I finally got a 1 to 1 done with Jose, albeit while in a pretty horrible state of not having slept and just having got off of a Coach. The 1 to 1 kind of helped making my ideas into something with more of a goal, Jose suggesting that the Ambient Box Set could be multichannel, could have a cinematic sound to make my portfolio more desirable for an employer, he did think that having one project to be recorded work, the other to be live performance based was a good dynamic to show a multifaceted discipline. It seems like something I’m lacking strongly is context, I am confident in what I make but it should be grounded in research for the marking scheme, which to me is something I can’t really force, like if my work is thematic I find it hard to articulate that theme in language, which is why it is done through sound and not writing, if that makes sense. I feel like everything I do is extremely personal, so I just need to figure out a way to articulate what I am expressing and find work that engages with something similar as a reference (as well as make the work into something). Most of the session was spent just generally taking about Noise, what it does, its aesthetics, etc, which is fine and I did enjoy it, and I found it particularly helpful after talking about Noise literature for references, and I got some recommendations for work that I was not aware of, but these feel only really apt for Project 2, which kind of stressed me out more regarding the first project. 

But I feel like the main issue I’m facing that is making me focus on literally everything else other than this is that I feel like I have to do it, which I guess is taking away some of the appeal that making music usually has to me and creating this kind of impenetrable wall between me and this. It’s pretty awful, but the 1 to 1 really helped feeling reignited in making stuff, so as soon as I finished I got in the library and bashed out an extended Drone Ambient cut of The Cardigans – Favourite Game, looping the bridge, refracting it with resonant filters, harmonised resonators, delays, reverbs, harmonic oscillators, those kind of purifying sine-ish sounds. I feel like it does something attractive for me, the aesthetic of song covers has always been a fixture to me, giving a reference point of what the sound was and where it has been taken as well as riffing on the idea of the “eternal hook” aspect that Celer has to me (also somewhat referencing the Celer track Merita which I hallucinate this Cardigans song over the top of whenever I hear it). I did this because I wanted to do it, it kind of goes against my idea for the Box Set, as it is literally something that I would do under the Fox alias, but it can become something else. This idea isn’t final yet.

Roger Batty of Musiquemachine (which is probably the only site from the “golden age” of HNW still reviewing work) gave my heart of grief album that I mentioned in my first entry a pretty glowing review recently, which I really appreciate as he rarely rates anything above a 3/5 kudos (“one of the most impressive and atmospheric releases I’ve heard from the progressive side of the wall noise in a long time“, so lovely!).

I have always loved his writing style when approaching this music, describing sound with mostly onomatopoeic and material-based language, focusing purely sonically rather than aesthetically or with a desire for emotional content, even when my work has interjected some. Because of the research project, I am listening to and engaging with a lot of work to do with Wall Noise within a more ephemeral context, so much that it is making me want to do nothing but live in that world, and it is making me see further parallels to ideas previously touched upon in this blog, the idea of Wall Noise and Drone Ambient feeding the same itch, just at different levels of social knowledge. Both occupy the same space, which got me thinking about what I am doing with the combination of the two in some of my albums on this ephemeral level that I am exploring within my research. At the moment, it feels like the only way to progress this project is to marry the ambient work I am creating with this Wall Noise fixation in a literal way, make work that does both, occupies both spaces and expresses this homogeniety.