I struggle a lot with balancing multiple deadlines at once and a bad habit of going off to prioritise things that ultimately aren’t important, so I’ve been trying to get stuck in with the two modules ongoing as much as I can. I did however get to visit my friend Jack C in Manchester while going to see Shit & Shine playing down there, and after catching up he mentioned that he had been writing a lot at the moment and that he wants to get back into making stuff together again (he is studying law so doesn’t have a lot of time for creative work it seems).

I mentioned to him this project and rattled off some ideas I had about ‘noise poetry’ referencing some work I like that deals with sonic abstraction of the voice, particularly the current trajectory of The Rita’s deconstruction of the feminine using gated fuzz sound characteristics to reduce it to onomatopoeia, as well as Francisco Merino’s work for hyper-digital frozen voice abstractions in the album My Voice Is Unique, Charlemagne Palestine’s Studies for Piano + Voice and a couple other albums. I convinced him to come record something with me when he’s able, and with his spring break coming up, there is an opportunity to organise so that we can bang it out in a couple of sessions if I have enough preparation.

I want to pursue this Noise-Poetry idea rather than the URLFest mostly just out of a desire to carpmentalise what I do online from what I do academically, allowing me to make the URLfest less serious and allowing for more fun & silly work within that as I like to play into the ‘netlabel culture’ aesthetics a lot (spam, juvenile and mean humour). I have actually delayed this project though for after the deadline, as I think having this happen simultaneously would be a pretty undesirable position to be in. Also, I love working with Jack C as I have known him for most of my life, we briefly did Noise together years ago under a few names before he went off to focus on other (comparatively more ‘productive’) things, so it would be nice to go back to those roots in some way, and the Voice Deconstruction idea in Noise is something interesting to me already, so taking full reign of it will be exciting. It is something I have done on a previous album as well, using EQ> Gate > Fuzz > Pitch Shift to abstract the voice to just clicks in the pattern of speech.

We will be jamming it in a couple of weeks, ideally either in Manchester or Liverpool, and my own plan is for it to be focused on live-ness because that to me is the most exciting music. I am thinking I will use my regular Noise pedal setup, but for more textural variety, I will try to mix analogue and digital means so that there is room for the voice to be both textural and narrative. As for narrative, I am trusting Jack to have some ideas already since he mentioned already having written work done, but I would like it to link into Rock Music lineage at least a little bit, which would be entertaining.