The theme of this week’s disquiet junto project was creative reuse — call it recycling, or unconsumption, or upcycling, or compos(t)ing. Four objects from garbage pails at work or home were developed into an original musical track that would be used as background music for a PSA about recycling.
We were allowed to transform the sounds of these elements, but only lightly, so as to respect their inherent sonic properties. In my track, all objects are represented in their native state, either alone or interacting with each other, as loops or one-shots with minimal processing. The soundscape underneath the raw sounds is a layering of each live recording in a processed state. I tried to keep processing to a minimum. Each processed sound was only either time stretched or resonant filtered, with 0 or 1 more effects applied on top (harmonics, pitch shift, or wah-wah). In this way, I think the processed sounds retain their sonic signatures, though some of them got blissfully strange (e.g., the eerie trash-wailing ~2:00 is a time-stretched, pitch-shifted bendy straw being pulled open).
The four objects used:
wine bottle (napa valley, ca, beringer pinot grigio, via ‘prime time wine and liquor,’ brooklyn, ny)
cracked sea shell (rockport, ma)
snipped guitar string ends (ernie ball heavy-bottom/light-top custom set, via peekamoose guitars, 30th st, nyc, ny)
bendy straw (china, via freshdirect dot com)
The live sounds recorded:
wine bottle dropped into bathtub w/ sea shell
wine bottle submerging
blowing into empty wine bottle (long blow, two-puff, one-puff)
spinning-in-air guitar string ends
low-e guitar string scraped across sea shell
pieces of sea shell tapped on each other (a one-shot and an 8 bar live loop)
blowing into straw while opening its bendy accordion joint
clean open of the bendy straw accordion joint
22 tracks (11 live w/ compression and reverb, 11 processed)
rig: sony acid 7.0, paulstretch (windows), condenser mic, motu interface, lexicon reverb
the earth’s just slowing down, and it’s just about to stop. the only question is, “where will it be noon?”
peace,
westy
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more details on the disquiet junto