Nathaniel Clark

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”.

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.