#154

Not much to add! I was actually quite (positively) surprised by how fluid and natural the whole process was. I was a big pleasure to work on this with @Jet!

@jasonw22 @Angela Love the artwork!

And now I’m really looking forward to listening to this!

3 Likes
#155

Thanks for putting this together @jasonw22! I took a listen to the first half last night, some really really impressive music being made on this here forum.

My collab with @jwhiles was super interesting. The song we put together was definitely something I never would have done on my own.

From my perspective, the process went like this:

we started with a simple sound – a recording of a recorder, by @jwhiles.

I put that into a sequencer and tried to come up with a few interesting musical ideas, and moved the project to Ableton Live.

@jwhiles extended the sound motif and added some glitchy drums, along with an automated bpm shift – something I’ve never done before.

I took that and tried to extend it into more of an arrangement, adding some ‘live’ recordings from the online shortwave radio scanner: http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/, the simple bass part, and so on. I also in places added a back beat to tame the glitched out drums.

As I recall, @jwhiles added one more round of polish / ideas / drum programming. We stopped when we weren’t immediately inspired to keep going with the track.

On the whole a fascinating and unique experience–so different than working alone!

5 Likes
#156

thank you so much for putting this all together @jasonw22 ! I just finished giving the album a listen and there are lots of fantastic gems. here are some notes from my take on my collaboration with @giftculture…

we are friends RL who play modular together, including a couple times in front of small groups. until now it had all been improv, so we thought this would be an opportunity to give ourselves a kick to hunker down and work on a Real Thing. we both have a pretty good idea of what styles the other person likes so we decided to both make some recordings on our modulars and go from there. @giftculture suggested that we use Ableton Live with Splice to collaborate. this tech choice was a pretty good experience overall, more thoughts on that here: Ableton Splice

very early on, I made some modular recordings which appear here and there, most notably, the solo groove you hear during the first 30 seconds is a SSF Entity + TipTop SD808 being driven by a Teletype and going into a Rainmaker. pretty sure that is the only modular on the track, although @giftculture may correct me on that.

@giftculture took my recordings and assembled a basic structure with bass and percussion loops, and added in the wah pads. at this point the dub sound began to emerge. I wasn’t able to help much with Splice during this time period because I was not up to date on my Ableton plugins so I was mostly restricted to listening and commenting.

three weeks before the track was due, we decided to have an in-person session. this mainly involved @giftculture driving Ableton with me making mostly-helpful suggestions in the background. this is when the d&b fills emerged, and we made the bass a lot more active. we were reasonably happy with it at this point, but kept going back and forth online, with @giftculture manning most of the polishing since he is way better at Live (I’ll be playing some catch-up there, soon!)

on the weekend before the track was due we met up for two several-hour long sessions. on the first day we ended up trimming tracks where the layering was making things sound too muddled. this was the peak of testing out our mutual “Yes, and…” experience as it can be hard to kill your babies. the cuts made individual bits shine more and we decided that it was good but needed more melody to create interest. near the end of the first evening, @giftculture improvised an early version of the fantastic and distinctive space melody. on the second day we made that resolve more interestingly, sprinkled in the faux vocals, and did a ton of fiddly tweaking with effects, mixing, and panning. this got us to a place that was near to what you hear on the compilation.

during the final week we had a few more ideas but most of them seemed to hit diminishing returns. I was convinced that I could do some cool Clouds processing but everything I did was meh. @giftculture and I did a few more rounds of iteration with tiny mixing and mastering tweaks, and we called it good a couple days before the due date.

I had a ton of fun and learned a lot and am excited to work on more in the future! it feels great to finish something that I’m happy with, and working together was a blast.

6 Likes
#157

This is great! Thanks so much to @jasonw22 for wrangling it together, and to @Angela for collaborating on the great artwork.

I can’t wait to listen to the whole thing.

For my track with @fjna we kept it pretty minimal. I recorded some initial tracks improvising on the Serge with a heavy dose of reverb. Then I sent stems to @fjna, who added some incredible live performance of bells/bowls/chimes/something? (@fjna can add more specifics about how he recorded this).

From there I took it back and did some editing, mixing, and really not that much. It came together really easily and I love how the two very different parts play off of each other.

Oh, and the strange “voice” things at the end is a recording of voicemail phishing/spam that I received threatening to “come and arrest me” if I didn’t give them my banking information.

11 Likes
#158

@sandy well thank you for your kind words, which i can return. Your input was very relevant and has been decisive in this track. :slight_smile:

indeed this was a work of offline processes (not to make a pun on the online nature of processes in-between). I used mostly fscape, a bit of Virtual ANS and probably csound as well (there are files in my render folder, but no source code related to those).

