Sometimes I am overwhelmed by the methods and theories I hear when I read about other artists on llllllll.co
It is fascinating to me how some of the processes have a programming language involved or include a range imaginative physical maneuvers to interject random accidents. I often just read and reread the steps hoping to understand what types of mind processes are happening but in the end I realize I am just not wired that way.
I really enjoyed the metaphor for the ‘music ignotum’. It actually made me just imagine different things and for most of the period that the thread was running that was all I did. Imagine things.
Determined to work toward something I continued to try various approaches.
For the last few weeks before the deadline I had been trying different melodic ideas, each one becoming more and more edited, simplified, thinned and stretched.
Somehow I thought if I refined my statements a clear way forward would be found. I again found myself reducing both harmony and processing in favor of simple note movement looking for something that would cause me to feel like I am making music that answered the brief.
I had gotten to the place where all that was left in the things I had recorded was long sustained guitar tones with very slow movements. Becoming more minimal by the day was all I could think and but I still felt like I was missing the brief.
Somehow what seemed like a very simple brief for sound creation really stopped me dead as I tried to take it seriously without losing my sense of self or point of view. I spend most of my time listening to small pieces.
I often do simple tasks while listening back to the recordings I have made, keeping my hands busy while I drift with the sounds. I was in the kitchen cleaning vegetables and started really looking at Shiitaki Mushrooms. The ones I had purchased were extremely fresh and only starting to open the spore gills. The more I looked at the mushrooms the more I thought about how the shapes of the spore gills looked like resonant cavities. Each slice of the spore gills as a small resonant chamber. So there in the kitchen suddenly was the answer.
Imagine a set of sounds that come as a result of reflection of the harmonic resonances that are from the mushroom’s spore gills singing back the sustained minimalist tones that I had been working with.
Now that I had a clear idea it was fairly easy to execute. The simple guitar tones were processed through two tracks of a step modulated pitch delay max patch in Ableton. The step modulated delays were time modulated with a random LFO. In the end simple tools - guitar and delay, with a bit of reverb.
To me this made me think of the mushroom spore gills each echoing back bits of the sound offset in time… singing back to me. Final imagination to place the whole piece.
In forest clearing
Under a crisp bright starry night sky
Looking up at the underside of mushrooms
Singing tones to them as they echo back
Hearing each other
