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DAVID LAST
THE SECRET MUSIC OF PLANTS
In the summer of 2007 I joined some friends at a special location on the shoreline of Rhode Island. This location is the home of Duncan Laurie, a friend who is a sculptor and researcher of the connection between science and sound.
Upstairs on this property there is a laboratory with a wide array of unusual electrical research equipment, and a full sound system with subs. What happens at this place is research into the nature of biofeedback and sound. While we were there, Duncan had connected electrical sensors to the surface of plants; a venus flytrap, a potted houseplant, and what looked like a soggy variety of moss. The sensors are the kind of electrical sensor you might put on the surface of your own skin to measure slight fluctuations in your natural electric field. I believe they are the same thing you might see in movies attached to the foreheads of people undergoing lie-detector (polygraph) tests. They are also used generally to give bio-feedback in relaxation experiments.
One night Justin Boreta (who was also there at the time) did some technical work to connect these electrical sensors to MIDI signals which were sent into music software, by way of a sensor data translation program called "IBVA". Justin did some amazing work that night, translating the electrical signals from these living plants directly into abstract sound. The sound sources were, I believe, both software and hardware synthesizers, and a digital harmonization processor. The sounds produced directly by the plants' natural electrical fields were complex, and sounded like some kind of alien form of consciousness (which in a way, they kind of were). When rounded off into notes instead of free-flowing tones, the melodies produced were eerie and (as might be expected) quite organic. The following day Justin had to leave, but together we had installed IBVA on my laptop. That day I created a stereo audio mix of the elements Justin had created.
Though Justin had gone, the IBVA system was still there, and I had worked briefly with Justin to get it working on my computer, so I did one experiment of my own. It was less ambitious than Mr. Boreta's experiment, because it dealt with the data from only one sensor, and dealt with a single audio instrument. This experiment is what I would like to share with Modyfier.
THE EXPERIMENT
I set up my laptop with the IBVA feeding data into my music software, which was running a granular sampler patch. On my laptop, I was able to play recordings of music I had been creating, and step through microscopically short segments of this music. The position of playback of these tiny sound "grains" was determined by the electrical data coming in from the plant itself. In other words, the electrical charges on the surface of the plant helped to select what part of what musical sound file on my hard drive would be played. In this way, the piece is a collaboration between myself and a single houseplant.
The goal of the experiment was to find out if it is possible to allow a plant to unconsciously structure a piece of music (or at the very least, to use the biological flux of electrical signals from a house plant in order to determine a musical structure, in collaboration with a human (me)).
The collaboration was multi-layered. I had been preparing sketches of orchestral music for my own projects, and there were a large number of sound files on my hard drive; these were used as "building blocks" for the musical collage. Some of the sound files contained full pieces of music I had composed; some contained only orchestra instruments playing melodies or chords, some contained crazy sound design, recordings of bells from a carnival, or choir voices singing dissonant tones. Almost all of these sounds were acoustic in origin. All of these sound files were made available to the Reaktor patch I was using in order to create a new piece of music out of many fragments. As the piece progressed, I could change which sound files were being accessed, and the plant's energy readings could change what part of the sound file was being played, and how much of the sound file would be heard. Whether this constituted conscious collaboration is, to my mind, irrelevant.
So, not only was there collaboration in terms of how the files were being played back (my interpretation of how the plant's "alien intelligence" electrical signals could be used to generate music), there was also a collaboration in terms of my offering of the original audio source material for "mulching." Certainly, in order to get musical results, I heavily impressed my own sonic personality on the experiment; however, the plant's feedback did in fact help to create a composition I never would have created myself.
The recording is totally un-edited, recorded straight to disk. The 16 minutes of running time are exactly as they sounded coming from Reaktor, live in the room! There are several "movements," and the whole thing strikes me as very similar in its overall feeling to modern classical music.
The whole thing was made exactly 1 year ago. I hope you enjoy it!
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TRASH YOURSELF
John: This song was born due to Buffet Libre asking us to do a cover for their Rewind Project in which all the artists were asked to remake an 80s song. This isn't something we would have naturally done without the constraints that were put on us. We started off by sifting through our 80s archive and chose to remake NWA's "Fuck the Police." We wanted to do something that we felt had never been elaborated on. We wanted to do something that we knew none of the other artists would have come close too. Most of the other artists kinda stuck with the new wave / rock route and didn't go towards 80s hip hop. I think people kinda forget about hip hop when they think of the 80s and just think of weird hairdos and crazy clothes or whatever. We wanted to make the song something of our own, so we threw out the verses and just kinda ran with the idea of "Fuck the Police." We felt that it went with the attitude behind Trash Yourself, of just not giving a fuck.
