Working with Ableton’s Simpler instrument, I manipulated my phone recording of the water dispenser outside the classroom. Processing the original with pitch shifting, overdrive, church reverb and certain drum enhancing plugin called ‘Low Rider Drums’. I worked mostly blindly, adding and removing effects and time stretching by ear after I had selected a rhythmic portion of the water dropping that I wanted to sample. I struggle to articulate and act upon intention within the maximalist DAW ecosystem, feeling dragged onward more than investigating.
Taking the processed samples home, I added them to Logic Pro’s Sampler and Quick Sampler instruments, further distressing and attempting to draw out what could be considered a pad. Ableton’s pitch and reverb manipulation had morphed the ambient, muffled crowd voices into a somewhat sinister tonality that I could apply musically and rhythmically with my own setup. The dark, synth-like pad and sloshing water drove me to imagine some captive wretch navigating the haunted undercroft of a chapel, flooded knee-high. Similar, I later thought, to Ged in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘The Tombs of Atuan’. My visual imagination plays a defining role in the works I create
The excitement has been largely in hindsight; seeing the naked, original recording in sharp relief against the total transformation of the final experiment. Resampling my own work is something that interests me, but I would be more engaged with the process if I was using a hardware-forward, more analog approach.