This week’s session was a visit from Megan Steinberg of Drake Music, which is the organisation responsible for the second path of this project. It was very interesting, but it hasn’t swayed me on doing that pathway really, as I am not so technologically proficient. But I did like seeing the instrument examples given, especially the less digital modes like the pedal-based guitar to fret the strings. I have seen a couple of the instruments used before as well, the Linnstrument I have seen online and the Mimu gloves, I think I’ve seen at a concert last year, so it’s quite exciting for them to be used in this kind of context of increasing accessibility of playing music.

This has however not swayed me on what I would like to be doing, so I decided to go ahead and ask my friends who I am doing the heavy drone group with at the moment if they would be down for trying a performance, since a space by my house has opened that is quite cheap to rent for performances and I feel like people I know would most likely come to see and perform if I give enough of a heads up. So far, it seems like everyone is down to try something. The idea I have right now is wanting to create something from the amplification of spray paint on a surface, as a performance that leaves behind remnants is quite beautiful to me, so having the sound of the dramatic creation of work would be a good method of this, and both Prince and Izzy do beautiful artwork. They are on board from having spoken to them, so I have asked if they want to try jam next Sunday, as I will be in the City. It seems like it will be happening, at least to play music if not to practice this specifically, but meeting in person might help bring together some more ideas of what could be done to be exciting within the performance space even if I don’t have everything needed to make this work yet, but I do have spray paint and a lot of metal at home that I can use a contact mic on, so we can try a primitive attempt to work out Gate sensitivity and the characteristics of the sound.

I have not contacted Igor Ruz, I feel out of my comfort zone sending cold emails to people who don’t know I exist, so I think that idea might be dead in the water, or maybe possible with another artist with similar interests to Igor that I would know online or in person (although the already pre-existing interest in The Green Elephant would not be there most likely). I think it’s best to just see if my friends are up for doing this first, and seeing how this goes, seeing what ideas emerge from it.

This week’s session was apparently supposed to be for us all to present slides related to what we have going on with our project at the moment (which, (somewhat thankfully) I was not the only one who didn’t get the memo for), as it is our last week before spring where we are expected to come back with a first draft for the project, so it makes sense and will be helpful to find out where people are up to to develop my own work accordingly. As I am stuck in this limbo right now of not having much going on at all with my project, I had to just be honest and explain that I haven’t got very much of anything done. I explained some ideas that I had with my friends, as well as some more ideas to do with tattooing and performance, which did help, but I don’t think I am where I should be at at this point and over the spring will ideally be able to get things worked out enough to have something to present when we come back.

As for last week’s jam session, it didn’t happen; I booked the room out, and on the day everyone either cancelled or didn’t respond, but wanted to do it at another time. I have a feeling that this isn’t going to really work for a Uni project since everyone is pretty unreliable, not that this wasn’t expected, everyone has shown up hours late every time we’ve actually done it, meaning it’s hard to get everyone in one room. During the Spring, though, we could play some music, just not related to this project, I don’t think.

The rest of the class was focused on preparations for Crit sessions and methods of giving peers feedback in the best way possible, a lot of it was quite good advice too, and felt related to what is happening with the method of the group listening sessions Adam Stanovich puts on, where after the first listen the group is to talk amongst themselves as if the artist is not in the room, and the second listen through is to engage in the Q&A. This method gives the artist a view of how the work engages an audience without their own input attached, giving the response more purity with the peers acting as if they are not even there, really.

For myself, though, if the work with my friends continues to fall through, I think the best bet is to man up and contact an artist I don’t personally know with a proposal rather than waiting for friends.

