For the past 2 weeks, I have had hearing issues that have rendered me basically unable to hear, which was obviously extremely depressing since I don’t do much other than music. Thankfully, after 2 appointments with a doctor, the issue was solved. I’m not wanting to go into the specifics since it is pretty gross, but thankfully, it was not caused by any noise-related damage and was reversible (and excitingly has solved some issues that I didn’t know were ongoing)! Because of this, and obviously not being able to engage with the sound piece at all during this period as per doctor’s orders of “taking it easy”. But now that we are back to normal, work can be continued!

I recorded a proper take of the setup done last week straight into my tape deck with the gain pretty high this week, to get that ‘classic’ crunch and avoid the undesirable digital clipping characteristic. It took a couple takes to have the tracks develop how I’d like, and a few instances where the take is ruined by my laptop’s CPU overloading and gets near to crashing, but what is functioning now is with starting with ultra high pitch whine, adding more harmonics and building the track into drone, sending the clocked LFO to more parameters over time to slowly introduce the rhythmic element before fully bringing in the drum track. The performance is loose though and ‘live’, as is important to PE I think, and the structure this way shows three different styles of Power Electronics (ultra minimal high pitched focus, drone laden Industrial Noise, Power Noise / Industrial Beat led material) without being jarring or gimmicky in that regard.

I recorded a vocal take, which was just sending these toy microphones from a kid’s karaoke machine through superfuzz, looper, pitch shift, delay and reverb into my amp back home, but because of the current situation with a new neighbour moving in I couldn’t have it so loud, and my vocals are more of the ‘half screaming’ variety with a lot of feedback. To be honest, I am not that happy with the take, but when next to the track, it sounds pretty exciting as a textural addition to hear how the feedback interacts with the pitches in the VCV rack recording. The track so far I really like as it is to be honest, but 17 minutes or so is quite overkill for the person marking, and I feel like with the high volume and high pitches I might come off as being obtuse, so changes I need to make next week is to trim the track down and add more elements of “atomised Power Electronics” as I mentioned last week, the only thing is I don’t know if I will be able to record vocals again like this, so sampling from elsewhere might be necessary.

Thinking about what I am trying to achieve with this piece, I want to show both understanding of the genre and exciting deviation from its norms, applying character to it in a tasteful/funny way, and in all honesty I don’t have the heart to go all in writing mean spirited lyrics, so just screaming garbled nonsense at the moment feels right as it is. I am mainly worried about length and about if the loudness aspect is too ridiculous for an academic setting, but true to form of the genre ‘extremity’ is key, and demonstration of it is generally integral to showing understanding of the form (and characteristic loudness is something common within most of my stuff anyway). As it is now, it is extremely loud, and hopefully that will be appreciated.