We toyed with Ableton’s synthesizers, Drift, Collision, Operator and Wavetable, creating sonic chaff that may be useful in our final compositions. Session view’s quick note-taking ability creates mental clutter, almost making hard decisions too easy. It does make possible an exciting spiral beyond intention, where I can trace how my ideas and working process evolve through Ableton’s toolset. I may feel listless, but as a fine artist first this is the closest thing to a digital comparison to reactively working into a painting. It is a far more organic process, when examined from an analogous standpoint.
I started with attempting to synthesise a dulcimer with Collision, resampling it into Simpler and slicing it. Using the keyboard and further resampling through Sampler, I created a fast moving chime pad, replete with glitches. Finally, I turned that chime sample into a Wavetable synth, which felt the most dynamic of all.
In finding an organic approach to sound creation, the glitch as technique is one I am personally wary of. It signposts the technological underpinning of the composition with clarity. Haela Ravenna Hunt Hendrix (2023) of avant-garde black metal band Liturgy states on her Substack that ‘general trembling abstracts the idea of tremolo further, partly by orchestrating tremolo for pitched percussion instruments and partly through digital skipping effects, and partly through shocking changes in style which create a stuttering glitches in subculture identification.’ I think her articulate way of explaining the way Liturgy see the digital, stuttering glitch as an ecstatic extension of the black metal tremolo picking technique is very coherently formulated and executed in the band’s music. It is so distinct to their sonic and ethical identity in my mind, that it would be foolish to replicate that unique meld. Functioning, as Hunt Hendrix posed, as a destabilisation of perceived subculture signifiers, more commonly expected and found in experimental electronic, rap or dance music genres. Where the longstanding guard of traditional black metal archetypes stay rooted in the boreal, Liturgy’s boundary-less exploration feels like staring at the sun.
Somewhere there must exist a balance between analog puritanism and Skynet. Achievable tatramajjhattÄ. In discussing and thinking about, and frankly agonising over, my perceptions surrounding technology’s role in my work, a quote I found by Mark Nunes (2011, pp. 43) detailed my concerns and hopes exactly: ‘In the condition where machinic systems seek the unforeseen and the emergent, there is also a possibility for the unforeseen error to slip into existence. This condition can be seen in the tradition of artists using the error, just as Munari used the wind, as a creative tool.’ The premise posed of human machination to enable a human-made machine output unintended results can be considered an extension of historical and surrounding art-making practices’ use of random or uncontrollable technique. Sensing a relation to my ontologically-investigative experiments with re-creating the aural character of wind, Bruno Munari’s ‘Useless Machines’ sculpture series depended on the kinetic intercession of wind itself; with the artist providing creative agency to the creation, a genuine bridge between the organic and the designed is formed. A bridge that I want to, if not fully cross, venture out onto in good faith, despite my own preconceptions about the chasm below.
Bibliography:
Hunt-Hendrix, H. (2023) ‘Towards a New Philosophy of Music’, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, 10 September. Available at: https://litvrgy.substack.com/p/towards-a-new-philosophy-of-music?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2 (Accessed: 7 May 2023)
Hunter Hunt-Hendrix (2023) Djennaration. 23 March 2023. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENp5Ly8C5MM (Accessed: 7 May 2023)
Nunes, M. (2011) Error: Glitch, Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures. New York, London: The Continuum International Publishing Group.