muted tones

now that it’s up…

september 29th, 2004

…I wonder if it might be as interesting to others as it is to me because I know the songs that the various snippets making up the piece are originally from. but perhaps that’s all part of the artistic dilemma regardless…wondering if the audience will get the same out of the work in question as you the creater do…

I still like some of those songs, though I wouldn’t really want any one to hear them in their entirety (embarrassing) mainly because the lyrical conceits are pretty juvenile…but what can you expect from one’s teenage years…

it turned out more ambientish than I originally thought it might. even the noisier samples I used in places fit into the piece in a more textural way…

sonic thoughts…

september 20th, 2004

since I’m contributing the first track to muted tones 3, I thought it was about time I write a little something about what I’ve been trying to do:

originally, I had thought to do some field recordings — at first literally in a field in the countryside north of Toronto where I grew up, but my mic sucked and I didn’t get anything useful. next, I thought to make some field recordings of the weird warbling, whistlings sounds the subway station makes at the corner of Spadina & Dupont — check out the bubble-ish thing in the bottom left of this picture I found on somebody’s blog: picture — but those sounds are dependent on certain weather conditions (wind, primarily, from just the right direction), which conditions haven’t been met whenever I go down there with my minidisc and microphone…

so, lately I’ve been doing some self-plunderphonics, so to speak, plundering a bunch of my old cassette 4-track tapes containing songs I wrote when I was a teenager (I’m sure lots of us have those). quite embarrassing, some of them, but I’ve taken some of the better sounding snippets and am now in the process of reassembling them into something quite different than the originals…I hope…

aidan