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the dream before – parts 1-3 (download here)
In “transitory”, the first piece I posted, I was still experimenting with different sound sources to feed into the software. I had a wooden frame with a large sheet of metal suspended from it, a violin strapped to the top of the frame with a contact mic attached, an electric guitar with an e-bow, a microphone for my voice, and various other bits and pieces.
At some point over the next year, I was taking part in an evening performance at a monthly sonic arts network* cafe. I was using a similar number of sound sources, (there wasn’t enough room for the 6 foot high sheet of metal!), including a metal metre rule clamped to the tabletop with a contact mic attached. The performance went fairly well, but as is often the case at this kind of event, I was constantly competing with the noise of people talking. The usual arms race – the louder the talking got , the more I turned up the volume, the more I did that, the louder the audience talked, and so on.
Towards the end of my performance time I fell into simply bowing the metal ruler to create a deep slowly evolving bass drone, and got completely lost in the sound. After the performance several people commented to me that this was their favourite part of the performance. I took my own involvement in the sound, and the interest that people showed, as signs that this was a good direction to pursue in terms of my sound sources.
bowing metal strips
And so I started putting together a an instrument consisting of a piece of solid high quality timber mounted on a trestle, which had different lengths of metal strip securely fixed to it, and a contact mic on the bottom of each strip. As time went on I also added various other metal objects such as kitchen whisks, angle iron, and what I called an “eviscerated spring reverb”. The result of attaching the contact mics directly to the metal strips was that the sound produced was very intimate, very close; gently bowing the sides of the metal strips produced a whispery, and at times very tentative kind of sound, with lots of variation over time. I could also produce very powerful, aggressive sounds by bowing strongly, striking the metal, or by dragging paper or fingertips over the springs in the eviscerated spring reverb unit.
For a performance at Lawrence Ball’s Planet Tree Festival in 2000, I made a hand-held instrument of solid wood with smaller pieces of springy metal fixed to it and a single contact mic attached to the wood. It’s this that you can see in the 2nd photo below. And it’s this instrument which is producing the sounds you can hear at the beginning of part one of “the dream before” .
This is still a fairly early version of the looping software. One of the things that I found very interesting about using this software was that it didn’t necessarily behave in what you might call a logical, computer-like way. It would occasionally misbehave - the sounds would glitch, jump, click, or even sometimes spiral out of control. I liked that the results I was producing were not always under my control, and that the software was almost behaving as if it was a real world, analogue instrument, rather than a fixed, rigid piece of software that always behaved in consistent ways. This only added to the “sandbox” aspect of the software. I could choose a place to start, in terms of my ”in the moment“ choice of original sound, and the initial settings of the software, and then follow the development of the piece in ways that the sound itself suggested, trusting my subconscious processes as to where the material would go next.
(* Sonic Arts Network has recently merged with a number of other organisations to form Sound and Music. The web site is up in beta form, and should be formally launching in Spring 2009.)