Heidi: Yeah, Trash Yourself is about attitude and feeling.. It is more than music and less than fine art.. Trash Yourself is strictly what you want to take from it.. and what we aim to give you is meaning masked in the loud mouth antics.
John: I wanted the intensity of the song to match the lyrics so I layered a bunch of synths and guitars with over compressed drums to get a really driving sound. After I had the main section written, Heidi came over and we both screamed a bunch of shit in my closet. I distorted the vocals, chopped them up and built another section around them. A main factor in how this was created was the deadline. If we wouldn't have been under a week timeframe to make something I think the process would have turned out a lot different, and more drawn out. It's easy to second guess yourself when you have time to spare. Sometimes having a limited timeframe can be a good thing. It was a fun project. We are happy with the result.
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RUOHO RUOTSI
Preflight Preparations:
Back in 2006, I received a commission from The Polycubist at Skor Records, to write a piece based upon a series of Amharic and English language spoken word recordings by the Los Angeles based Ethiopian reggae artist, Isaac Haile Selassie. The concept was to showcase a variety of interpretations of the spoken word. The Polycubist selected Jack Dangers, dubLoner (aka [a]pendics.shuffle aka Ken James Gibson), Gys and me, Ruoho Ruotsi, to be featured on the EP.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with the recording of Isaac Haile Selassie's sonorous and emotive voice and chose to build my track from the Amharic language spoken word. Having grown up in West Africa and as a musician with experience living in a variety of cultural contexts, I find myself somewhat sensitive to the aesthetics of blendings of cultural-musical memes. For instance, the musicality of a sung verse by a Malian griot (like the one that backs Salif Keita) has a certain intrinsic beauty, in the articulation of the consonants, the flow of the vowels or simply the rich vocal texture. Therefore, the process of writing an accompanying melodic line or bass part to such a verse must not only consider tonal and rhythmical aesthetics, but must also function to amplify or reveal latent aspects of the original sung verse in a coherent fashion. This is crucial to show respect and sensitivity to the spirit of the source material, while bringing something new and engaging.
These were some of the thoughts that grazed in my mind as I listened through the Amharic spoken word recording the first couple of times, contemplating the delicate challenge of writing new music for these words. My first step, I decided, was to spend a couple of weeks "marinating" in Ethiopian music sung in Amharic to get an idea of some common musical contexts for the language. Additionally, I was curious to discover the timbres of the instruments common in folk and popular musics from the Horn of Africa, hoping perhaps for the possibility of weaving such an instrument's textures into my piece.
After a deeply unsatisfying web search, I asked one of my Ethiopian-American friends, Teddy, where I could track down some CDs from his motherland. He referred me to his brother, who pointed me to a couple of Ethiopian craft stores in Oakland, that also carried selections of Ethiopian popular and folk CDs. A short BART and bike ride later, I found myself in a little craft shore, crammed to the hilt with carvings, prints, wall-hangings and Ethiopian knick-knacks of every colour, shape and smell! To my dismay, the "wall of music" was behind the counter! So for the next hour, with my most charming manners on display, I proceeded to make the very patient and not easily exasperated lady proprietor, play every CD she had available ... I ended up buying about 8 CDs altogether, satisfied that I had reasonable coverage of contemporary Ethiopian and especially Amharic language music.
Of all the music acquired, a certain album emerged as the clear standout. It featured Alèmu Aga on the Bèguèna, playing to his contemplative spoken word. The last track of this CD featured an instrumental version with many sampledelic multi-minute cuts of sheer Bèguèna goodness. To give a little background, the Bèguèna is an Ethiopian 10-stringed instrument that resembles a large lyre. It has U-shaped leather thong buzzers that are placed between each string and the bridge. It is played by plucking the strings, which causes the buzzers to vibrate against the edge of the bridge producing a characteristic buzzing action that helps to create its unique sound. The Bèguèna dates back to the time of King David and has a revered role in Ethiopian society. It is used in large part for meditation and in religious and cultural ceremonies.
Process:
Finally, ready to start writing, I sampled sections of the final instrumental track on the Alèmu Aga CD. These sections, which were usually multiple-bar-length recurring melodic motives, were then passed through filterbanks -> envelopers -> delay units, where the essences of the buzz and string timbres that I found most interesting were emphasized and further sculpted. I then separated each passage into a series of shorter note-length sections that I mapped to my clavier keyboard. Next, I turned on my hard-disk recorder and spent a couple of hours playing and improvising with these short-short sections to try create some new melodic phrases and interesting "one-shots". Afterwards, I waded through the recording and picked out the most compelling sections. These I inserted into my "ready-for-arrangement" folder.
