Disquiet Junto Project 0409: Spooky 3.0

tristan_louth_robins · 2019-11-02T02:31:52.149Z

Boy, did I go on a weird trip with this one. Thanks, Marc.

The short story is that this piece was inspired by the later work of musician Scott Walker, in conjunction with the strangeways of Google Translate.

Long story:

I was sitting on the couch with partner last night and I mentioned this Junto prompt. She thought about spooky kinds of music and said straight away, “oh yeah, that Donald Duck one by Scott Walker.” For those unfamiliar with where that reference is pointing to, it’s the penultimate track on Walker’s 2006’s album, The Drift. The entire album is harrowing, but “The Escape” brings things to a ghastly (and profoundly surreal) climax. Those who have heard it will know what I’m talking about; those who haven’t - well, you can check it out for yourselves.

We discussed this a little more, and I thought about doing something in the vein of late-period Walker; along the unsettling lines of The Drift and 2012’s Bish Bosch - with a heavy emphasis on queazy atmospheres, abrupt cuts, disturbing lyrics, etc.

I grabbed a recent book of Walker’s lyrics (Sundog) which compiles lyrics from across his career, though with a heavy emphasis on his later work, including several sets of lyrics (c. 2016-2017) which remained unrecorded up to his death earlier this year. These unrecorded lyrics are fascinating and you couldn’t help but imagine what they might have sounded like against Walker’s incredible voice and his knack for interesting structures and phrasing.

A favourite of his late works is “Barracuda”. Much like the bulk of Walker’s late work, it doesn’t easily derive clear meanings, and is rather a sequence of fragmented imagery and sensations, which reads a lot like the narrative of a fever dream. The chorus is particularly strange, whereby one dreams of a barracuda which appears to shape shift into spires, razor wire and burning tyres. I’ve provided an extract of the lyrics below:

the collapse
of the
rubber boom
confetti cannons
ashes
around the
room

bladders stop
beating
like
moon flowers

your bones
on my back

your long lost
nom de spume

there’s everyone
that isn’t you

no eyes behind
my eyes

dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into shining spires
dreamed in barracuda
dreamed into razor wires
dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into noonday choirs
dreamed into barracuda
dreamed into burning tyres

**

A peculiar characteristic of Walker’s later lyrics is his usage of really odd terms (such as ‘Gynozoon’ [in 2012’s “Zercon”] - good luck Googling that), phrases and the occasional line of non-English words. Pulled together, everything becomes a chain of brain-swelling non-sequiters. When I was re-reading through “Barracuda”, I was struck by the line ‘nom de spume’. I went to Google Translate and it picked it up as Romanian, translating to: ‘name of foam’.

Now, that might not be what the line actually is (if it is anything at all) but it set my mind to what I might do with “Barracuda”. I had originally thought about recording a spoken text of the lyrics to music, but this struck me as a little uninspired. What I decided I would do - based on the ‘nom de spume’ translation - would be to run the lyrics of Barracuda through Google Translate into a different language and translate it back again into English.

It took a bit of experimentation, but eventually I settled on using a combination of Romanian, Turgik and Sudanese, which warped lines of the lyrics into a semi-desired outcome. I then took the ‘remixed’ set of lyrics and translated the bulk of it back-and-forth a couple more times. This was the result of the third iteration:

straps of the sleeve
dark gray in the room
the shoot grows like the flower of the moon
my bones behind me
lost a long time after baking
they are everywhere, not you
he doesn’t even look at my teeth
I have a dream
dream in a shining glass
I have a dream
Barracuda
cast into the fire
I have a dream
you eat breakfast
I have a dream
pour into the wheel of the car

**

I loved how the process of translating the lyrics back-and-forth could warp words and phrases and transmute the original lyrics into this kind of parallel reality version of “Barracuda”, whilst keeping some of the original elements of it intact. In this respect, I thought the original was pretty spooky/uncanny; then I took it into even spookier/uncannier terrain.

For the musical accompaniment, I recorded me reading out the remixed version of “Barracuda” and then dubbed this to my old Tascam 424 cassette multi-track. I used an old cassette that I picked at random, which I discovered has these field recordings on a couple of the tracks. I kept these field recording, and then recorded an additional track of me improvising with a microphone (via a loop/delay pedal.) This was dubbed back into Logic and I did another four-tracks of improvisations on the Tascam. I then mixed it all together in Logic.

