Nathaniel Clark

Man­aged to uncover some nov­elty tonight, pushed Cru­ci­fix­ion Doll in another direc­tion entirely but one that made me much hap­pier. This is the song I have found entirely unyield­ing to manip­u­la­tion lately … I have spent the last 4 ses­sions, sev­eral hours each, really try­ing to wrench this out of the sonic hole it was in. Ter­ri­bly frus­trated, but then a break­through or two tonight. I just couldn’t leave it alone. Then, because suc­cess breeds suc­cess, hap­pened across 9soundware, which looks/sounds quite promis­ing… an answer to my recent con­cep­tual dilemma: do I dig in and spend some seri­ous time synthesizing/creatively edit­ing and make myself a library of sound and noise? Of course, if I had the time, this would be my pref­er­ence; but I feel the pres­sure of try­ing to get this first EP done, and there is still some sig­nif­i­cant song-writing to be done. Find­ing some interesting/powerful sounds/sampler instru­ments to use as a base would be a def­i­nite boon, let­ting me con­cen­trate on the song while still hav­ing some­thing son­i­cally wor­thy as a base. Even­tu­ally, I will have to gather my thoughts on sound-design/song-writing … since I am watch­ing myself work and I am see­ing that I find it hard to sep­a­rate these things — that is, the tim­bre of a given instru­ment will indi­cate a musi­cal direc­tion … change the tim­bre, change the direc­tion, change the melodies, change the song.

Then, I dug into some old PD patches and got them work­ing, and heard an array of impli­ca­tions go skit­ter­ing through the sound­scape and on into the clouds of impli­ca­tion. I got excited. Which is why I am up later than I promised I would be. Which is why, as usual, work will be a spine-grinding chore tomor­row– my brain will be only half-there.

So it is under­stand­able that I must now say — good­night. Goodnight.

.…research has gone well, in ret­ro­spect. There were some frus­tra­tions, and I wasn’t ulti­mately happy with the two major “cre­ative” attempts today (one attempt at grainy, scream-esque vocals that just fell painfully short but left me with a ragged throat, and one attempt to insert a motif-expanding break into a dri­ving song– the result was actu­ally sort of inter­est­ing, but it dropped the energy of the song way below an accept­able limit, so it must be (a) scratched, or (b) sliv­ered into the end por­tion of the song, where I am already doing some discordant/chromatic stuff), but over­all, advances were made. Played around with Logic’s wild and woolly ES2 in search of a mean and fat ana­log bass, some­thing way over­driven with that warm ana­log detun­ing .… didn’t get it, but found some fine set­tings along the way. Also, down­loaded some weird mel­lotron voice sam­ples for the EXS24 and drew some faux-middle-eastern modal lines over the end of snake­skins, which I am re-working for about the 100th time.

I am sip­ping some Ther­aflu, try­ing to nurse the final stages of the week­end ill­ness that gave my fam­ily a micro­bial upper­cut, and pok­ing through images of old mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers. The week­end just went and dis­si­pated into the blurry atmos­phere, and it’s dif­fi­cult to turn one’s mind back to work already. So it goes. So no clever turn of phrase to end this post, just one last sip of medicine-flavored lemon drink and then it’s off to tuck my head into a pil­low of sleep. Or some­thing that resem­bles sleep, which is just about where things are at, at night, in this hill­top aerie.

Going along with the idea that “if you build it, the ideas will come”, I have cre­ated homes for my recent audio work. Guitar/Synth/Band for­mat stuff I believe will become Engine Ares {work­ing band name, based off an old song from my for­mer band and one that hit me with the force of epiphany this morn­ing on the walk around Avo­cado Lane}; exper­i­men­tal synth/noise work will prob­a­bly go to The Invis­i­ble Noise Expe­ri­ence, a name that’s bet­ter than the ones that kept cir­cling through my head about quiet noise, though that’s the way I think about a lot of my sound work — quiet noise. Invis­i­ble Noise opens up the world to para­nor­mal audio, methinks.

In honor of the truth, the pic­ture above is not my audio set up — but oh, how I wish. No, it is an image from an MIT Media Lab vet­eran who has been build­ing this thing incre­men­tally, for years, or so I just read today. Here are some audio works from the owner’s web­page.

Post­ing the “cart” before the “horse” is an attempt to trick myself into dis­ci­plined action — now that I’ve put it out there, I need to ful­fill it prop­erly or know myself as truly, deeply “lame”.

Yeah, haven’t actu­ally writ­ten too much lately, instead let­ting the Twit­ter mod­ule take over & cap­ture the frag­mented thoughts of any given day. Night time has been spent exper­i­ment­ing with record­ing, incre­men­tally carv­ing, remap­ping, knob-twisting, and the like, mov­ing slowly– but ever– onward. Lin­ger­ing favorite from last week has to be the Tuba sam­ples, thrown through some dis­tor­tion ped­als set to mid-growl level. Sort of a dirty heroic fan­fare, which makes my ster­num go all a-flutter.

Just last night/this morn­ing, was check­ing out Wave­Burner, and real­ized just how far the dis­tance between an .AIFF and an .MP3 … if you lis­ten, if you really lis­ten, there is a lot wrong with the .MP3 com­pres­sion; it’s like some sub-psychological mud– a mud that’s almost not audi­ble, but rather some­thing sort of felt.

