Over the last two weeks, I haven’t been able to do much, as I have had some hearing issues I needed to have treated that was rendering me basically unable to hear anything, which is obviously very depressing for me as I don’t really care about much other than music. Thankfully, it was not noise-related though and was reversable, but it took a while to get done and set me back a bit monetarily, and also around the time I have been going through a breakup, which is bizarre, everything all at once. But I did organise meeting up with Jack this week which is good as I can hear again properly (better than usual as well!), he was only available on Wednesday to meet up at my house in Liverpool, so I had to not attend the class so we could start proper progress on the work.
We had talked prior about what we’d like to make, I showed him some of what I’ve been enveloping myself in at the moment, and we talked about desire for sampling in the work as it is something I am very into at the moment, specifically work that is more recontextualisation than restructuring the sample, by which I mean just playing the sample within a different context. I have written about this process prior, but recontextualisation through looping or playing over the top of work, or placing it at the end of something else, is exciting I feel like for using other works for self expression, so I was happy that Jack C was into the expression of this idea as well and familiar with a lot of the work I brought up. Particular to my own obsession though, I wanted to approach the work with this in mind as tribute to Cory Strand, who is an extremely prolific Wall Noise artist who has been releasing “Reinterpretations” of his favourite albums through his distinct style of ‘songs reduced to muffle’, and I find the antedeluvian approach he has taken for +10 years to be a beautiful way of self expression through other people’s work. I don’t intend to do the exact same thing though, I want to take on some sonic and aesthetic qualities from his work and take on this “Reinterpretation” mantra for Jack C’s material, rather than voice and Wall Noise coexisting, it will be voice made wall noise if that makes sense.
I brought back from London as much gear as possible, both for this project and to help move out, so I laid it all out ready before he arrived, so it is all available to use and adaptable to the sound. I had 4 microphones available, one contact mic, the microphones on the toy karaoke machine, and a USB microphone for a clean signal, so the thought was that I could have as many variations of the voice signal available live, minimising the amount done in post and emphasising live-ness.
When Jack C arrived, he went through some of the writing he’d been doing for the past year while I set up some effects chains, and we talked about what we’d been listening to reinterpret some of it within our work. Jack has knowledge on the technical side of things too from his old noise projects (which I hold in very high regard), but he chose to just let me do my own thing while he did his, which I appreciate in terms of keeping the contributions more distinct.
My chain as seen below was; on the right side of the image, bass rumble texture with radio signal being sent to low volume Donner Fuzz (a cheap-o version of the Big Muff I very much like), Death Metal Distortion (which beefs up the bass and gives it a classic “wall” sound), Crybaby Wah (which I’m using as an extreme low pass), Bass Eq (which I’m using to bring in the subtle high end static left behind from the wah) and Compressor (which gives the high end static texture a shuffling timbre). On the left is the vocal chain, which has the Pitch Shift, Gate and Cabinet Simulator running on the Zoom GX-1 Four to abstract the voice to crackles (my Gate Pedal was not working for whatever reason which was extremely disappointing, so I had to compromise with the sounds being more coarse and less crackly and more distinguishably Pitched Down, which had to be worked with), ran through Tube Overdrive, EQ and Compression to give the sound more punch & shape. Underneath the table is a Marshall Amplifier so that even though we are using headphones, feedback can be enjoyed when needed, and I wedged the contact mic underneath the amp to give us some more bass throb reactive to the other elements.
Out of frame also is my laptop, which is running the clean USB mic input through VCV rack and being sent back through the mixer. The voice is being sent through a filter with noise-modulated cutoff, which reduces the voice to crackling in a more high-end focused way than the pitch shift. I experimented with this output triggering the Quantised Chord resonators to create a drone reactive to & created from the voice, which worked differently to how I intended, but nicely enough to keep. There is also a reverb channel for the voice which cuts through the mix a bit more while keeping the sound cluttered, my idea for the work is for the voice to become a part of the wall / the wall to be formed from the sound of the voice, so to me it feels like even the clean channel should be buried under heaps of other sound. I also split the headphones using VCV rack, which wasn’t ideal since we were both getting quite different sound qualities this way, but even after bringing as much gear with me as possible, I somehow had left a headphone splitter in the flat, so compromises had to be made.
We did a draft of the sound using song lyrics for a take, which was quite nice. I have been obsessing over Nick Drake at the moment, so there was a lot of that being thrown on top of what I gauged as a mix of song lyrics and improvising based on them (lots of Current 93 as Jack is obsessed with them). With the noise being “walled”, meaning near stagnant static texturing, improvisation and interaction between vocal and noise took the focus rather than the narrative content, the vocal tone and overall sound of the voice dictating the character of the noise as I replaced noise sources with Jack’s voice.
Jack brought up some writing he did previously about Joan Of Arc for our second take, which we decided to go all in on improvising and leaning into sampling aesthetics by using the topic as a springboard to interject Jack’s own writing with extremely tangentially related works, Joan of Arc then allowed for interjections of Norman Boutin’s idea that she succumbed to heat stroke before death as intervention by Christ (written about in JOAN OF ARC’S DEATH: From Heat Stroke), then this idea led to a couple more ridiculous interjections of choosing to add parts of Jim Morrison’s writings to imply martyrdom, and lyrics of Current 93 songs out of Jack C’s obsession and bringing in more fantastical aspects to the work. The result I liked a lot, more than just reading other people’s work the improvised collage of work from other places, including his own, gave it a characteristic that I think works better with the Noise and leans further into my own interest mentioned prior in Cory Strand’s Reinterprative work and Jack’s own David Tibet obsession, who is also another highly referential artist (as well of as course the classic Burroughs Cut-Up technique often brought up in this course).
We did around 4 full recordings of our track, each around half an hour (I love longform work, I can’t help myself) before calling it so that Jack could get his train back to Manchester. I finished feeling pretty elated by the status of the work, so I’m pretty excited to continue working on it after this weekend, I also gave Jack a heads up to send over any material that he wants to add, and I’ll be sending over drafts while I go along editing and mixing it. One of the main concerns though, that I have about the work is that we have probably made it longer than is desirable for marking, because even though we love that it is so slow, it adds a harsher level of subjectivity and 30 minutes could be pushing it, so I would have to make an abridged version alongside the full thing I would guess. I don’t think Jack will be able to come back down to Liverpool for a bit so if he is to add more material it will be remotely, so I got a clean take of him reading in case more prominent/discernible vocals are needed, or if extra layers would be nice to be added, but as it is it was a conscious choice to mask the language and keep the work texturally focused. Overall, though I think this was a pretty productive session, and I am actually very excited to get the work finished despite procrastinating it for so long.