In the first composition I have used material recorded in my overcompression workshop while also allowing myself to use elements of my regular practice such as virtual synthesizers, various samples I have collected online as well as recordings of my own voice. For this composition, I allowed the material from my workshops to retain a lot of their original chaotic nature by only restricting its frequency content in very extreme cases. It resulted in a composition where the building blocks seem to fight against each other, pushing each other out of the frequency spectra and allowing clear structure to form for short moments before dissipating.
I desired the intensity of club music, but where that intensity broke the seams of itself and unraveled, only finding islands of peace before being swept away again. I used a sort of collage of rhythmical sounds that didn't form quite a whole, but rather rolled forward on top of each other without settling into place. The sounds were only on occassion rigidly and consistently organized, but held enough internal rhythms that it kept momentum. The crunchiness of the sounds also aided in this sense of unraveledness, often sounding like the result of broken equipment. I worked towards a balance of just how many of the clicks and cracks to keep in to signal a sense of intention about it.
The sounds in the piece not originating from my workshop consist of:
- 6 heavily processed self-recorded vocal tracks
- A short voice sample
- A saw wave lead
- Six variations of kick drums, differently processed
- A variety of percussions
- A few short pad and bass samples
- A recording of metal drums with all but the lowest frequencies cut
- A synth pad made of a cello recording I have made myself.
The sounds coming from my workshop are as follows:
A consistent technique in this piece was to use the drum buss on the glitchy and electric sounding sounds. The drum buss plugin that can enhance drum sounds through compression, improved click in the transient, saturation etc. The key feature here is the boom feature, which allows you add a low, tuned sine wave to any transient.
The drum buss logically interprets a sharp movement of the waveform as a transient, and the waveforms of these sounds are often highly unusual. This leads to a very naturalistic irregular kick drum repetition which quickly gives you a naturally interesting and outside the grid rhythm that you can organize on the macro scale.
As shown above, this particular waveform that I used makes sharp moves to the very positive extreme and stays there for prolonged periods of time. Every one of these, as well as their release, count as a transient for the drum buss. Normally, a waveform like this would silence the audio output completely through phase cancellation, but the usefulness of the drum buss here is also that it simply interprets away and does not output this extended extreme position. This means that the drum buss can be used to process these kind of frequencies to usability even if one does not add any other coloration to the sound.
Returning through the piece is, as mentioned, a metallic explosive sound. It was made through an impulse into the Hybrid Reverb pushed through extreme compression. This held another useful feature of these misused sounds. Several plugins will, when pushed, start exhibiting highly interesting panning. This means that you can get natural movement in your music with fluctuations that can be very hard to automate in as natural a fashion.