Since the Bèguèna isn't usually tuned to a Western diatonic scale, it was important to find compatible tonalities in which to play my synthesizers. So I did some listening and harmonic analysis of the best bits from above. Then, using the central tonality of the sampled and massaged material, I wrote some simple basslines in Reaktor to live in the space just above sub-bass, but below your standard bass guitar.
Now, with a series of bass and melodic passages that I was happy with, I loaded them up into Ableton Live, mapped them to my keyboard and improvised again, playing and mixing phrases to get some thoughts for the arrangement. While doing this, I used some factory-preset percussion (shekeres, etc) to give a basic sense of rhythmic structure. Once I had an idea of how the bass and melodic parts would work, I pulled in the raw, unprocessed recording of Isaac's Amharic language spoken word and overlaid it on everything else. The phrasing didn't quite match at first, so I split up the vocal into sections based on Isaac's own phrasing and naturally longer pauses. This gave me about 8 or so sections, some as short as 15 seconds, others long up to 45 seconds long. Each vocal section now had its own pace and internal consistency. Now with these vocal sections as the foundation, I reworked my arrangement, matching the vocal, melodic and bass parts to live and develop together naturally.
Once I was happy with the vox, bass and melody, it was time to dive into the percussion. I own an African percussion sampler CD, that I bought 10 years ago around the time I acquired my first Yamaha hardware sampler. I wanted a clap-like sound, but something more organic than your standard drum machine clap or snare. So I searched for hands & feet clapping type sounds, loaded those up and sequenced them. Next, inspired by the thought of a large-waisted African auntie playing a shekere and grooving to these sounds, I fooled around with some shekere samples from the sampler until I was happy with how the results sat in the track's empty spaces. I then mixed these into the background, using a combination of lower mix level and a bit of reverb as an insert to add to the spatial impression of distance from the listener. My initial percussion arrangements had a decidedly slow burning grooving nature, akin to a halfstep-dancehall-bastard-love-child. Initial feedback from the Isaac Selassie and The Polycubist leaned in a more directly danceable vein, so I bumped up the tempo and brought in the 4th kick.
For the final touches and to help bring the song's structure into focus, I sequenced the interesting Bèguèna "one-shots" I'd initially created. I then added some snare drum dub-ification every 32 bars with careful attention to the length and textural qualities of the reverb tail. Next, I mixed Isaac's vocal deeper into the surrounding music than I had originally, adding a healthy dose of send effects to my favourite reverbs, phasers and delays at key points. After all this sweetening, the breakdown about halfway through the track still felt rather anemic. This section needed something with a more robust transitional nature, so I mixed in some groovy reggae-style skanks passed through a LFO-synced resonant band-pass filter, to give a dash of tone color through the breakdown.
After completing the track, I rested my ears and brain for five days or so, before re-listening with a fresh perspective. I still liked everything and was a happily surprised in a few places. Further positive feedback from Isaac and The Polycubist cemented this as the final version.
That's it! Thanks to Rayna for the opportunity to feature this song on her awesome blog and have me ramble about my processes.
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C.L.A.W.S.
One thing I’ve always appreciated about electronic dance music is the freedom one is given to both creatively and improvisationally manipulate how it is mixed, especially when the style gravitates towards long overlapping mixes.
There are many approaches a dj can take towards constructing a mix. Some like to put a lot of forethought and planning into the particular tracks they select and the consequential sequencing. To me, this method usually results in a level of rigidity in the mix and saps out the spontaneity that I appreciate. My preferred method is simply to grab a big stack of tracks that i like, think about the feeling and energy that i want the mix to have, and just go for it letting the selection and sequence happen in the process. In this mix I wanted to start with a fun and driving arrangement that drifts into a darker and more relaxed end.
I also feel that people often strive for a “perfect mix“ with no apparent mistakes, which is usually attained through editing and post production. While I like a tight mix, I don’t mind hearing a flub here and there because (as my friend Jacob tells me) it reminds the listener that they’re hearing a live performance.
I made this mix with two Technics 1200’s and an Allen and Heath Xone 92 mixer, recorded into logic. I hope you enjoy it!
01. suokas - stockhom
02. hot - mrutalkin
03. the cheapers - caves
04. bloody-mary vs. sierra sam - baccara
05. kit clayton - grey amber (dan curtain remix)
06. louderbach - dior compound
07. andomat three thousand - hominid
08. akiko kiyama - fungi (inxecs rmx)
09. misc. - schictdienst
10. franklin de costa - borderline
11. daniel dreier - horny
12. alex tsidiris - oshhh (aaron hedges and beaner rmx)
13. coalition of the killing - too many machines (argenis brito rmx)
14. jichael mackson - one thousand bugs
15. ferrante unt teicher - taboo
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