During this tenuously denormalized environment that we, as humans, face currently amid the COVID-19 epidemic, most musicians [and non-musicians] are discovering ample time on their hands that can be utilized for creative endeavors; hence, for this week’s disquiet junto, I imagined, as Marc had stated, “[an] idea of looking ahead, of projecting, and inhabiting that projection,” and set out to produce a work of sound that might become representative of manners of compositions by musicians and non-musicians, alike, briefly ahead in the future.
To that end, I struck off into this project intending to be pure audience to the piece; that is, I desired build a soundscape that was completely out of my control, and to which I never input a single note or sound via my usual musical tools and instruments. Six month from now, I imagine the word’s aural archive will have grown in its number of works created by non-musicians with no musical instruments, save a computer for retrieving, and mixing, pre-composed soundfiles.
But, of course, when composing and mixing a project in a DAW, egotistical control and inward aesthetic always prevails in my case – I had to choose and edit several huge beds of sound, layer them side-by-side, and judge the manners in which they collided and existed together (i.e., volume fades, effects, and panning).
I chose the pre-recorded online file archive of freesound.org as my nest egg of sound options: I entered the words “space” and “a-note” into the search field over a period of five hours, and auditioned, chose, and melded, seven distinct soundfiles that were ten- to ninety-minutes in length, as might a non-musician [?1], and mixed them together – of course to my aesthetic (i.e., volume fades, effects, and panning).
This is the result: “In the Orbit of a Victorian Fireplace.”
