Utilising the footstep like a kick drum, I created two bus channels for the left and right sides of the stereo field. With the mangled, glitching pad that I had created with Reaktor I recorded a long sustained note.
Using Valhalla DSP’s ÜberMod plugin, I designed a reverb and delay that would smooth the most frantic aspects of the raw drone. Bringing to the fore its most prominent melodic aspects enabled me to discern where sonic events could take place that surrounded and complemented it. A compressor the sidechain effect I had imagined, binding it to my footsteps. This formed the core of the composition.
Beyond Reaktor, by far the most useful recording process was the Radial X-Amp, through which I could re-amp sound files through pedals and a Marshall amplifier, in order to distress them a little. Break them from the entirely digital realm.
I felt that the composition, while repetitive by design, or operating in a droning, flowing state, could use a fixed event. I recorded and re-amped a passage of electric guitar chords, cymbals and the Reaktor drone through a ProCo Turbo Rat pedal, intended as a moment where something comes into view; be it a mountain, moor or thought, before the mind returns to scouring the ground.
Picking out some remaining lower frequency events in the Reaktor drone, I added a bass tone to accentuate its harmonic content, using a Behringer K-2 analogue synthesizer.
With Ableton, I experimented with re-sampling the electric guitar passages, trying to create a recurrent motif. Using Simpler and slicing, I was able to form new, swinging melodic sequences. I abandoned these in their rawest form, feeling that I was moving too far from the walking stimulus, doing too much. I fed some portions through the ÜberMod and compressor bus I had set up, but the pitch differential between the Ableton sample and the Reaktor drone was too jarring.
Instead what I chose to do, taking the initial MIDI harmonic conversion I had made in Ableton, I transcribed significant chords that could harmonise with the Reaktor drone. Finally using the JV-1080 and re-amping the resultant recordings, I added additional drones of synth pad and guitar tones, to better complement the ending, meditative section of the piece.
Much of the lecture material demonstrates the increased need for academic study or collaborative work in order to access streams of funding. I almost want to push back on the idea that this is a necessity, it seems to speak to London-centric institutional culture; like credible art doesn’t exist without money’s influence. I understand the want to pursue it, I dream of it.
I think the outcome of the Gallery 46 show instilled a desire to introduce more of my fine art practice into sound art. It seems sounding sculptures are a popular means of physically showing pieces. While I feel a real resistance to conforming out of insecurity, I have been dreaming of working with large-scale resin pieces for the final degree show, wondering how to make them sound. As far as future career goals go, I hold no illusions as to the difficulty in making an artistic practice financially viable, especially with how slow-moving and reclusive my own practice can be.
Again, I return to instinct as the most powerful motivator. I have produced a composition far louder, more effusive and dramatic than I perhaps intended. Perhaps even obscuring for the general listener the concept at its heart. Often I’m second guessing myself, imposing some rising and falling dynamics because I’m somewhat petrified of the work landing with a dull thud. This facet of my instinct is one to push hard against, I feel, moving forward. I didn’t want to give myself the situational advantage of field recordings in this piece; working around walking, the least interesting experiments involved simply recording walking. Field recordings of that nature seemed like an empirical short cut.
I do worry that by remaining in the romantic, often musical compositional artmaking tradition whereby ‘x represents z because I say so’, I am staying in the kiddie pool. Braver, more brazen artists than myself drape a single recording over the listener and all manner of discourse seems to unfurl from it. And yet, I was not drawn to similar approaches making this work. It’s interesting, I came into this course utterly confused as to where music’s place in sound art was, why it was seemingly discouraged, and indignantly pursuing it anyway. Now I feel hampered by music, choked by an inability to academically express why it should represent ‘z’ at all. It feels both right and wrong to be in this zone. I don’t think it’s inaccurate to say there’s an intimidating, very elusive expectation to conform to whatever sound art is, and maybe that’s why ‘experimental music’ is potentially being added to the degree’s title. If it is, then I’m in the ballpark! If it’s plain old ‘sound art’, I can’t say I know where I am. I’ll keep my face stony and maintain my story. Tell my truth.
My composition, ‘Walking’, is a sublime, bracing march through the landscape, the inner world somatically carrying the piece. External factors, shoes on the ground, birdsong, wind, are filtered out as the listener joins the walk at the transportive point where the walker retreats inside themselves, tiring as the mind scatters. Sluggish in the body, yet euphoric and fast-moving in the mind. The peculiar, repetitive sifting of input experience and memory, talking to yourself, incoherent and content to keep moving.