This spring I did some collaborative work with a couple of people online, but not much for this project. I did a duo with a classical violinist over voice call which was pretty fun, I went into it thinking that classical practice would actually make it applicable to this project since I am from a completely different background and I could then send the work over to a filmmaker/video collagist to work with (ideally themed around The Velvet Underground was my thought of relating the work to some “Rock Music” as usual), but the sound actually was not as disperate as I thought, it turned out to be a really nice psychedelic drone-fest spindizzy without our playing really being much different (even though I have no training at all), so I just released it on its own on my label site. As for the Band, it is not happening for this project. We did a couple of jams, but not everyone was in the same room at once, as predicted, funnily enough, so I guess I dodged a bullet not relying on them for this.

I also have been in touch with Theo H for a little while, who is one of my favourite artists from the 2010s Wall Noise sphere, and found that he was now spending most of his time exhibiting paintings with a similar aesthetic to his sound work, being that it is intentionally primitive but greatly evocative and confusingly grandiose art brut. I suggested the idea of us co-creating some work where I create Wall Noise reacting to some of his paintings (akin to his old Ushinawareta Tamashi project), but at the moment, he is busy with commissioned work, so it disappointingly will not be doable within the time frame I have.

So still at a brick wall really with what to do, but with the label I’m running at the moment being the primary outlet of what I’m doing, I floated the idea with friends of running a kind of URLfest for it (which is a live stream ‘festival’ with pre-recorded/live music and visuals), as we were running these compilation showcases of people around our ‘scene’ already, so doing something similar but facilitating video art and live performances in a classically ‘Internetty’ way (which is important to me to stick to as part of the ‘netlabel’ aesthetic I pledge allegiance to). I think this would create room for myself and others to platform sound and video work, and allow for me to reach out to some artists from netlabel/webart circles that I’d like to participate in the ‘fest’ or collaborate with. I pitched the idea to people who have been on our last couple compilations and was happy to see a lot of enthusiasm, so I organised a group chat for us to set this all up while keeping the rules vague out of trust.

So with this idea being my main thing at the moment, it feels better to have an idea I am passionate about that is doing something both out of personal interest and for University, so I’m excited! Today’s class was with Milo, which was nice as always. He talked about past collaborative experiences with a prior band and art collective, and what he had going on outside of the UK with this collective. I didn’t find much applicable to my own practices other than being kind of sad in seeing people drifting apart from each other, but that isn’t like a new revelation or anything.

The plan for next week is to hopefully reach out to more people to get on board (more Visual Artists is the idea) and confirm with a lecturer if this is suited to what is expected from us this term, as well as to set a deadline for the project so that everyone who wants to get something in for this has the opportunity to. I feel like for this I want to perform some drone ambient with projected film accompaniment, I will see how accomplishable this will be.

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.

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.

• https://corystrand.bandcamp.com/music
• https://infernalnoumenaproductions.bandcamp.com/music

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.

I have been working on the recording since last week, cutting out some parts that I felt were blunders, unpleasant or redundant. There is also some aspects that I forgot to mention prior, like the use of microcassette re-recordings of Jack’s voice occasionally put back through the microphones on the spot to add extra scuzz, or the use of a random Goregrind CD filtered through the Pitch Shift chain towards the end which I thought were fun artefacts of improvisation, as well as an amazing sample I don’t even remember happening at the time and I don’t know what it even is appearing halfway.

I am working in FL Studio, which is not so great for editing and cutting up, but works well enough, and I enjoy the sharp cuts it gives, regardless. I mixed the recording I got from the Amp using my phone (I love raw sound) with the audio going straight into the interface, and listening back I can write about the recording a bit better.

Issues in the recording;

• Jack’s Phone is interfering with audio sources, creating undesirable ‘beats’.
• Some pitch-shifted vocal sections are ugly.
• “Explosive” part toward the end is puny.
• The recording is mono.

I cut out some of the vocals because of this and cut out a section where we were having issues with the interference which were the easy fixes, but for the other 2 issues I thought it might be best if I recorded some extra material in VCV rack to compensate, using only the clean vocal track and noise sources. I didn’t think to screenshot the patches sadly so I will try and describe them to the best of my ability, but using complex simpler to loop the voice, and sending the channel to filters with noise-modulated cutoffs, with some careful filtering and tight reverbs I was able to simulate a fake field-recording-esque recording from the voice which I think is quite beautiful to think about. I also added another chord with resonators, which elevates it I think.