I find it revealing that after a few exchanges, sounds had been iterated upon, mixed-cut etc so that in a little time from now i don’t think i could ever reconstruct the steps and who of us acted where. It puts a core of “letting go” in a work of precise control; (and that has shed light on some frictions in my usual process), decisions, for me, were relatively easier to take (not in the sense that each sound would have been calling for its own “obvious/natural” place amongst others, but in a sort of a relationship with sounds that was lightened from most of the symbolic metadata that usually come with re-contextualized phonography.).

The “non-submersible units” is a thing i have used in another project at the same time and it has proved a nice “trick” when the macro-form is not a very important parameter or is unpredictable or does not want to give hints on how it should be.

Ok, now on to listen to everyone’s works ! And a big thank you to @jasonw22 for another multi-dimensional contribution to the community.

7 Likes
#159

I will hold my hands up and say that @GoneCaving did most of the heavy lifting on our track (e.g. structure, processing). We began by collecting field recordings from our trips that took place during the project. These were transformed into most of the sounds in the track. I created a few percussive loops using polyrhythmus and the Sigur Ros drum kit in ezdrummer. @GoneCaving then mixed these in with his melodies. I then played the drums (sloppily) on my microkey to create a trip hop ish type feel. This was mixed into the final section of the track.

The processing at my end was minimal basic room reverb on the kits. We ran into a slight prob when we discovered that we were on different versions of live, but managed to muddle on!

8 Likes
#160

There were a few more modular bits on the track - the dubby pad was an E370 going into a morpheus filter, and way in the background, there was a chopped up sample of some water drums that were sequenced in the ER-301.

As @mirth mentioned, the best part of all of this was embracing the “yes, and…” while avoiding the “no, but…” as much as possible. It was lovely being able to trust the instincts and tastes of @mirth as a writing partner, and doing this project was a great catalyst towards doing more work together, a lovely official kickoff to our musical partnership! <3

4 Likes
#161

Yes, I think we both suffered from a lack of time due to external factors. To @steveoath’s treated field recordings and drum loops, I added some texture from one of the presets in Audio Damage Quanta. And the mix was run through Valhalla Room, and one of the Ableton delays.
I must say that despite the lack of time, I did enjoy the process, and would love to try it again (ideally when work is taking up less of my time and energy).

3 Likes
#162

an interesting facet of mine and @jasonw22’s collaboration is how much talking and sharing we did that didn’t directly end up in the final product! We started talking with pictures and high concepts, and explored a few different sounds from there. I happened to make a Max synth that I played, but I don’t think any of its sounds are in the final product. In the end, I believe Jason took MIDI I recorded at the keyboard, worked various magicks upon it and added drums to yield the final product.

It was a fun way of working, and in the end I think the time constraint we were under helped us finish something rather than noodle endlessly. At the same time, I don’t think we fully realized some of our original high-concept goals, so there’s room for more thought in a similar space.

I wonder if this is how one gets an album or an EP out of one concept…

7 Likes
#163

I definitely feel that @alanza and I have an EP worth of material if we went back and finished all our noodles and explorations. (let me know if you want to put any more time into any of those, @alanza!)

I tend to think of concepts as starters. You need a starter to get an internal combustion engine going, but you don’t drive on its power. In the end, the track we finished was the track we finished.

We kinda did it twice. @alanza sent over a midi noodle played out over a nice droning chord. I separated the chord from the melody and put them on their own tracks, gave them interesting voices, and added drums. A bit of feedback from @disquiet suggested further melodic exploration, so @alanza sent over a much longer midi jam. Dropping that into the first multitrack suggested a need for different orchestration, so I reworked all the voices.

It’s funny, for all my cringing about the label of “producer” I have to admit that’s more or less the hat I put on for this track, with @alanza playing “composer” and “musician”. Of course we could have reversed those roles if we chose.

I’m going to prioritize collaboration in my music making for a while. This was just a lot of fun, and I think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

9 Likes
#164

Thanks @abalone, @Angela and @jasonw22! Very fun project and it looks and sounds great! I was very excited by the prospect of making something totally different from anything I would make by myself and having full collaboration all along the way.

Continuing from what @abalone said above, we talked first off about the exquisite corpse game and building back and forth off each other’s contributions. @abalone sent over a recording and since it was made with free software, I decided to continue in the same way, and messed around with the recording using Composer’s Desktop Project and audacity, using aspects of some images we had also traded back and forth to suggest (verrrrry loosely suggest) the settings of various CDP process parameters.

@abalone had also requested a recitation of the text of an early email and then arranged the vocal track which was the email and some improvised talking since the email was just a few lines long and I wanted to make sure there was enough to work with :slight_smile:

4 Likes
#165

(Un)fortunately, I was very busy with work, that I kinda forgot how/where I got my part of the sounds I used. But, it definitely will include some Audacity/Ableton mangling.

