Somnimage

Somnimage · **some notes on the june 10 sets...**

Thanks to all who came out...
Mykel began with a flurry; static discharge, volume swells, electronics on the verge of collapse. A screed of static pulse looping / weaving, some metal bowl scraping and banging, high distorted bursts cascading and raining about; it wasn’t a relentless noise derailment—he had some moments of breathing—but it was consistently loud (at least inside the box) with a solid amount of dynamics and frequency manipulation. he also beat some of the metal plates of the speaker box with a microphone, the result coming over the speakers as harsh metallic punctuation that slowly decayed and was subsumed by other components of his sound palette. I will say that inside the installation it was a LOT louder than outside (I was inside the for most of his set, setting up my stuff for our segue and checking some material over headphones.) I did walk around the box a couple times during his set to see if things sounded ~that~ different from space to space and overall, with the exception of the face of the box that was all pylons that sounded pretty bassy, the sound wasn’t really altered noticeably. I say the best seats in the house were inside the speaker.
Our segue (about 20 min) went pretty well; I brought in some shortwave that clipped in nicely with Mykel’s bassier static loops, and my drone element did a decent job of swimming among the pre-existing sounds he began adding. Mykel brought his bowl back into the mix to work off some of my sounds, and we had a pretty decent back and forth and overlayering (plus some fine head scratchery “is that you or me doing that?”) And again, this is all from inside the box; I’m not sure how it translated outside. I’m sure Mykel’s wife and kids (the latter with their hands over their ears for most of Mykel’s set) would tell a slightly different tale. I also tried putting a few microcassette players in some of the pylons during our segue, but I have no idea if anyone came close enough to the sides to hear the different sounds I’d planted...
My solo set started off with good intent but I think fell apart about ten minutes in; the bass throbs from the oscillators were fine, but the material I was mixing on the laptop (two low frequencies) were pretty much too low for the PA to handle / replicate, and in what I consider a bad decision I tried to force the tones to “play nice” and do what they’d done at home over headphones by furiously working the eq’s and levels for the next few minutes; from where I was, it all just sounded like clipped crap. I then added ~another~ trio of bass tones (two more looped from the oscillators and one more from the computer) and while the 55 hz sounded pretty good from the laptop, the other two canceled each other (and the other two from the oscillator) out and left a bit of a void. In my mind, things were now in disarray; I had intended to run with multiple layers of bass material for about 15 minutes, working eq changes and panning changes to shift the sound inside (and outside) the space, and I was determined to make things work as they had done when I was jogging ideas at home. I kept at it for close to 15 minutes, trying to adjust levels, bring sounds in, take sounds out, basically flailing blindly while trying to find a solution I was happy with. Here and then peaks of decent sound came in, but I could never hold them. Oh yeah, and then this horrible feedback (i.e., not intended) crept in for which I could not find any logical source. Bringing in the shortwave helped a bit (filling the troughs of the bass tones), but it wasn’t the ideal solution.
Uncertain after the bass problems, I’d say the EVP “replication” didn’t work as intended, because the vocal sources were way too prominent due (primarily) to trying to resolve the feedback problems from the bass component. Unlike the bass clip clop, the vocal elements were satisfactory, even if not what I intended. I ended with a smattering of permutated organ drone and extremely pitch shifted voices and a fuzzy shifting pair of drones from the pedal with a lot of panning.
I also don’t know how successful the speaker itself served as a speaker, although that could be based more on the actual PA inside (and the material we each played, let's not kid ourselves...) Everything outside was quieter, there wasn’t a lot of variance in sound processing as I walked around the speaker during Mykel’s set, and a smattering of the folks who stopped in weren’t actually “interacting” with the speaker box (i.e., walking around it) to explore the different speaker cone ideas. I think I thought the speakerbox would have been constructed so that I could have, for example, played a single drone for 45 minutes and while I didn’t change anything substantially, to people outside it would be shifting / changing... and again, this is from someone who was primarily inside, so maybe it was doing what it was intended to...

from Blake

Somnimage

Sunday, June 10, 2007

the big speaker

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some notes on the june 10 sets...

