For this project I particularly wanted to use a track which had vocals in it. I have a great fondness for the eccojams Oneohotrix Point Never did under an earlier pseudonym - to take fragments of well known music, particularly bits with vocals he found that emphasised a deep desire or longing and drown them in echo and reverb and then looping them for a good few minutes creating a very washed out kind of sound. I quite often find I like these reworks more than the original songs.
So, my entry this week is inspired by that kind of approach.
I used the collaboration between @howthenightcame@calmnesia and Essie Quoi (for some reason I can’t find you on here Essie - I’m sorry, I’ll have a better look when I get a chance and tag you!). Which had all of the elements I wanted to make my own eco-esque-jam. I deliberately didn’t look for or wait for any individual stems, preferring to EQ the various different tracks.
I’ve recently picked up a LaunchControl XL for mixing in Ableton - but really didn’t dedicate any time to really figuring out how to use it besides occasionally turning a panning knob. This project presented a great opportunity to dive a little deeper with it So here I’m mostly just making a few passes and messing with effects and volume while in record mode.
At this point I have to confess I’m a bit lost. It’s not a bad thing, but I’m not 100% sure who I’m collaborating with. The sense of randomness is appealing.
I started with the Nightwalker Stem and added a lot of other things. Nothing seemed to fit. So I reduced the Nightwalker Stem to something more minimalistic by repeating some moments. Again I added a lot of other things – and nothing seemed to fit. I threw away nearly everything and so it became what it is. I needed a lot of time to like it … hope you like it, too, and that the sound donors can recognize some of your original sounds …
Because I always try to never look at the new discussion before contributing to it, I felt a little bit lost in clicking thru the old playlist and looking for notes for existing stems. Maybe next time we should maintain some kind of central page or just start a new topic for collecting the stems?
Random.org gave me the number 74, where I landed at the piano solo track of the 3-way collab: [Bellyfullofstars – Three-leaves-feat-stefan-strasser-stijn-huwels-disquiet0431-solitaryensemblesx3]
made by @bellyfullofstars, @stefans and @stijn
So I collected the single tracks, took those apart and remixed it to make it my own. I’d say it’s still our own. It took some time until something I could do with it emerged, but then I didn’t do much, just added drums (seems to be some kind of standard way to do a remix, but maybe that’s because it easily gives a new frame), sped up the piano and aligned it to the beat. I run the guitar through some effects simulation and used only snippets of it which were partly repeated to make it more calm. someone may space out to this, so we don’t want to startle them.
I did roughly the same thing with each of the parts from @BennDeMole and @DeDe - I loaded them into a sampler that works as a granular synth and set velocity to control sample start point rather than the amplitude or anything else. Each note has a big release time, so they sometimes overlap. This way I could skip about through the session files, stumbling upon ways of reshuffling the content that I liked. Sax has a bit of tremolo and a faux tape delay, guitar through a chorus. The guitar part plays backwards near the end, but the stuttering grains make this pretty opaque.
I sliced up two pieces of @fakeg3nius part and made 4-bar loops, feeding them through different kinds of EQs and filters.
Bippy drums and bass tone my own. For some reason I felt a field recording would be a good way to kick off, so I sifted through existing material on my hard drive.
As usual I’m not 100% convinced with what I’ve done - I think I still prefer the original track. If nothing else it was novel for me to play around at a much faster tempo than usual. Thanks all.
Environmental activist Greta Thunberg speaks to world leaders at the United Nations in September 2019. Today the world is shaken by the Corona crisis and the climate crisis is less prominent in media and in peoples minds. But Arundhati Roy said the other day:
"The pandemic It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."
The remix is dedicated to the great Andrew Weatherall. He teached me that remixing means to combine a beat, a message and a hook in order to amplify those elements into something bigger. I tried to do that here.
Took the tracks “better” from @DeDe and “Facilie Descensus Berlin” from @joemcmahon and took a few bars from each, which I tried to combine. Tuned them, increased the tempo, detuned both slightly (few percent), added some synth notes here and there. In the track itself I thought it would be fun to have a break with some bit-crushing and end with a decreasing tempo, fade out.
My attempt to give voice to the feelings of isolation and distance between us.
I broke the rules a bit this week. I took three stems from different collabs and tried to weave something together from them. Started with @onkeltuka submission for the first round Winter Never Came because it really caught me. Added @Ausgesuchtestenohren Bass Drones Minature stem and my own synth stem from last week. Ran all the stems through a sampler with various effects to make them colder and more abstract. Added a few layers of droney textures. Tried to make things feel cold and distant. Not sure if it worked or not.
@Stull - I loved your trumpet track that went with @baconpaul’s piano, so I took your stem, combined it with my vibes track, and added a new whole-tone electric piano track, and then Frippertronics the hell out of your track.
Thanks! I was inspired to continue with the trumpet myself, but I was unable to finish a piece for Disquiet 0432. I ended up here instead (done just today and still pressing a deadline):
So here I’m mostly just making a few passes and messing with effects and volume while in record mode.