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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
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