MAARTS:
JAC- my apologies for the late reply, had my mind cluttered with so many promises...just got around to listen to your track...I like ambiance a lot but would love a bit more melody in it- I know it's very much en lieu with Autechre but I'm a nut for a good tune. The backing soundeffects are pretty effective though.

ME:
Yeah, I like a good melody, too, but the thing is, it's very difficult to work true melodies into a song made on the Acid music studio program. It's loop-based, so must of what I can do is manipulate loops and arrange them in an order that pleases me. Plus, I have the option of using several effects on each track separately. What I like to do is find a sound (maybe myself singing a high note, for example), then pitch shift and chop it up until it's not recognizable as what it actually is. Then I'll do the same thing with other sounds, layering the ones I like and deleting the ones I don't. Maybe a couple of recognizable words or sound thrown in the mix. What I usually get is a very rich, deep soundscape in which the listener can discern several different things going on at once, but they're all very obscured.

I can blame the Acid program if I want for all it's loop-based restrictions, but truth be told you can use a microphone ( how else would I have recorded the foundational sounds in the ambient stuff?). However our mic is not really studio quality. It's a good little mic for a computer or a PlayStation game (which, in fact, is what my son uses it for). But it leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to doing this.

If I knew anything whatsoever about MIDI I could probably do a lot more, as well. But probably not. Right now I'm sort of in a Throbbing Gristle/Autechre/Skinny Puppy mode. One of the best ones I've done lately, "Take You To Hell" is a good example. There's a sound and beat that could have come straight from "Incunambula" or "Amber", then I've dropped in several portions of a rather fiery sermon given by a strict protestant minister (I got it off of a free sermon mp3 site). I take his words, jumble them up until they've lost most of the context they originally had. I mix them all up, pan the from channel to channel as my whim dictates. Towards the end I've chopped off a line where the preacher says, "You don't need God to be right because you're all right." All this after he's already shouted about you being down in the darkness of hell forevermore. I make him say stuff that he, as an orthodox Calvanist would NEVER say, simply by casting the admonitions he directs as "sinners" and making them universal.

Anyway, I found that idea interesting, and I think it stands well, as it is, without melody. Or even a key change in this instance (key changes are a pain in the ass when you've confined yourself to loop programming).

A couple of ongoing projects---I'm doing a song that is basically a combination of Ravi Shankar, playing a raga on the sitar, with ornamentation by Anonymous 4 singing Gregorian chants by Hildegard Von Bingen. It's been on the backburner because I'm not real sure what else I want to put in there. It' not "cluttered" at this point but I fear it will be once I try to embellish it further.

The other track I've been working on is an experiment in which I've chopped up various small snatches of Jonsi's lyrics from the last album then dropped them into a backing track that sounds absolutely nothing like what Sigur Ros would do. I think this one is going to turn out very well when it's done. I can't work on it for too long at a time because some of the lyrics get stuck in my head and they drive me crazy. I have step away from the whole project until they subside. It's going to need quite a bit more work, though. The hard thing is finding vocal samples that either fit the key already or can be pitched to fit without a discernible difference to the casual listener. I've got a beautiful sample from "Festival" that stretches that ethereal voice to the length where I've been able to cut it, make a loop out of it, paste it repeatedly and then pitch shift where I need to and WALLAH! I've got a chord structure made out of padding that's made from Jonsi's voice and nothing more.

Maybe I'll do some work on that one today. It's daunting, though, because I have so many ideas already and new ones seem to pop up every time I get one down. I knew when I went into it that the song was going to take a lot of effort and would be a long term project .

Sorry I got carried away...hope I didn't bore you.

Bookmark that Bambo page, because I put stuff on there fairly regularly.

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