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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.

During a project meeting, we had begun to flesh the project out as well as allocate roles. I opted for the role of manipulating Cindy’s voice – I thought it sounded like fun as well as challenging, I also felt like it played to my strengths coming for a synthesis and noise music background. Originally, we had planned to sample words from other interviews then splice and warp them out to accommodate the script as well as normal ‘influencer’ speaking patterns. To do this I had planned to lay the sampled word above an interview and stretch the word to fit the speech pattern. I found this process to create a strange uncanny valley type androgynous personality which we felt was perfect for the character, although as interesting as it was, it was incredibly time consuming and with such a short time span for the project, this idea became unfeasible. To combat this, Raul managed to get his sister to record the parts for Cindy while Daniel played the part of the interviewer. This worked well and the Woman playing Cindy sounded perfect for the role. Now my part was to use a multitude of production techniques and effects to warp and distort Cindy’s voice into the strange, vapid personality in the script

Using Debord’s writing as a framework for the sound I began editing the audio in particular ways to achieve strange and mostly unpredictable effects. I began by splicing the particular words I wanted to manipulate. I started by manipulating a few words at the start of the piece, gradually adding more manipulation as the piece progresses. We wanted a gradual progression of manipulation and a huge noisy climax – we liked the idea of building a tense uncertainty as we felt it complimented the themes of the piece. The main tools I used for manipulating the speech was M4L Grainscanner, Ableton warping tools, EQ, Compression, Ableton Reverb, Simpler, Pitch shifting, Panning, re-sampling and layering audio. The most powerful and my favourite tool was the M4L Grainscanner, I love the unpredictability and glitchiness of the VST – I felt like using this technique gave us the ability to warp the dependence of Cindy’s self-image.

I then began to record effects in real time over the original Cindy audio, this added a serious unpredictability with the Grainscanner which I found to be incredibly fun as well as fruitful, throughout the piece and closer to the end alien-like sound artefacts and warps can be heard all over the audio – this is exactly the kind of manipulation we had in mind for the piece.

I love how the piece descends into chaos and there is almost a tape like warping present – the glossy irony of the crescendo worked well. I did have trouble getting things to work and would have preferred a more streamlined approach to manipulating the audio, although if I had more time I would have preferred to work with the original idea and create something more Dadaist.

Today we had to opportunity to gather as a group and brainstorm ideas for a radio project. We all agreed that we wanted to touch on contemporary themes which formed the foundation for our brainstorming ideas to grow. We wanted to do something deconstructive, using false convictions and uncertainty to create an ambiguous and Dadaist radio experience. Personally, I loved this direction – a radio show that takes inspiration from Burroughs’ cut up technique really intrigued me – I felt like it was a powerful way to comment on the ego-centric radio personality we had begun to concoct.

In the coming weeks we decided to base our radio play around Guy Debord’s “La Société du Spectacle” (1967)”. One of the most important themes we aimed to explore with “Just Cindy” was Marx’s Commodity fetishism

Debord’s commentary on commodity fetishism was the blueprint for our piece. We used Debord’s and Marx’s writing as a guide to create an interview between two fictional characters we had created – “The Interviewer” and “cindy”. Debord states, “… just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.” This quote is the framework for Cindy’s personality – her conceited nature and vain disposition is a mirror image of reification.

Marx describes the capitalist mode of production as presenting itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,” its unit being a single commodity.”, further explaining “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production”.

How can we convey this critique – what does the contradictory essence and appearance of commodity sound like? I began automatically writing ideas – underlying industrial soundscapes with clouds looming over glossy, vocal harmonizers and noisy chatter – stretchy, stuttering conversations I wanted to peel back and peer into. Commodity and reification are a giggling smear that I find myself more often than not trying to chuckle with rather than at – this was the main idea I had implanted while I was working with sound and automatic synthesis

Today I had the pleasure of experiencing a Locustream during one of Dawn Scarfe’s lectures. We tested and experimented with setting up and listening to streams from both around the world and from my own classmates. I set up my livestream using the locus sonus app, propped my phone up with a pillow and pointed it down into the busy Dalston high street.

I then began to listen to my own stream very closely for about five – ten minutes. It felt strange – I could hear words and phrases mixed in with the passing of buses, cars and the occasional doink and flop of a car driving over the loose manhole on the tarmac. I felt like a ghost, listening so intently – closing my eyes, hovering over the red kebab shop canopy – occasionally hearing a flutter of fabric and a squeak from the hinges. Initially the experience was incredibly connective – but I wanted to experiment with what it would feel like if I disconnected – forcing my brain not to recognise familiar sounds and using them in my own soundscape. Suddenly the familiar buses and cars chugging by become an alien language, the squeaking hinge becomes electricity, the talking becomes a strong breeze. I loved this experiment; I have found it incredibly useful and stimulating – especially when faced with a creative block.

We then began to listen to streams from around the world. We experimented by mixing multiple streams at once to create our own strange and alien environments – suddenly the electric sounds of a wave farm and a huge whistling sand dune is on a busy street in Camberwell. I’ve found these experiments to be incredibly stimulating – I never realised how deeply connected you could become with your surroundings and how it can be used as a tool to paint otherworldly, dreamy soundscapes.

The BBC’s Touching the Elephant was a documentary in which four blind people encounter an Elephant named Dilberta at London Zoo. The idea for the documentary comes from a widely diffused Indian folktale in which a group of blind men conceptualise an elephant by touching each part of its body.

I found this documentary to be particularly moving and thought provoking. Imagining what something looks like from nothing is an alien, confusing and strange to think about – it is exciting and imaginative but strange. Bonnie M Miller states that “Pictures are better on the radio”, this is a beautiful thought – this made me think about how focusing down on one sense can be an incredible imaginative tool. Through this piece I’ve found that the real beauty of radio is that you’re forced into this – nearly obstruction like mode, which is totally creatively stimulating