Tuesday, January 06, 2009

Etude 002 Kitchen Edition!


Look! Another thing whut I done made!


This one was made from a collection of field recordings made by the lovely folks at UnFoundSound. This is a record label that is actually two: FoundSound focuses on traditional commercial recordings, mostly of minimal techno and minimal house that draws from musique concrète, found sounds and field recordings. UnFoundSound offers free collections of field recordings for artists to use, and it releases free downloadable tracks by a mixture of established and upcoming artists, usually using these same collections of field recordings. So, among the field recordings was a packet of recordings made entirely from kitchen objects, including the whoosh of a water boiler, the click of a switch on an appliance, the thlock of those spring-loaded buttons on ovens, and so on. There are only two sounds in the track that didn't come directly from these recordings: the bass kick, which was a MIDI instrument, and the "ding dong" sound, which was a recording of we thwacking my water glass with my finger.


This isn't a complete track by any means (thus, it's an étude!). I pretty much put together an opening build-up, a momentary break, and then the first major moment of arrival of the track. That is, the first moment when the full texture of the track is present. If I were to develop this into a full-length track, I would proceed by thinning out the texture again and maybe adding a more melodic and sustained counter-theme to the whole thing. I would probably apply reverb, too, to give a sense of space to an otherwise rather dry track.

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