I first started creating this piece by working on synthesis that I felt would fit thematically. I wanted the sounds to be eerily playful and colourful as well as harsh and noisy. The main synth I used on this piece was GlitchMachines’ hybrid synth – Polygon. I used samples of my voice and foley I found appropriate. I heavily manipulated these samples using fast and overlapping LFOs, these LFOs controlled the envelope, filters and grain parameters of each sample. I wanted to create a bass sound that resembled a horn more than a traditional bass, I feel this adds to the apocalyptic themes of the track.
I composed a slow, lamenting sounding melody to accompany sections of the track, I wanted to create a ‘dragging’ sounding melody to compliment the themes. I layered strange foley from film and games to create the more percussive sounds.
I really felt like this piece was able to convey the themes I had originally anticipated. I had a lot of fun working on it and composing it.
White Noiz is a song that I found particularly inspiring during the composition of ‘Flick a Tooth’, I felt this track had a connection to themes I want to convey but in a more lamenting manor.
The game opens with a pallid skinned James, staring into a bathroom mirror, arrogated by grime and filth accompanied by the first track playing in the background – ‘White Noiz’. Immediately I am absorbed, the sound is to interestingly peculiar, the pads feel like their weeping, it has a sinister, mysterious comfort, it’s dreamily pitiful. I want to critically analyse ‘White Noiz’, I feel this track holds the secrets to how to create a space with such enthralling nature.
Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill 2’s composer and lead sound designer) acts like an architect, connecting and painting with an acute meticulousness. He is constantly working to build both structure and the personalities within the world. Understanding and becoming totally in touch with what you are creating is an absolute fundamental to creating a world both tangible and holistic.
Strangely the pad has history with one of the most prolific synthesis designers of all time, Eric Persing – ex Roland chief sound designer, founder of Spectrasonics and creator of the highly acclaimed soft synth, Omnisphere. The pad comes from the Spectrasonics’ Distorted Reality series, in an interview with sound-on-sound Mr. Parsing details the creation of the samples for Distorted Reality stating,
“Many of the ambient sounds of Distorted Reality have no source at all but were generated by letting six or seven effects processors feedback on one another for hours. How? Subtly change the send levels to each feedback effect (which in turn feeds another effect and so on…) and then walk away – recording to hours of DAT tape. Come back with fresh ears in a few months and edit the best bits. Those beds can then be used as fresh source material for further processing and layering in a sampler or computer”.
I absolutely love this technique and find it eerily contextual to the world I wanted to create – leave the sound to itself and let ghostly chance take the reins, creating worlds with almost no human interaction – it is its own. This technique is closely related to the ethos of the Kierkegaard quote – chaos, unpredictability and meta-ness are all deeply rooted in what I want to convey. This technique became a major influence on how ‘Flick a Tooth’ was made and was directly inspired by ‘White Noiz’. I think using this technique I was able to create the densely, ghostly, chaotic world inspired by the quote
I felt like a lot of the aspects of our performance turned out to be confusing and disjointed. Due to the opacity of the bags, we were not able to perform the chorography we had previously planned. Feedback was a problem with my microphone and my vocals were sometimes sheepishly buried in the mix instead of being centre as we had previously expected. Although I do feel like the performances had some shortcomings there were sections that sounded huge and noisy, resonating out of the hall as we had hoped.
If I were to do this again, I would approach the project with more confidence and better planning. I think our project suffered, mainly due to the limited amount of time and disjointed communication due to covid. There are sections of the piece I am proud of, I really loved the sound layers our group had put together and the visuals really complimented the themes of what we had planned.
During this morning’s class, Jose gathered us to talk about ideas for a live performance we would be performing in a week. To come up for ideas for this performance, Jose got the class to participate in an automatic writing exercise. Using this automatic writing exercise, we were able to subconsciously generate themes that were in common with the group. The words I chose were;
We then began to narrow down the themes that we had in common during the automatic writing exercise. The two main themes we chose to work with were war and occultism. We then took the class outside to begin a brainstorming session to organise the aims and logistics of how the performance would work. We decided that we would each use a sound source and improvise over synthesis and music we had made prior to the performance. We would also be using visuals to compliment the sonic aspect and religious / occultist implications of the performance. We wanted to create the appearance of our own cult, using sound and sigils to invert traditional religious sounds and imagery. We planned for myself to be in a figurative position of power, with the other members of the group slowly dragging me into their cult by symbolically putting a bag on my head.
For my sound source, I decided to use my WWII tank commanders throat microphone as I felt the object had significance both thematically and sonically. I planned to record myself shouting and screaming in tongues for my sound layer, we agreed that doing so complimented the themes and aims of the piece. With this in mind, I went home and began the processes of recording.
I liked some of the ideas and themes integrated within our piece, although I found most of them to be too general and the choreography to be logistically confusing. I feel like we needed more time as a group to better establish the themes of the piece so that it may feel more connected and purposeful.
This song directly influenced the synthesis processes I used to create ‘Flick a tooth’. I found this song to be an incredibly helpful tool to keep the piece on track.
Undo K From Hot – 750 Dispel
I found the drums and manic synthesis on this song to be incredibly inspiring. I used this track a lot for reference when composing.