I’m quite happy with the outcome. I hope Scott would have liked it (as well as the rabbit-hole process.) I’ve always liked the medium of cassettes and memories of discovering old ones in boxes and finding some really weird things that people had recorded to them. All grainy, hissing, warped and strange.

howthenightcame · 2019-11-02T03:36:22.418Z

@tristan_louth_robins epic process and result, love it

Tuonela · 2019-11-02T04:17:27.701Z

Boo…

disquiet · 2019-11-02T04:40:59.181Z

The playlist is now rolling:

fbusche · 2019-11-02T12:58:14.378Z

VCVRack, Geodesics, Elements, Plaits, Octasource, Rampage, Rings, Plateau. Lots of self patching and feedback for rhythmic noisiness. I wanted to impart more of rhythm and musicality then I have the last few submissions. Not sure that I got what I wanted, could’ve been a little scarier, however I feel like there are definite elements of suspense. There have been so many great prompts lately and I enjoyed this one as well.

mdh · 2019-11-02T23:13:31.370Z

I’ve started a new job recently which involves me having to commute 3 hours per day… which I quickly realised was not good for my sanity, so in order to try to tackle the problem I bought an OP-1 to jam away with during those hours. So far its working great but I’ve stuck to rather conventional grid based beat oriented music so far. Thought this would be a great opportunity to push it into some weirder directions - so I decided to do everything within the OP-1 for this project.

I started with using the built in recorder to capture a couple of plucks of the high E string on an acoustic guitar.
I also used the line in to record a cassette of BBC Radio Collection of “Just William” read by Richmal Crompton. I picked this up while visiting the UK recently to see some extended family near St Anne’s on the sea, I’m going to try and make it a habit to find a couple of old cassettes wherever I visit.
And used one of the built in synths and percussion for some extra sounds.
I got quite caught up in the reverse and stutter tape tricks - too much so maybe
I think it starts out sounding quite creepy, but eventually just gets odd!

Had a blast making it though. Happy Halloween everyone.

There’s a moment where I can swear I hear my girlfriend say “baby are you cold?” somewhere buried in the mix - I asked her if she remembers saying it, but she doesn’t. But I’m not convinced, maybe the microphone was still listening while I was recording something else. In any case it creeped me out.

Pineyb · 2019-11-03T01:58:59.676Z

This is too long, but it probably has to be. Mostly hands off patch on the modular that I gave up on, but came back several hours later and it had evolved… Recorded into ProTools and added a bit of reverb.

Sereptie · 2019-11-03T07:26:12.303Z

Dark World. OP-1. Koma Field Kit FX. Tape.

IMG_4615.jpg2614×2614 1.77 MB

RupertL · 2019-11-03T07:52:24.127Z

It’s been a few weeks (months even !!!) since I last submitted something for the weekly challenge but I couldn’t resist this one…

It should be pretty self explanitory hopefully - it starts spooky and gets spookier… made using Spitfire Audio’s British Drama Toolkit and LABS Amplified Cello Quartet, Native Instruments Straylight and Sonic Couture’s Glassworks.

stefans · 2019-11-03T15:12:03.870Z

This one is based on a loop of a breathing sample which was pitched and slowed down and treated with Abyss free doom effect. Fading in is the orchestra drone first from the right with AM radio sound, slowly speading and getting clearer to the anotal final chord.

Orchestra samples are from Ableton standard library.

cmcavoy · 2019-11-03T18:09:18.085Z

Recorded two long sessions, one with VCVRack & Orca’s Heart, the second with Vidiot and a VHS tape called, “Jack Van Impe Presents: The Occult World”.

Cut them both up into bits, combined and published. I’m not sure how spooky it turned out. The music was more nice and tonal than I wanted (Orca’s Heart is just too good). The preacher is pretty creepy.

Happy Halloween!

Oh - to answer the question, “what makes music spooky?” - that’s been scientifically proven as “reverb.” Lots of reverb. 20 cc’s of reverb, stat.

name_constant · 2019-11-03T20:05:52.213Z

Hello all, here is my contribution:

Thinking & making:
The main difficulty with this assignment was the question: how to outdo an idea or image in my mind, which is always of unrealistic perfection, I’d say by definition. Anything that outdoes my imagination must have been generated by chance, otherwise I had thought of it. hmmm.
Maybe that was not what is meant. In any case, let’s think how spooky is different from scary or creepy. The main feature of spookiness is the unknown and uncontrollable, but still reminding us of something real, that just behaves somehow wrongly. Making music wrongly quickly results in noise. hmmm. Just make strange noises you hear in a room results in an audioplay. So I combined several recordings into a scene, which contains knocking on a door by an unknown entitiy and very strange singing and ambience to a strange, wrongly performed drumloop to return to the music. At least I expanded my techniques to make strange singing. phew. The result, in order to outdo my ideas, has to be not so pleasant to listen to in the dark. sorry.

