Posts tagged as:

drone

persistence of vision

by davidestevens on July 23, 2009

in Early pieces

persistence of vision 1

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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

persistence of vision 2

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falling embers – bass, flugel, electronics

by davidestevens on April 23, 2009

in Recent

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falling embers (41.52) 23/04/09

Steve Lawson and I finally managed to get together today. After some initial problems with Steve’s looper, we got started, and produced this 45 minute improvisation. I’m very happy with the way it worked out – apart from a few small cuts to tidy things up, this is exactly what we played.  I recorded the stereo outs from my main computer, and Steve’s rig, so there’s no real post-mixing, only occasional added effects and a bit of sweetening.

The instrumentation is:

Me on flugelhorn, bowed metal and software, and Steve on bass and Looperlative – a very cool hardware looping device.

It was interesting and inspiring to work in this way. Steve comes from a different performing background to me (though there is overlap), which I think helps create a shifting centre of gravity somewhere between tonality and abstraction. The tonal palette is also expanded in interesting ways, though again there is overlap – it’s not always clear who is creating which part of the soundscape. And of course playing as a duo means that neither of us is “on” all the time, which means that there is more time to let go into the sound and wonder where to take things next.

Why “falling embers”? That’s the feeling I get from the final section, from about 38 minutes in to the end. It seems to me to sit right with the rest of the piece too.

Enjoy!

Steve Lawson and David Stevens

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The Tube

March 30, 2009

Tube Performance – saxophone, delay lines, and Korg Kaospad
Imagine a clear plastic tube, fifty foot long and about ten feet high. There are four loudspeakers arranged around the tube – one each at the top and bottom ends of the tube, and the other two along the sides. People are sitting inside the tube, listening [...]

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First live performance – York 1999

March 21, 2009

transitory spaces – 1999

I spent the best part of a year working slowly on
resonant 1 and 2, which was a very enjoyable process. The processing to produce a new element took anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, with no guarantee that the processed sound would be what I was after. Each individual sound was [...]

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The first trickle of sound …

March 13, 2009

alteredstates:resonant 1
The first extended harmonic drone piece I created using a now defunct piece of software called SoundMagic, created by Alberto Ricci, with extra plug-ins created by Michael Norris, which are still available as AudioUnit plug-ins.
I wanted to start with a sound which was overall fairly constant (apart from gradually dieing away) but which contained [...]

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