Disquiet Junto Project 0466: [ ] Sound Machine

[ryanscottmattingly]

The city of Lone Oak, KY was dissolved in November 2008. This was my impression when I traveled there. I was running sound for a choir in the early 2000s, and we stayed in some interesting places in Paducah. Our driver also hit a turkey at such a high speed that it came through the window, flopping, bleeding. It was fucking terrifying. It’s interesting to me that this place voted to dissolve. It speaks to the economics of blue-collar areas that have lost the prospect of industry. As for the recording, I’m reading from some dense notes I wrote about the Bible around that same time in my life. I used a copperphone mic, sm57, steel guitar, mandolin, banjo, tambourine.

[wasabicube]

This is Dunedin, New Zealand, not Dunedin FLA. I lived there, attended school, then went to university, during the era of the “Dunedin Sound”—the late '70s and '80s. Bands like The Clean, The Verlaines, The Orange (all definite articles), Straightjacket Fits, Toy Love, The Chills, to mention a few, created a distinctive sound.

This track tries to capture the jangling guitars, muffled vocals and thumping drums drifting from The Cook, The Oriental or The Gardens (what’s with all the definite articles?)—the local student watering holes, or wafting over the city from practice rooms on George Street, or someone’s student flat bedroom.

Here I’ve recorded chord samples strummed upward and downward on an electric guitar then added to an Ableton drum kit to be MIDIfied. There are also bass VSTs and an Ableton drumkit. I’ve used Klevgrand’s Jussi to simulate a slightly strangled vocalist. I’ve further mangled the guitar, bass and vocals with a granulator.

[ryanscottmattingly]

I’m curious about what the overlap of a venn for both Dunedins would sound like.

[Joule]

The street cleaner changes the city scape overnight. In this piece, I was aiming to follow the sounds from one of these street cleaners as it moves down a city street. The act of cleaning a labyrinth of streets to put the city into refresh is like coffee in the morning for my brain. I used a 128 monome grid to help orchestrate sounds coming from Arcade (Output).

[hardworking]

For this one I dug up some sounds I recorded with my cassette player while walking around Utrecht years ago (I was there for Le Guess Who?, a wonderful festival with a weirdly bad name). I didn’t record much, but I did get this snippet of church bells, which sounded to me like they were played mechanically. Thus, the sound machine!

I initially tried cutting the material up and scrambling it, layering it, treating it etc, but it wasn’t working for me. The loop on its own has a lot of character, partly from bring recorded to a cheap handheld tape machine and the noise of the street, and the processing was losing that character. So I just ran the loop on its own. The only think I did with it was gradually apply a bandpass filter on the frequency with the most tape hiss, to emphasise the ‘sound machinery’ of the tape.

[wagneric]

For two decades now I’ve had this CD-ROM in a box, containing recordings I made of crowd noise and aftermath (street sweepers, etc.) of the 2000->2001 New Year festivities in Times Square, NYC, thinking I should do something with it. These were recorded from the 6th floor, with spaced omni microphones extended out the window over 7th Ave, between 48th and 49th. Thanks (sincerely) to this impetus to do something with it, I was able to recover two of three wav files (the missing one had the countdown). I should have just burned audio, in hindsight.

What’s here is comprised solely of snippets of these recordings, with me just messing around with loops and filters.

[Peter]

The sound machine for my small Wisconsin home is based on sampler instruments created from recording of pine cones and honey locust seed pods. Locally sourced on my street. I tracked an improvisation on pine cone sampler, added some rythmn from the seed pods and tracked live violin and keyboard (tuned percussion sample in Logic) over that.

[ryanruppe]

Lake Forest is a southern California suburb in between bigger, more well-known suburbs. It’s also on fire but like no big deal.

KastleDrum direct into PO-14 direct into Monotron Delay direct into Norns/Fates running Pools for some drippy shimmer.

[JochenEdmund]

Apologies for the late submission – I’m working some crazy hours these days. I’ve been roaming the wilds of Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood in the wee hours the past several weeks. It’s a grimy old industrial neighborhood with extensive networks of alleyways that don’t exist on the map. Knowing nothing about Miami or their sound machine, I put this bit of kit together at a local second hand shop and let it rip for still grungy Georgetown. Would swap out Gloria Estefan for Jesse Bernstein any day.