Field recordings: binaural recording of knocking on doors in several rooms, geese, buddhist monk chant loop, someone singing strangely.

haebbmaster · 2019-11-03T20:21:22.953Z

Du bist der Zweufel.

At the moment I’m setting up an ambient / noise / noinput / feedback installation that fits in a suitcase.
It’s not ready yet (the mixer will be replaced by a matrix mixer).
Recording was made “live” in one take, just a bit of normalizing in audacity.

Have fun!

OakBloodThree · 2019-11-03T22:31:28.246Z

Thinking about what makes music Spooky, I decided to consciously avoid the classic culturally-conditioned, received notions of musical spookiness that I could easily fall into, e.g.: Tolling bells, pipe organ, theremin, harmonic and Hungarian minor scales, etc.

I tried thinking of recent films that had spooky soundtracks, and the first recent one that came to mind was The Favourite. Its soundtrack falls into a kind of “uncanny valley” between music and not-music. I read a bit about it and the film’s sound designer, Johnnie Burn, has said basically that: “There was no composer on this film; we were working a lot in that space between music and sound…”

I also recalled another recent-but-not-quite-recent film with a spooky soundtrack: Under the Skin. Turns out Johnnie Burn was also the sound designer on it! I guess I am now officially a fan. (Though I still consider myself an “Elfmaniac”.)

I wanted to make sounds that could resemble something familiar, but not quite.

To make this track, I started with a public domain recording of a Sedge Warbler: https://freesound.org/people/SiliconeSound/sounds/475048/
I reversed it, applied a gliding stretch so it starts out at full speed and slows to 1/8 speed by the end (i.e. down 3 octaves). I chopped it up into 7 pieces and made the pieces overlap at tail to head. Automated pans make each piece move gradually toward the center.

Additional tracks:

I played two analog synth tracks (on Prophet Rev2) using bespoke patches. The tonal patch is using a 7-limit just tuning that repeats every septimal tritone (not-octave-repeating).

I applied distortion to the kick drum part I played (using puffy legato mallet) for “I am the Sweeper” by Diane Marie Kloba: https://music.dianemariekloba.com/track/i-am-the-sweeper

Everything was mixed with multi-tap delay and nonlinear reverb.

Paul_Reiners · 2019-11-03T22:46:29.820Z

I used the “Bruk Foot” reggae riddim. “Haunted Houses” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The sound effects were from a record I had when I was a kid, “Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House.” The introductory narration is by Laura Olsher.

I did this in Ableton Live.

tristan_louth_robins · 2019-11-03T22:47:42.314Z

Thank you - glad it had a good outcome!

VonnaWolf · 2019-11-03T22:55:40.330Z

Hello, happy day! Using the drum patterns and my distorted vocals to create a loop in Ableton. I then played the Midi fighter thru a drum rack in Ableton with a looper grouped with Korg to create additional layers in Ableton thru the Roland DJ808. I then looped in a ROLI Block. I took the sample and then played it thru the 1 and 2 in Serato while recording into Ableton thru the Resampling track. Enjoy!

Mike_Dayton · 2019-11-03T23:55:08.616Z

I initially wanted to try exploring the genre of Dungeon Synth but this transformed into something else. At some point this track began to sound a bit too pleasant for being scary but then it struck me that could be a metaphor for a real life horror, addiction. Drugs can appear so cool and enticing on the surface but the evil lies underneath.

The main melody line comes from the generative app xynthesier as well as some clock samples played in samplr and a boatload of effects.

Bach-y-nal · 2019-11-04T01:04:57.423Z

Just tongue in cheek stuff: I was imagining myself as one of the hapless victims in various Lovecraft stories, especially one–whose name I don’t recall–which has the narrator coming across midnight worship of Lovecraft’s alien gods in the wooded hills west of Boston… [it might be ‘Whisperer in Darkness’]

howthenightcame · 2019-11-04T01:48:27.779Z

@Bach-y-nal Good idea and a great track. You now have your first part for a complete soundtrack to the story!!