8bit sampling that the mini-keyboard allows is proving to be useful as a constraint and the gritty sound quality a nice contrast to the precise digitally created source drones. Along with using a USB mixer running into Ableton Live, I’m enjoying the freedom of setting up a set of loops running against a longer drone track and just putting down mixes that I play live – just like the old pre-automation, pre-sequencer days!

Here’s the edit from a mix of the latest drone piece.

Download audio file (sp44-altmix3-edit.mp3)

Cut Up Audio

Martin — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 18:45:51 +0000

Doing well at blocking my internal audio censors at the moment, and just getting on with it. Unexpected drone manipulations from last night created through what’s become a standard process of processing, sampling, looping and re-processing the original audio source material until something interesting comes out.

Wonder if there’s a tenuous parallel there with the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up technique. I was always struck by the quote on the recording on the Industrial Records album “Nothing Here Now But the Recordings” where Burroughs introduces the cut up technique by quartering and shuffling a letter, and comments “Now we’ll see what he’s really saying”

Download audio file (1-1jumpmix-webedit.mp3)

Gene Pool Avalanche

Martin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 14:13:17 +0000

Probably my last individual Gene Pool post before I won’t be able to keep up!

Back in July, I went down to Bristol to meet up with artists, Simon Whetham and Duncan Speakman and Clare Reddington at PM Studio. Nailing lots of things in one go, I booked Simon for a performance, Duncan for a weekend workshop and interviewed them all for the Summer Gene Pool shows on Soundart Radio 102.5FM.

The radio got first dibs on the resulting “Locative Media” episode of Gene Pool, which I’m now putting out on the podcast feed for download.

Starting from 8th Sept, I’m going to try to keep up to date by releasing the podcasts after the radio show goes out, so every Wednesday night running through to December a new episode will hit the RSS feed.

Anyway, Gene Pool#23 ready for your listening pleasure. Subscription in iTunes is the easiest option, which you can do via the Gene Pool Channel on iTunes. Alternatively, a one shot, no commitment link is below. Enjoy!

Download audio file (gene_pool_010910.mp3)

Gene Pool Autumn Season

Martin — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 00:30:06 +0000

The Gene Pool continues it’s radio season on Soundart Radio 102.5FM (www.soundartradio.org.uk) from 8th September. I’ll be putting together a series of weekly shows, airing on Wednesdays 7pm on 102.5FM and live web stream. I should be uploading the episodes to the podcast more frequently now too, as we’ve turned around from the shows being made in advance for podcast, to being made for radio as we go along.

I’m getting some material ready in advance and recorded with Felicity Ford today for the first show, which features an interview with sound and video artist, Kathy Hinde and material from Sound Diaries and London Sound Survey, all of whom feature in the Sound:Site sonic arts festival which we’re holding on 2nd October.

The Soundart Radio live stream dropped out at the end of the last season, so the second show this season, which we’ll be airing again on 15th Sept. is our episode with sound artist Jonathan Coleclough, who talks about his performance approach and a particular technique he’s using to extract sound from recordings of silent rooms.

In fact, I got the job of taking an all night recording in the old Library at South Hill Park for Jonathan to use for his performance at Sound:Site, resulting in a 13 hour long 2gB mp3 file for him to work with!