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: symphony of the senses 1
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: symphony of the senses 2
Symphony of the Senses is a piece by Simon Desorgher, for improvising musicians and dancers. The piece has a broad structure, in that specific sections are defined (heart, breath/air and so on), but the specific details of how each section is formed is largely left to the musicians to decide. This version of the piece was performed in Colourscape with Simon playing flute, Michael Ormiston on vocals, various eastern percussion instruments and (if I remember correctly) effects pedals, and myself on computer. There were three improvising dancers with large coloured scarves, and various scents were released in the different sections of the piece.
In Colourscape the audience move around the whole structure – fixed performers (that’s me) are in a large central dome, whilst the other musicians are on radio mics and can move around freely. The dancers also roam the structure during each performance. It’s quite an experience, for audience and performers alike.
I’m using the same software that I used for my solo perfomances with metal, so I’m layering and looping sounds using software recorders (technically, I’m recording into buffers) and replaying the sounds using granular playback and delay lines, as well as adding extra effects. These are live performances, but there was quite a bit of post-production – mostly in the mixing, though there was a bit of editing involved as well.
Tagged as:
computer music,
experimental electronica,
flute,
Live Electroacoustic,
overtone singing
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: time
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: waiting
“persistence of vision“ is a two hour edit of a 4 hour performance in Colourscape, from around 2000/1. This time I’ve broken the recording up into separate, shorter pieces, of between 5 and 15 minutes.
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: nervous rain
I think that by this time, I had most of the metal sound sources on my performance rig sorted out. In addition to the metal strips, I had found two beautiful metal whisks in the kitchen department of one of my local department stores, both of which produced everything from quiet, hard bell-like sounds up to a demonic rattling; a large piece of angle-iron gave much needed stability to the sounding board, but turned out not that sonically interesting – a grating continuous bell-like sound and the occasional clang were about all that it would produce; and my “eviscerated spring reverbs”.
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: what lies beneath
Back in the days when I worked for EMS, I’d found that you could create a wonderfully thunderous sound by (gently!) knocking the synthesiser so that the springs in its reverb unit banged together. So I hunted around for a couple of old reverb units, and took the lids off the springs. Now I could brush the springs directly with bits of paper or plastic, or create an incredible industrial screeching sound by bowing the mounting plates of the metal casing.
The rain-like sounds in “nervous rain” (above) were created by slowly (and gently) dragging the edge of a piece of card slowly along the springs. This sound is then fed directly into a 2 channel looping delay line, with different delays on each channel, so that the sounds drift slowly apart.
Again, the sounds are looped and layered, and played back in different ways – slowed down, pitch shifted, random playback and so on. One of the modules in the software plays a single recording back at different pitches, producing chords. This is what you can hear in the “the final toll”, where the chord gradually shifts down to a single pedal note.
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: the final toll
Tagged as:
atmospheres,
Dark Ambient,
drone,
metal soundscape
