I had to cancel the 1 to 1 this week as my Dad had to go to the hospital, I had to go to Liverpool for the week so I could see him when he was let out (which took longer than any of us would have liked it to). He seems like he is doing a lot better, thankfully, it is just obviously pretty scary having anything serious happen at his age, and the thought has been stressing out me and my family quite considerably because of already existing health problems being compounded by all of this.
I have been mostly stacking on top of this first wall I did last week, adding the previously shown dictaphone Casio recording as an intro and underneath the wall to add emotional content to it, which works a lot, I think. I added an extra layer of droning with a VCV rack resonator patch, while using the speaker for it to vibrate some metal objects, adding some organic elements to the wall sound on top of the Drone. The fire alarm went off around 10 minutes into recording, so right now I’m using a stretched version as a placeholder until I am able to use the Foley room again.
I also added a layer of sandpaper, which adds a more dirty crackling texture, using a toy karaoke mic, one of the mics feeding back, so that the crackles give more exaggerated pops and add some further improvisatory rigidity to the otherwise fixed “wall”. The technique refers back to some early experiments with HNW I did as a kid, referencing The Haters’ Drunk On Decay, Death Defying Sickness, and other work utilising amplified erosion (as well as some performances on the DVD The Haters Live!, which features some slow destruction of microphones). I have used the technique to encourage more subtle results, especially well on shame I think, eroding small bits of metal, so this is expanding further on an already tried technique.
The sound had to be pitched down so that it wouldn’t be irritating in the mix. I think it adds a lot, I like it when the depth of the sound has a mix of fidelities; it adds an artist’s presence that I feel like adds to the comfort of the work, creates an intimacy. So far, because of the dictaphone recording not being so long, the track is split into two sections (I don’t want to loop it), so to subside the murkiness of the first section, I added some bright guitar loops over the top of the second section to have the ecstatic gorgeous capability of the two contrasting elements come through, giving the work a narrative of tension and release which I think is an appropriate opener. My audio interface, which I have had for probably 5 years now is finally giving up, making some horrible interference noise passively even without any input, so I had to cut the high end from my recordings, which also sections the drones into their own space spectrally, which has some sonic benefit. Thematically, I don’t feel comfortable making this about my Dad, if it wasn’t for Uni, I would feel more comfortable making it more personal, but I feel like the fact that I have to articulate the concept rather than present the work as it exists kind of irks me.
I really like the state that the first track is in, what it means I feel like will come to me with more work on the other 2 for the disc as a whole experience. For the first submission for the work, we have to present a prototype project for the first project, so with my work being a Box set release, I want the first hand in to present the first disc of my work, with the cover art complete already, really, due to having creative friends who are enthusiastic about my Silver Dove project.
Further extrapolating from the imagery I had of the lonely voyage and reflections of Donald Crowhurst on my second track, I decided to watch a short BBC documentary on Crowhurst to find any information or samples that could be useful to realise that atmosphere.
“With isolation there is no stimulus coming into the brain, which gives the imagination free reign.” (Weirdly HNW related quote.)
I found some other documentaries, but they are much more dramatic and lesser because of that, I like the more “scholarly” approach of this one, interviewing experts in the fields of navigation and psychology to piece together a motivation and timeline for the disappearance. I also found that there’s a biopic movie, which I find the existence of very depressing, I really hate that stuff. The documentary put me onto the fact that there are 10 hours of Crowhurst talking out there that I should seek out. Thinking about his story within a sonic realm might help to conceptually piece the work together. I don’t want to be fully wholistically devotional to his story, mind you, I want to use the story as a theme within the work to extrapolate from and find commonalities between it and other interests and experiences.
But with these two tracks, I feel as if the overall theme is riffing on the voluntary isolation ideal that Wall Noise is built upon, projecting my own personal experience with homesickness and disillusionment from the outside world, using Wall Noise as a means of controlling my auditory space, cocooning myself. The work is not coming along very friendly at the moment, it’s sounding pretty miserable, but in an elegant way I think, which I guess is the mood right now even if I’m not aware of it.
To further bolster my work with more context, I want to further research ASMR and ANW’s relation in order to be able to articulate the genre’s similarities to the much more well-regarded and understood ASMR phenomena. To my understanding, ASMR is the suspension of small, intimate sounds that create a pleasing reaction for the listener, which is also what ANW is to me. I want to see how my perspective can alter with more information regarding the subject, as ASMR is much more well-studied and would prove an invaluable source for understanding what I am doing if I can bridge between the two.
https://isismagazine.org.uk/2013/05/asmr-loneliness-and-healing-on-youtube
“everyone has the mechanism [to experience ASMR] to some greater or lesser degree, and some culmination of this mechanism and their personality can develop to a discrete sensation rather than an unnoticed blip.”
https://breakpoint.org/triggering-the-tingles-asmr-is-a-poor-substitute-for-human-presence
- “Back in the 1950s, a curious psychologist sought an answer to these questions. He installed electrodes in the pleasure centers of rats’ brains and gave them a lever to zap themselves. Not only did they like it, they became addicted, pressing the lever thousands of times a day and neglecting to eat, drink, or sleep until they died.”
- “According to Kriss, the tingles don’t necessarily result from the noise, nor are they overtly sexual. Rather, the presence (or simulated presence) of another person, the sounds of their movement and voice, are what “seems important.” ASMR requires an “emotional element,” which leaves the viewer feeling “safe, and warm, and loved.”
- “There is something deeply dystopian about “untold millions of people who spend a good chunk of their free time every day sitting by themselves in a dark room in front of a screen, blissing out to a series of clicking sounds … [or to] someone who does not know your name, and who would not notice if you died tomorrow, pretending to nurture you. This could only exist in a deeply lonely, deeply broken world.”
- “However, in the end, we will be left lonelier than we were when we found them appealing in the first place. That should probably trigger chills, not tingles.”
I like this Christian magazine’s perspective on ASMR the most. There are some prescriptions to ASMR that I like that apply to ANW, emphasis on phoniness and substitution, the parallel between this addictive ASMR trigger and the Rat experiment is something I love the most. I remember a striking quote from A View From Nihil, “To be honest I don’t even want to think about life without HNW. It just seems to fill some deeply rooted need and I know that a lot of wall makers out there feel the same.”(https://www.musiquemachine.com/articles/articles_template.php?id=178). The pleasure achieved from addictive pleasing sound consumes your life in this way, the curation of your own “wall”, meaning you can tailor these feigned stimuli for yourself and cocoon yourself inside them. I know for a fact I was like this during Quarantine, I was listening to/recording Wall Noise from the second I woke up to the second I fell asleep, and I felt as if it was enriching my life because at this time I was restricted from the presence of other people and going outside, so the construction of the experience of doing these things was particularly exciting even if I wasn’t aware that that was what I was doing.