Month: May 2021

I was inspired by a quote by Arvo Pärt, “Have you thanked god for your failure already”. I found this quote as I was composing this piece, its implications on the future and present made how to move forward with creating this piece so much more fluid.

I was inspired to create a lament for the future using the past. I wanted to create a sense of mourning and longing in the past and uncertainty for the future, I wanted these two elements to twist and walk together, I wanted to create an ethereal instability.

It is said that the most sensitive instrument is the human voice, with this in mind I decided to whisper stretched words, like an incredibly long eulogy, reflective of time.

I wanted to create electricity, which would weave and knit its way though the eulogy, pressing at it – unstable and exciting.

I used a sample of waves washing sand on the beach, reflective of time starting over.

My piece then uses these layers and pairs them with a string section, which to me, is a fundamentally earthly sound – grounding and moving the piece.

The piece then slowly sways, twisting in and out with each element. The chords at the beginning open the way for a huge sounding crescendo of all these elements.

With Gareth and Jose’s previous lectures in mind I began to experiment with Musique concrete techniques in order to build a soundscape in line with the themes of the project. For the first instrument I used a multitude of drone like string samples layered with vocals I had recorded.

 I wanted to make the piece feel intimate, in reflection to the bar scene in The Shining. To do this I used a lot of whisper like vocal recordings, layering them with long, sustained strings. To create the futuristic element, I created an ‘electricity’ sounding synth patch. I then used a sample of waves washing up on a beach, I used this to create atmosphere and space within the track, I wanted to add more earthly tones to ground the piece rather than having it hyper-futuristic sounding.

I wanted to create a short repeating musical phrase to make the piece more meditative or hypnotic. I felt like this was an appropriate thing to do considering the main themes of reflection and futurism.

I feel like I was able to create a rich ambient piece which reflected the themes we wanted to convey as well as relate to my collaborator’s pieces. I felt the drone like mixture of the strings, my voice and the electricity created a soundscape both longing and mournful though this I feel I was able to achieve my goal in creating a lament for the past using the future.

Today in Jose’s class we used a technique called automatic writing. This technique involves ten minutes of meditating on an image, space, event etc, in your mind’s eye, then immediately describing what you imagined, automatically forming sentences without stopping, regardless of their nonsensicality. The exercise felt so personal, like reaching into a depth – I loved it and felt incredibly inspired to do this exercise regularly.

Using my automatic writing piece, I feel like I was able to create something incredibly substantial and rich. Below you will find my writing and musical piece.

“Yellow ceiling office tiles on floor, they’re wet, I can poke through the tiles my feet, a cracking noise, then a slimy mushy one, they disintegrate like wet toilet paper. The room is narrow, 1 meter wide, I feel compressed, worried, claustrophobic, grey concrete walls and ceiling, veined and cracked, a fast moving, viscous liquid moves through the wall capillaries, creating a warm, bombastically sleek, pumping, throbbing tone, tiles are smoking consistently, sinister, broken, white, hissing, fading in and out quickly. I hear a throbbing voice, room ends with opaque black fog, standing gaunt, bone like legs at the end of the room, fat and muscle has slipped from the thighs, the skin of the fat is thin like an old man’s hands, gathered and drooped onto the floor, the feet are absorbed and obscured by the drooping fat, the fat is slithering in-between the legs like how a cat would move in-between your feet, fast moving slithering. The smoke and walls are getting louder, hissing with subby, throbbing liquid sounds, the fat around the legs are singing making an 8th note gated whine, pink and leathery.”

We wrapped up our first meeting by creating a title for the project. The title came from the bar scene in Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’. In this scene, Jack is seen to be hallucinating, talking and interacting with people that previously lived in the hotel at a point in time. These characters are eerily predicting events that will happen in the future. We felt that this scene held similarities with the themes of our project, so we took the line “I’ve been away but now I’m back” and used it for the title.

A collaborator brought up the idea of “Dancing with the past in the future”, we loved this idea as we thought of our project as both a meditative process and a dance – the idea of fusing both concepts was exciting to us and played well with the initial concept. One of our colleagues, Joanna Besarab is a dancer, and we liked the thought of taking a photo of her dancing, manipulating it, and using it as the artwork for the project. Due to lack of resources and scheduling we were unable to take the photo.

After further consideration and brainstorming we decided to use photographs of Dance Halls from the 1950’s. These photos depicted people, shoulder to shoulder, packed in a hall. I loved the aliveness and implications of camaraderie expressed in these photos. We all felt like this perfectly represented the past. We then decided to superimpose a retro futuristic painting depicting a sci-fi space environment – this would represent the future. The talented Rocco Wallis created the artwork, this was the final result.

I felt like their work encapsulated the themes of the idea well, although I would of liked to spend more time experimenting with different techniques.

Raul mentioned a book called Retromania, by Simon Reynolds. They explained that the book presents nostalgic-thinking as thought process that humanity has pondered for ages through questions akin to – is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward? or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times? I found this thought to be a beautiful yet troubling standard to work with – I found it inspired a foundation for the artwork as well as the composition for my piece. Reynolds rightfully believes that nothing is new – even referring to every avant-garde movement as arrière-garde. Reynolds presents this thought by using the renaissance movement as an example as it drew heavily from Greco-roman art.

I have always loved the thought of trying to fight human nature and create something totally original, but due to nature, this would be impossible. Nature and emotion are fundamental in every human and every human experiences these elements similarly, regardless of intensity or complexity, therefore a piece of art, no matter how separated from influence would always draw from these natural fundamentals.

This thought furthered the respect I have for what I draw inspiration from, I feel like we all felt this, and it became elemental in influencing the artwork for this project.

Capturing the unamenable nature of the future is undeniably challenging yet offers incredible perspective. In group C, this idea is one we decided to tackle. The idea of working with this concept was initially inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, we then decided to look at similar pieces that also worked on this concept. Riddley Scott’s 1982 film Blade runner and Kubrick’s 2001: A space odyssey were another two seminal pieces we decided to draw inspiration from for this project. During our initial meeting we found that these pieces described the present by using the future as a reference – we wanted to twist this idea and describe the future by using the past. This thought is the concept for “I’ve been away but now I’m back”

We then began discussing musical artists / projects which have previously explored aspects of the concept. I suggested artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never, Steve Hauschildt and Holly Herndon. The concept of futurism is an idea central to most of their work. Due to their extensive exploration into this concept, I felt their work offered incredible perspective to our ideas.

OPN’s 2015 – ‘Garden of Delete’ pioneered a new sound – symbolic of an interpreted future. The record is a glissade of mucilaginous, animated synth leads paired with harmonised, auto tuned and multi distorted vocals and speech. These samples range from YouTube vloggers and interviews with a mentally disturbed child to Am I Supposed to Let It by Again by Roger Rodier and Hans Reichel’s Return of the Knödler Show. To me this record exemplifies a beautifully dense and chaotic world filled with both respect and disrespect for time and itself. I knew for this project; this record would be somewhere where I would draw a fundamental inspiration.

My fellow collaborators presented artists I had not heard about before, such as the north American record producer Daedelus. Daedelus mainly produces IDM and Hip Hop fused with samples from the music of the 20’s / 30’s (Mainly swing and Ballads). Personally, I really did not like his work – I appreciate how he treated the concept, but – to me – his work felt like putting a 1920’s film distortion effect over a shuffled Hip Hop beat.

As the meeting concluded, we now had a solid concept to work with as well as musical references to draw inspiration from.