Which makes me excited for the time I actu­ally per­mit myself to buy the near-field mon­i­tors I keep think­ing about. At the very least, it will give me some sort of gold stan­dard from which to mea­sure deviation(s).

Ok, so a sort of bor­ing update-type post. Noth­ing too use­ful. So it goes, my head is down in the wave­form, swim­ming in the fre­quency bands. Bet­ter phi­los­o­phy when I actu­ally look up.

So inter­est­ing thing sort of just hap­pened… I was too tired to tackle the “music” music tonight (though I got a few ideas off a deep-listening to the scratch tracks), so i decided I should play with some of Logic’s soft­ware instru­ments and make some cool and non-specific textures.

OK, wait, back up, impor­tant point skipped: Aunt Jenny gave Lucian a sleep-noise machine (I for­get what its real name is) which has sev­eral dif­fer­ent set­tings. Cur­rently, he is in there past the gates of deeper slum­ber whilst dig­i­tal waves crash with white-noise crests on the vir­tual shore. Lest you think I am mak­ing fun, I am not: I love white-noise machines, could lis­ten to them all day long (cf. my sound art). I am ‘mon­i­tor­ing’ the baby through a ‘mon­i­tor’ which is sit­ting next to me, god’s-eye view of my son curled up asleep.

A highly com­pressed, noisy, distortish-type sound comes thru to me, through this mon­i­tor, but I really didn’t notice it before, mostly because I had on my record­ing head­phones on which heav­ily (though not com­pletely) fil­ter out ambi­ent sounds.

Any­way, I set up some syn­the­sizer through a series of com­pres­sion, eqs, and dis­tor­tion, then played with an EVOC Fil­ter which, in total cool­ness, allows one to chop up the har­mon­ics in two ways and gen­tly morph them into each other, fueled by an LFO. I got the sound med­i­ta­tively cool, deep grainy dis­torted breaths of sound heav­ing in waves, sort of liq­uid noise undu­la­tions. I looped it for a while, try­ing to think to what pur­pose I might put the sound…

Now to the meat of the story: tak­ing off the head­phones, blink­ing my eyes, and real­iz­ing the sound i just spent 20–30 min­utes craft­ing and zon­ing on was pretty much the sonic equiv­a­lent of the waves being hushed out by Lucian’s sleep-noise-machine. I mean, nearly iden­ti­cal. Must have leaked through and bent the synapses towards the sound. Sort of viral, or inva­sive. Or maybe my brain is just sort of ‘yield’-y lately.

There you have it, the funny/odd/interesting thing. Two ends of a psy­chic elec­trode touch. An aural ouroboros. Sort of.

Except, in the end, i have to say: my sound was better.

Oh, yeah, come all ye faith­ful repro­duc­ers of sonic phe­nom­ena. Just glanced through this arti­cle, The Death of High Fidelity while I was research­ing the foibles of mix­ing specif­i­cally for the mp3 format.

I had just bounced down a few recent changes in my cur­rent ros­ter of songs, and was giv­ing them a lis­ten on the open-air Bose speak­ers (note1) and was sur­prised by what got buried v. what got empha­sized. Part of this, of course, is my own lack of skills at mix­ing. But part of it isn’t …

Any­way, inter­est­ing to hear of the cur­rent pres­sures on pro­duc­ers and engi­neers to mix for the overcompressed-mp3-plus-crappy-laptop-speakers, since this is now the stan­dard state of lis­ten­ing affairs for a good chunk of the crowd out there. I don’t yet know what I think about that, since it’s the old artistic-ideal-vs.-commercial-reality conun­drum, and i have heard sim­i­lar argu­ments about the com­pres­sion for nor­mal radio air­play, but for this lat­ter there was always a radio.edit dif­fer­ent from the stu­dio album ver­sion, so that the sonic qual­ity was opti­mized for each dif­fer­ent scenario.

The truth is, I tend to like the mod­ern– well, 90’s and 2000’s era– pro­duc­tions. I think that we have a vast amount of tech­nol­ogy and knowl­edge that tweaks our aural per­cep­tion, and i find many albums today a resplen­dent sound­scape. Granted, I lis­ten to a lot of Nine Inch Nails and Radio­head, two bands who have invested a lot of stu­dio time in cre­at­ing sounds and atmos­pheres; but I do get a bit of the younger bands unnamed but implied in the arti­cle, both from my own pas­sions and research, and from catch­ing echoes of the ado­les­cent frenzy of my daugh­ter, 16 years old and every­thing that tends to mean. And truth is, as John Oswald says, the world is a noisy ball. You have to shout some­times to be heard. But then you have bands like Low, like Sigur Ros, like Kings of Con­ve­nience, and like the Black Atlantic (my recent late-night addic­tion): bands who swim only in the soft, the med­i­ta­tive, the glacial, and/or bands whose whole ethic is dynam­ics, mean­ing the soft­est softs and com­par­a­tive ‘louds’ that are an orgasm’s release of ten­sion. So I don’t know. On this, I am agnostic.

Mean­while, the prac­ti­cal side is that I have to make sure that these songs, being built in an incre­men­tal record­ing process that is all I can afford right now, sound good on an mp3 as well as full-fledged CD audio aiffs. I will over­com­press where I have to. I am not afraid.