Swan Song Diary 4

This blogpost is written after the residency as a catch up with my progress on the project.

After the last blog, I have now finished a preview version of Swan Song, consist of ten tracks, and finally aired on Resonance last Friday on my last day there. This is the link to the tracks. https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Cyo08Rq5X3dMohZEHNnBPbhPzegVZuUB?usp=sharing

I spent the last two days reflecting on the process, thinking if I had done what I wanted to achieve in the beginning, and has the work reflect my research. While this is the end of the residency, this does not mean the end of the project.

I think I have done a great job at exploring the space (the mormon church), and has recorded lots of interesting materials that dealt with the theme and experimented with the tools I have been given as well as the form and the medium. I also think the textures of these recordings are very interesting and worth pursuing further. And also the way I have structured the piece is very clever and way more mature than last time on Elephant Song. There are a few examples:

First is the room mics and how I have magnified them to sonically zoom in on some of the movements that I am capturing. These recordings (especially track 1) suggested actions and has effects of a musical arrangement. The recordings are actually rather clean to begin with, but by overlapping multiple takes to create a sense of ensemble and to make them louder than they sounded, it makes the space somehow sounded bigger as well. As well as making it seems that all noises are part of the theatre performance, and that creates tension and suspense. As an audio you cannot anticipate what is going on, and you can’t predict what comes next as there is no visual cues, but that kind of heightened the hearing and I would pay attention to it even more, to sort of rely on it to tell me something about what’s going on.

The second thing is the violins. The playing is so bad if you think of it as traditional music, but of course I don’t and I think there is something very sharp and direct about it. The sound seems to go right into my heart and have a sense of excruciating pain (Track 2). It is like a cry for help, and when the violins collides together, it seems like a wave of blood is coming at you like in Shinning. The on and off in harmonies created such tension and sounded very inspiring, like dance. I think the size of the hall saved my violin recordings by defusing them a little bit because they are unbelievably loud and in your face, even when I turn them down.

The third is the piano recordings. I really like how weird and close the piano sounds, and my over-micing really work to my favour, portraying a haunting image of a relationship between the moth and the swan. I could look more into alternative ways of micing up instruments to amplify them not to make them sound good, but ‘real’ in a sense. In the case of the piano, by having the mics so close to the hammers and all the different parts, and so many mics as well, I picked up the real sounds of the action in a piano rather than when it get diffused in its body and in the room. So this would be before all the harmonies blend together to create one creamy sound source, and they actions are kind of clashing when you separate them and bind them together on a mixing console. This clashing is very interesting and have this weird texture to it that sounds intimate and romantic.

Throughout the two weeks time I have been trying to add my voice into the project, but it seems like the piece is refusing that and saying, ‘focus on these textures of sound instead of drowning everything into an arrangement for a song’. I have been wondering why I felt that way, and then I read an interview of the music duo Matmos, on their collaboration with Björk on 2001 album Vespertine.

https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2013/06/when-matmos-met-bjork

MARTIN SCHMIDT: I don’t know. As soon as someone is speaking or singing, it is over for the rest of the sounds. The rest of the sounds now have become in a support role for the human voice. Come on, man, look at the EQ on a mixing board. If they’re going to put parametrics on it, where are they? They are right in the human voice range. Why? Because fucking 99.9% of what we do is listen to human voices. It is not even a matter of mixing.

And it is kind of right. The human voice takes over our ability to focus on the tiny sounds that surround it. And I think it has been preventing me in really experiment with timbre and qualities in my own work. I don’t know how to address this yet, but for this project in front of me, I can just not use my voice until I felt the need to. And this is an interesting thing to explore as well for me, what would come out of me if I were not allowed to use my voice? Sonically and creatively?

After hearing the whole thing for a while now, I think I want to keep developing the materials and make a second part of it. From the recordings I have, I want to create another album that tells the same story, but only using my laptop to cut and piece things together. Kind of like an ‘Original Sound Track’ situation. a version that I would wanna think of as contemporary experimental music more so than a sound piece or an opera as I called it. I think it could be a fun step to take, to dive further into these interesting recordings I got, to reshuffle the linear structure that is now, to redo it. Maybe I can think of the residency merely a recording session, now that I am away and has not as rigid of a schedule, can start editing.

I have been trying to give the project a proper name when I would eventually release it. But I haven’t felt right with anything yet, not even close. That means I am not near the end of this project at all I feel, I will have to keep working on it.

These are two pictures from the second shoot. I think now that I have two shoots they can be visual aids to when I release the project in two parts, to represent two sides to the same narrative.