I also added a second patch running the vocals through a marble emulation plugin, which is more strange and free-sounding than the noise sources, and played the voice through some excessive freeze delays so that the voice lingers excessively and swarms in stereo. I feel like this makes the sound a lot fuller than prior and adding more elements made from voice makes this to me feel like more collaborative, as Jack C is a bit swamped with work right now so can’t really add much more than he has, so I will have to squeeze as much as possible out of what he has given me, and this approach to me is pretty fun.

Also, since the theme is Joan of Arc, the infernal textures really lend well, which is something that I guess was happening subconsciously during the session. With the clean take of the vocals, I structured them and stretched them throughout the track, and eq-ed them so they were distinguished enough from the rest of the voices in the mix in the high end, but I didn’t make them so much discernible as much audible, as to me that is the point. I tried some voice manipulation on Ableton on campus too, stretching the voice into small stuttering jabs which is quite entertaining, which I gave a nice ringing timbre notched reverb as well. There is a lot going on, basically, and I tried structuring it the best I could so that these things happen noticeably and it isn’t just mindlessly piling more on top.

The mix so far is extremely messy due to the clipping on the original recording, so I need to work that into a feature rather than a detriment. I also want to add some extra drone material to make the work friendlier since I don’t expect whoever is marking this work to be as into this stuff as I am. As it is though, I’m glad all I have to do for the next week is refinement since a lot of this has been procrastinating what to do, and even though Jack C has had to prioritise his own work at the moment I still view this as a collaborative process. I am not sure if I will be able to make the next week’s class since I am basically out of money but I feel confident enough in what I have that I should be fine.

The track is finished, I added a drone made from Nick Drake’s They’re Leaving Me Behind track with reverb and low pass like Cory does that appears toward the latter half, as well as some better mixing and more thoughtful structuring. It is clipping in places but I enjoy the sound of it, it is more crackly than being annoying digital clipping, so I think it adds more sound to the excessive sound pallet. The wall structure is good I think, there’s a section toward the middle where the vocal presence takes focus because of the excessive delay layer, as well as a wonderfully stagnant part with subtly rising drone layer before the main one, it reminds me of my friend Angel’s Narehate stuff in the structure and sound kind of.

I made the ending abrupt. I recorded some droning I had forgotten about and decided to just ignore what was intended for the ending, but I kind of just prefer the sound of the mixer being turned off to anything more dramatic. I sent the mix over to Jack C a few times, and he mentioned that in my earlier mixes, things towards the end just become more mushy and indiscernible, so I added some automation to layers so things will poke out more during those parts.

I’m pretty excited with how this turned out and plan to release this on Bandcamp somewhere after the hand-in. The title I have at the moment is “Now take away my hand and talk about the love you had to let go”, which are lyrics from Your Hand by The Dead C. I have been having a very rough time the past couple of months emotionally, and The Dead C has been keeping me afloat, so it seems like an apt closer for the year to use some of their lyrics, it speaks to the depressive atmosphere of the release as well, it just clicks in my head I don’t know. Jack C is happy with the mix too, he likes the role of his voice and language, which I’m glad about since he will be M.I.A for a while to do his finals for his law degree. This feels like a good capstone for the year. I decided against doing an abridged version of the track as it would, I think, make it more confusing to mark. The length of the piece is something I enjoy, so I wouldn’t have it any other way. In regards to the collaborative experience I guess I spent too much time scrambling about for ideas to work out doing a more lengthy collaborative piece, and stayed in my comfort zone of ‘Jam Sessions’ instead, but I think what Jack brought was a challenge for me to extract as much as possible from the voice, and for him exciting to be part of some noise for the first time in I think 3 years, marrying his long time interest in writing poetry with it as well. It has been a very positive experience working with a very close friend, basically, and I am happy with the results.