finding my sound "thing"
With the weather improving, longer days, and the clocks moved forward giving more light in the evenings I’d normally be taking long-distance walks. But since mid-March our movements outside have been limited due to Covid-19. That’s meant that even though I continue to work from home I have time on my hands. So I decided to do some noise streams from my kitchen. These were improvised performances combining noisy no-input mixer, soundmaking objects, vocal improvisation, and some singing. Which is how I seemed to stumble backwards into my sound thing.
Since 2008 when I first started to make sound poetry, which quickly became sound art, then more broadly-based noisemaking, I’ve struggled to settle on one thing. Initially it was spoken words and phonemes with tapes, objects and loop-pedal. I started to add a wider range of vocal sounds, and on occasion to sing. But I found myself hitting a couple of barriers.
Since 2008 when I first started to make sound poetry, which quickly became sound art, then more broadly-based noisemaking, I’ve struggled to settle on one thing. Initially it was spoken words and phonemes with tapes, objects and loop-pedal. I started to add a wider range of vocal sounds, and on occasion to sing. But I found myself hitting a couple of barriers.
First I found that with the loop pedal, since I wasn’t a musician it was easy to end up with a congested mess of undifferentiated aural mush. Second, once I found a way round that, the loop pedal became a crutch. It was relatively easy to build pieces that sounded okay. But over time they became a bit samey, and uninteresting to make.
At that point I started to sing more, to listen to more singers, to learn more songs, and attempt with no success to write and record songs. I was still productive, and some things I liked, but on the whole it was clodhopping stuff and not as experimental as I’d like.
There was also the third barrier. I was struggling to split my concentration between voice, objects, and in particular tapes and loop-pedal. Although I didn’t altogether abandon the various techniques I was using to generate sound, at the end of 2011 I decided to concentrate solely on the voice.
More singers, more songs, more vocal music from around the world, more determined efforts to learn and consolidate what I learned, more extended vocal techniques.
The result was not quite what I expected. In effect my sound practice split into three. it wasn’t quite that neat, nothing ever is, but it’s close enough. There were field recording and sounds made with objects - usually limping and disjointed percussion, there were vocal improvisations, and there were songs - for the most part the folksongs from my childhood I was returning to. Later, more recently, I added spoken word to the mix.
And so things continued, with an increasing bias towards vocal improvisation. Which is more or less where I stayed until about two weeks ago, when I did that first kitchen noise stream. My main thought with it was just to differentiate it from my live vocal improvs, ongoing weekly for close to two years now. Since they’re primarily vocal the obvious route was to go in another direction. Pretty much at random I decided to revisit no-input mixer sounds which I hadn’t used in a decade or more, and a few soundmaking objects. Then, more or less on a whim, to add variety I decided to throw in a folksong.
At that point I started to sing more, to listen to more singers, to learn more songs, and attempt with no success to write and record songs. I was still productive, and some things I liked, but on the whole it was clodhopping stuff and not as experimental as I’d like.
There was also the third barrier. I was struggling to split my concentration between voice, objects, and in particular tapes and loop-pedal. Although I didn’t altogether abandon the various techniques I was using to generate sound, at the end of 2011 I decided to concentrate solely on the voice.
More singers, more songs, more vocal music from around the world, more determined efforts to learn and consolidate what I learned, more extended vocal techniques.
The result was not quite what I expected. In effect my sound practice split into three. it wasn’t quite that neat, nothing ever is, but it’s close enough. There were field recording and sounds made with objects - usually limping and disjointed percussion, there were vocal improvisations, and there were songs - for the most part the folksongs from my childhood I was returning to. Later, more recently, I added spoken word to the mix.
And so things continued, with an increasing bias towards vocal improvisation. Which is more or less where I stayed until about two weeks ago, when I did that first kitchen noise stream. My main thought with it was just to differentiate it from my live vocal improvs, ongoing weekly for close to two years now. Since they’re primarily vocal the obvious route was to go in another direction. Pretty much at random I decided to revisit no-input mixer sounds which I hadn’t used in a decade or more, and a few soundmaking objects. Then, more or less on a whim, to add variety I decided to throw in a folksong.
While there were problems with the sound I enjoyed the process, and didn’t struggle with making sounds at the same time as singing anywhere near as much as I did in the past. I carried on with a similar setup for a week and got more and more comfortable with it. More so with the unampliflied objects than the no-input mixer.
Since then I’ve done a few more improvs, and this combination of extended vocal technique, noisy objects, folksong, and other stray elements is really fun to work with. I seem to have successfully brought back together divergent strands of my sound practice. At least to my own satisfaction.
Since then I’ve done a few more improvs, and this combination of extended vocal technique, noisy objects, folksong, and other stray elements is really fun to work with. I seem to have successfully brought back together divergent strands of my sound practice. At least to my own satisfaction.
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