2 Likes
#166

Really loving listening to this collection. So much that’s surprising and inspiring!

5 Likes
#167

I had a blast collaborating with @Plym on this track. Despite a couple of long vacations we had to work around, there were probably a good 4 or 5 exchanges in which the nature of our sounds changed dramatically.

I started by sending @Plym a small handful of scrappy, noisy field recordings with a light curatorial touch; I basically just grabbed a few semi-interesting things I had captured, and sent them off. What came back was stunning — @Plym, in his inimitable style, transformed my atonal pieces into a beautifully dense, rhythmic and melodic recording that served as the foundation for the rest of our work (side note: I actually don’t know how he got those sounds, so I’m looking forward to hearing more about his process here!).

In my next pass, rhythms became less pronounced, as I opted to construct drones and textural snippets from @Plym’s work. I worked primarily with tape (cassette and 1/4-inch) along with my Norns.

The big fun for me was in assembling the final track. I tried to capture the idea of listening/working, so I spent a day re-recording @Plym’s awesome final submission on different mediums while also simultaneously capturing the sounds of the studio as I worked. My idea was create a track that would start in a “finished” state, and then have its layers pulled back as it unfolds, essentially morphing into a plunderphonics piece. Not sure if that idea comes through for others, but it was a fun conceptual spin to explore.

10 Likes
#168

I’m currently having a real good time listening to all of the tracks - what a joy it is to find yourself in the company of so much creativity and talent! It feels like anyone could pair up and make amazing things. Extra kudos to @jasonw22 for putting this all together.

Loved working with @Olivier! I think you’ve covered most of out process. For me it was all about act/react. I did a lot of chopping and editing in Ableton Live, first with Oliviers field recordings, then with my own recordings with Norns. When he came back with the drone layers I was really amazed by the density and richness of it. So I did some new takes with Norns MLR to add some more clear rhythmic and melodic content. I just wanted to fill in the gaps I guess. I love love love the outro section that Olivier made with his reel to reel machine. The overall structure and concept is all him, very well thought out, if you ask me.

Looking forward to more of this : - )

9 Likes
#169

CDs arrived today. Thanks again @jasonw22

2 Likes
#170

Ok, that’s not really true. :slight_smile:
I’ve got a couple of really rough months behind me and was able to just briefly check lines once in a while. I finally had the time to read through this thread properly, and while doing so, I remembered many more details. So let me add some more to what I have written above and to what @Jet wrote earlier (and btw. @jet feel free to add anything, or correct me if I’m remembering things wrong)

Before starting to collect sounds we discussed various approaches. We thought that it might have been interesting to define a series of keywords and collect sounds matching these. Originally we intended there to be some sort of concept, but we both had various things holding us up at the beginning, plus the time zone difference didn’t help, so we didn’t work on that part as much.
Still, we got a nice list out of it, and I guess there was some fil rouge in it after all anyway. We split the samples into roughly 4 categories: synthesis, field recording and ambiences, percussive sounds, and noise. The tonal ones were to match a scale we had agreed on previously. @Jet worked with a major scale and I did work with the relative minor. For some reason we liked the idea of basing everything on a 9th chord.
We produced a lot of material, like others here, I’m sure we could at least get one or two decent tracks out of the stuff we haven’t used.

Once we had all the samples, we decided who would start (online coin flipper did the job for us, IIRC) and decided roughly what the layers should be and which sequence we’d create them.
We decided to start from a basic harmony track, then add bass, percussions and then move to the higher-register tonal parts / melody. @jet suggested that we’d always make both a tonal track and one that would only use noises, and non-tonal sounds. This worked very well, helping to keep both aspects in a balance as the piece developed.

We had never worked together, the collab spontaneously happened thanks to lcrp, but we roughly know what kind of music the other one was making. We did not really agree on a style or genre, and just let things happen. The first layers came out quite drone-heavy, and ambient-like and we decided to just stick to it.

Towards the end my private life and work, got a bit messy. @jet did the final mix and sent everything off (Thanks again for taking care of that!)

5 Likes
#171

For those of you with a physical copy it might be worth noting that the audio for tracks 11 and 12 (as per bandcamp) seem to have been swapped by the cd making gremlins! My and @ermina’s track is track 12 and the track by healthylives and jwhiles is track 11.

2 Likes
#172

Aww. :frowning: That gremlin would be me. Sincere apologies for the goof! Is it also swapped on the bandcamp site?

#173

No need to apologise. The amount to keep track of with projects like this is a lot and it’s easy for something to get muddled up along the way. Bandcamp is fine - it’s just the CD that has the tracks swapped.