Thanks to all who came out... Mykel began with a flurry; static discharge, volume swells, electronics on the verge of collapse. A screed of static pulse looping / weaving, some metal bowl scraping and banging, high distorted bursts cascading and raining about; it wasn’t a relentless noise derailment—he had some moments of breathing—but it was consistently loud (at least inside the box) with a solid amount of dynamics and frequency manipulation. he also beat some of the metal plates of the speaker box with a microphone, the result coming over the speakers as harsh metallic punctuation that slowly decayed and was subsumed by other components of his sound palette. I will say that inside the installation it was a LOT louder than outside (I was inside the for most of his set, setting up my stuff for our segue and checking some material over headphones.) I did walk around the box a couple times during his set to see if things sounded ~that~ different from space to space and overall, with the exception of the face of the box that was all pylons that sounded pretty bassy, the sound wasn’t really altered noticeably. I say the best seats in the house were inside the speaker. Our segue (about 20 min) went pretty well; I brought in some shortwave that clipped in nicely with Mykel’s bassier static loops, and my drone element did a decent job of swimming among the pre-existing sounds he began adding. Mykel brought his bowl back into the mix to work off some of my sounds, and we had a pretty decent back and forth and overlayering (plus some fine head scratchery “is that you or me doing that?”) And again, this is all from inside the box; I’m not sure how it translated outside. I’m sure Mykel’s wife and kids (the latter with their hands over their ears for most of Mykel’s set) would tell a slightly different tale. I also tried putting a few microcassette players in some of the pylons during our segue, but I have no idea if anyone came close enough to the sides to hear the different sounds I’d planted... My solo set started off with good intent but I think fell apart about ten minutes in; the bass throbs from the oscillators were fine, but the material I was mixing on the laptop (two low frequencies) were pretty much too low for the PA to handle / replicate, and in what I consider a bad decision I tried to force the tones to “play nice” and do what they’d done at home over headphones by furiously working the eq’s and levels for the next few minutes; from where I was, it all just sounded like clipped crap. I then added ~another~ trio of bass tones (two more looped from the oscillators and one more from the computer) and while the 55 hz sounded pretty good from the laptop, the other two canceled each other (and the other two from the oscillator) out and left a bit of a void. In my mind, things were now in disarray; I had intended to run with multiple layers of bass material for about 15 minutes, working eq changes and panning changes to shift the sound inside (and outside) the space, and I was determined to make things work as they had done when I was jogging ideas at home. I kept at it for close to 15 minutes, trying to adjust levels, bring sounds in, take sounds out, basically flailing blindly while trying to find a solution I was happy with. Here and then peaks of decent sound came in, but I could never hold them. Oh yeah, and then this horrible feedback (i.e., not intended) crept in for which I could not find any logical source. Bringing in the shortwave helped a bit (filling the troughs of the bass tones), but it wasn’t the ideal solution. Uncertain after the bass problems, I’d say the EVP “replication” didn’t work as intended, because the vocal sources were way too prominent due (primarily) to trying to resolve the feedback problems from the bass component. Unlike the bass clip clop, the vocal elements were satisfactory, even if not what I intended. I ended with a smattering of permutated organ drone and extremely pitch shifted voices and a fuzzy shifting pair of drones from the pedal with a lot of panning. I also don’t know how successful the speaker itself served as a speaker, although that could be based more on the actual PA inside (and the material we each played, let's not kid ourselves...) Everything outside was quieter, there wasn’t a lot of variance in sound processing as I walked around the speaker during Mykel’s set, and a smattering of the folks who stopped in weren’t actually “interacting” with the speaker box (i.e., walking around it) to explore the different speaker cone ideas. I think I thought the speakerbox would have been constructed so that I could have, for example, played a single drone for 45 minutes and while I didn’t change anything substantially, to people outside it would be shifting / changing... and again, this is from someone who was primarily inside, so maybe it was doing what it was intended to... from Blake