I wanted to explore randomness and control on this piece. Also, I wanted to make a really long album. All these old tunes from electronic artists surfacing, suddenly hours and hours of stuff to listen to, I felt I was getting an idea of a period of time and personality beyond the tracks themselves.. Generalizing the listening.. And there was that nostalgia of the ambient bits on old rave.. (The strings on sweet harmony!..) and i got deep into the the new weird ambient stuff only released on tape - digitalis stuff, analog concept, gorman, emuul, celer, 0pn, mark mcguire..
There was this program on an old coldcut album called playtime, it cut up the samples and automated the music then you could fiddle with these faders and change it but it was never clear what they did exactly. I spent hours on that, I can't get it working now as I haven't got Windows 95 anymore (not that there's much difference). I do some data management and colleagues are often dumbfounded when my computer is doing work on it's own - i set up mouse recorders for repetitive tasks.. then let it get on with it. When i was a kid i liked listening to 45s on 33 and vice versa.. there was an old Bukem release that i swore was downtempo that turned out to be DnB and then getting back into the slowdowns with the chopped n screwed stuff..All these things were percolating with what I wanted to do here.
When I make music it never comes out how I expect, but rather than push against that i wanted to embrace it here.
So I did a quick formula on excel to give me a random sequence of 4 notes and another to tell me how many note progressions will be in each track. Then i searched for a synth plugin that had a randomize function and used the first one i found (acidrack). So, the notes i play and the sound is pretty random*.
But then I do have an element of control - i play the notes and can change the volume. However, there's a reciprocity because i'm improvising the music and this is based on how the notes sound together, the reverberations in and between the notes, how i feel at the time, and I play for as long as I feel like.
Also, I've got the choice.. i mean, i've given myself the choice, of whether to play the different note progressions in the same tone or press random again.. so if it's a harsh tone I can do an additional one (as long as excel said i was allowed to). Of course it might give me an even harsher tone and the note sequence doesnt go, but it was a risk i was willing to take. In addition, i found that acidrack doesnt randomize the octave selector or the lfo2/arpeggiate selector so i was allowed to choose those too.
Then to randomize it further I stretched the track to 30 minutes long. This also hopefully made it sound more ambient (control) and meant that each track could be seen as an album in it's own right. i like that fractal recursion idea of an album made up of a load of albums. Of course, i got better at learning how the track would sound slowed down by how long I played for in the first place.. control control control.
If I didnt like how the track sounded after all this I overdubbed with a different pitch, re-amped with self-feedback generating digital guitar fx, or just tried to accept it. I never discarded a track.
I'd encourage people to play around with the speed and volume when listening to these: find the perfect speed for you,, and some of these will sound better louder or quiet, on headphones or on speakers, inside outside, in a different room, in order or on shuffle, over hours/weeks/months/years.. the stretch factors are included in each title so you can get an approximation of how it sounded when played. Before that though it might help to do the mindfulness of sound meditation
cdn.roughguides.com/wp-content/uploads/mindfulness/3.MindfulnessofSounds.mp3 : the purpose of this is to focus on, and accept, the myriad sounds going on around you; the hiss and whirr of daily life; the sound of life can be immersive if you're receptive. It might sound like a cop out 'you're not enjoying this because you're not mindful enough' but fuck instant gratification, question those assumptions of how something 'should' sound, how long it 'should' last etc.
Oh the track titles were generated by doing random swipes on my phone keyboard then when i finished a track i used the title which fit it most closely. Artwork was then found doing an image search for the titles; then adding noise and randomness to the pictures.
*yeah i know computers are notoriously bad at doing random but this is great... it further adds to the question 'how random is this?' the answer is: i don't fucking know, but nothing's truly random and nothing's completely controllable, and the actual percentage randomness or whatever is arbitrary.. for me the interesting aspect is that interplay and conflict between the two. There's this biology theory that an organism can be defined simply as a system where there is more cooperation than conflict.. so an ant is an organism but so too is the ant colony.. this really chimes with me and where this project has worked is when there's been that sense of flowing with the computer, literally being with it.
Promo mix here:
www.mixcloud.com/sevenism/sevenism-j3-randomism-mix-v1-slow-this-echo-down/
type bark video here:
vimeo.com/sevenism/typebark
Release date = released + 17/04/1938