Yen Tech – Herd
I used this track as reference when composing, especially rhythmically.
The Body – To Carry The Seeds of Death Within me
This track inspired a lot of the themes and ideas within ‘Fick a Tooth’
“A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that’s just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it’s a joke.”
I found this quote particularly inspiring and decided to base my piece around it. I wanted to create a piece that was particularly pervaded with jovial chaos and bombastically furious disregard for things to come. The piece is called “Flick a tooth” in reference to an old Italian gesture meaning “I would not even give you the dirt from under my nail”
This piece will be based around the loss of identity and rejection of congruence – accepting loss of identity and congruence in an abrasive fashion – finding identity and congruency in chaos.
I also want the track to use an array of experimental sound design techniques, creating a plethora of glitchy, broken beats, abrasive sounds and a tonal melody. I wanted to encourage these sounds as I feel its complementary to the themes of the piece
I have found that the most common act of violence in performance is the act of mosh dancing. Moshing is usually found but not limited to in metal, punk and hardcore culture. Moshing was adopted by multiple scenes since the 1980s, originally finding its place within the California and Washington, D.C. hardcore punk scenes. During these performances, the artists would encourage members of the audience to form ‘pits’, people would jump into/onto each other in an improvised ‘full-contact’ dance. Music scholar Erik Hannerz writes in the book Performing Punk (2015):
“To mosh […] was articulated as the legitimate way of experiencing the music”. Moshing had therefore become not only a dance to the music, but its highly intense bodily aspect was the legitimate way, both for artist and audience, to participate in creating the concert and the musical experience.”
Moshing is engraved into the cultures of extreme music scenes – I will argue that moshing is a valid way to fully express yourself within a performance, although it’s not without its risks.
Moshing is engraved into the cultures of extreme music scenes – I will argue that moshing is a valid way to fully express yourself within a performance, although it is not without its risks. Edvard Haraldsen Valberg quotes in their Nordic Journal for artistic research.
“Mosh Pit or Death Pit” (sic!) from Abcnews in 2008, Bamboozle Festival in New Jersey is mentioned, where 50 people were injured after a mosh pit “got out of hand”. “There is no way to crowd surf [be carried/pushed out over the audience] or stage dive [jump out from the stage and into the arms of the audience] safely consistently”, said the safety representative at the festival. Later in the article, it is explained that around 10 000 people have been injured during the last decade, and that there were 9 deaths from 1994 to 2006 in mosh-related accidents.”
I hold Gabber and Hardcore culture very close to my heart – it has been a fountain of inspiration over the years and has duly impacted how I perceive and create art. My father moved from Belfast to London in the early nineties to escape the violence of the troubles, there he discovered a passion for production and DJing through underground raves in North London. Using the money he made as a plasterer, he bought two Technics 1210s, a 303, a 909 and a plethora of Mokum and Ruffneck records. Becoming absorbed in hardcore culture he told me how himself and his mates would march around in Nike Airmax and full “bin bag” nike track suits – Dancing, Djing and performing at raves.
I very vividly remember the soundtrack to my childhood being the Thunderdome XVII and Tidy Trax CDs – I loved these compilations. The intensity of these tracks pathed the way for the art I’ve grown to become interested in today. The tracks had so much energy and personality – they’re cool, not taking themselves too seriously, having a cheeky sense of humour. I still find the reoccurring themes of anti-authority and chaos to be incredibly inspiring today. I find hardcore and gabber culture so inviting. I always find myself returning to a Thunderdome CD when I need to remind myself of how to inject personality into music.
This week I decided to compose a piece inspired by the performances and theory I’ve learned about during my Sonic Cultures research and Visiting practitioners’ lectures. The piece involves heavy modes of synthesis and myself, talking, crying, screaming into an authentic WWII tank commander’s throat microphone.
I enjoyed working with the pacing of this piece and exerting a lot of pent-up manic energy. I wanted to use Fluxus ideologies within this piece – recording myself moving objects around the room – walking back and forth – working with substance in simplicity. Applying the idea of destroying the boundary between art and life was new to me and I found it to be quite enriching.
I was introduced to 100 Gecs in 2019, just as their single ‘Money Machine’ started to gain traction on RYM and numerous Facebook and Tik Tok shit posting circles. Needless to say, I despised this song, this was just some dead crunk-core, try-hard meme with some ‘Bro-step’ and ‘Happy Hardcore’ Serum pre-sets… according to Spotify I’ve heard the song over two-hundred times now – I couldn’t stop listening, 100 Gecs grew on me like no other artist I have experienced… in the end I became obsessed, following them almost religiously.
Their super sugary, elastic production style mixed with cheesy, self-absorbed, Monster Energy-soaked lyrics are all encompassing of Zoomer culture, the blueprint for the new maximalist wave of sugary billboard pop. Over the next few years, you can expect this mode of flamboyant hyper pop to creep its way onto the charts – similarly to how bubble-gum bass did in the mid 2010’s with artists like Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli xcx picking up popular producers within the scene to produce fantastically compromised work.
Recently I’ve found myself listening to them again more and more – 1000 Gecs is a fantastic summertime album I have to recommend.
