Thursday 8th December 2011 – Music for Berlin Montage

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Jay

Here is a montage containing various photographs of Berlin taken by a friend who asked if I would like to make some music for it.

I wanted to use a mixture of synth as well as orchestral sounds to fit the various moods throughout the video. This is because working with this combination presents a slightly different challenge: orchestral instruments on their own pretty much balance and mix themselves really as the orchestra is a well-designed instrument in it’s own right and is a well-trodden path. In an orchestra, each instrument has it’s own particular function, frequency range and timbre meaning each has it’s own space to sit in (although there is overlap if you need it). This ‘personal space’ ensures each instrument get’s it’s voice heard with clarity and/or effect because building up similar frequency ranges and incompatible timbres can lead to a confused and ‘muddy’ (unlcear) sound. Synth sounds don’t really come with this control as such because any synthesizer can create such a huge range of sounds on their own and therefore output any range of sound frequencies; it is up to the musician to make the instrument focused and efficient in it’s intended area by adjusting it’s controls.

As the combination of orchestral and synth sounds can sound pretty cheesy, I made a conscious effort to stop that from happening by thinking about the sounds that I needed to use for effect. The synth sounds weren’t replacing orchestral sounds as such (which would be a sensible choice as they could just slot in this well-honed instrument), but had an atmosphere to convey. Orchestral instruments could have done these jobs (although slightly differently) but the overall effect is a precise mood that I wanted to convey.

Well, there are the reasons for my intended path on this one! Please have a watch/listen below and let me know what you think. If you would like me to do something similar for you, or you know somebody that would, please do get in touch.

Displayed with kind permission from Peter Flower.

Fast Tube by Casper

Thursday 27th January 2011 – Lomography: A lesson in life..?

Posted on January 27, 2011 by transientmusic

This week I have created a new page on my site so I have somewhere to put the pictures that I take with my new Diana Mini camera. Click on ‘Photographs’ on the above menu to check them out. As you know, I’m no photographer but my aim with taking these pictures is to try to mirror the atmosphere that I aim to create through some of my music. I will leave it up to you to decide what this atmosphere is but I do hope you see some parity between my different bits of work. If not then I need to try harder… With ‘branching out’ like this, I hope to add clarity to my musical thoughts as well as progress my ideas by taking influence from something very different from what I am used to.

The Diana Mini camera is designed to be a quick-fire analogue camera that encourages the user to take pictures of anything and everything and also to experiment. There are many pictures you can see on the Lomography website (the manufacturer) and I have uploaded my own to be a part of this. Click here to check out my page.

As an introduction to what Lomography is all about here are a set of rules that they encourage your photography to live by….

1. Take your camera everywhere you go.

2. Use it any time – day and night.

3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but part of it.

4. Try the shot from the hip.

5. Approach the objects of your Lomographic desire as close as possible.

6. Don’t think.

7. Be fast.

8 You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film.

9 Afterwards either.

10 Don’t worry about any rules.

This last rule is a particular favourite of mine as it’s one rule I try to make music by. Of course, being 100% devoid of a rule is not a good thing and I find hippy excess pretty deplorable and childish if I’m honest. So as ever, a little thought goes a long way! ……In a general sense, I’d like to add ‘…but don’t be an idiot’ to that last rule…. (I’m sure the Lomographic Society would agree!)

A quote from their website:

“Don’t listen to others; remain true to yourself, follow your inner Lomographic voice and never forget that not all that glitters is a golden rule. Discover your own Lomography, forget about your education, socialisation, indoctrination, knowledge and everything you’ve learned and not learned about photography. Set free your innermost desires, never stop moving, never stop Lomographing; believe in yourself, focus on the important and not so important things, enjoy life in all its variations, forget about the camera in your hand and shoot ’til your eyes are glowing!”

The idea of what the camera could do was what initially caught my eye, but to find out that the values the maufacturer promotes have already appeared to me in the concept of Derek Bailey‘s music was quite interesting…(I talked about Derek Bailey’s band a little in a previous blog post here). I think there are some great concepts among all this for being creative in general and much art and music does run parallel to this. After being restrained in various ways during my life and unproductive as a result I also think these ideas are good for life…so maybe take them on-board a little but yeah, don’t be an idiot about it….

Thursday 20th January 2011 – Photography

Posted on January 21, 2011 by transientmusic

After Lesley Flower bought me a mini Diana camera for Christmas I have been experimenting a bit with photography. Photography has always been in the back of my mind as a visual way to augment my ideas and music but wihtout some one to push me in that direction these thoughts never quite made it to the light of day…. After all, my musical work and ambitions take up more than enough of my time!

The Camera that Lesley bought me is called a Diana Mini and the reason behind her choosing it for me was that it has enough adjustable settings to teach me about how each change effects the picture being taken. Of course, a digital camera has slots and lots of different settings, but as I have experienced with guitar-related technology, this seems to suck a lot of the fun out of what you are doing and it’s so easy to get bogged down with messing around with settings too much rather than creating….

So, my first little outing with my new camera was actually a couple of days after Christmas of 2010 and I decided that I wanted to take some photos to go with my short story ‘The Alley’. The real-life alley in question actually inspired the story and is located very near my childhood home in Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire in the UK. I started to mess around with the different settings and got some results that I was very pleased with. My idea was to capture a similar mood as that of the story, thus hopefully enhancing both picture and prose making the combined effort greater than the sum of it’s parts. Those of you that know about the musical projects I have in the pipeline will already know about an interest I have in enhancing things through combining different media… Illustrating some writing may be an obvious choice but nonetheless it is something I needed to explore.

The invented term of Lomography created by the makers of the Diana Mini has a very interesting cult following and community surrounding it. I think it’s a cool idea and I also think that the rules and philosophies around it would be even more interesting if adapted for music and sound…

Thursday 30th September – Audio/Visual Work and the Importance of Calm Thought.

Posted on September 30, 2010 by transientmusic

As promised a few posts back, here is some information on the photographer Lesley Flower and the project we are working on… as I may have mentioned, Lesley has had an interest in photography from a very young age and also studied Fine Art Photography at university. Take a look at some of her work at: www.LesleyFlower.co.uk.

As I’m sure you will see from her website, Lesley’s photographs ooze atmosphere and the themes that she uses practically climb out of the picture and envelope you. At the root, on a basic level, her current work concerns calmness, particularly that to do with nature. Being a person that finds an affinity with the outdoors life, this all comes very naturally to her and because of this, the atmospheres that she creates are very vivid. It is this vividness that draws me in to her work and this is all very relevant to me because this enveloping atmoshere is something that I am aiming towards musically (which is by no means accomplished yet!). As with Lesley, I believe this sense of calm is very important in modern society. Many, many people forget how to relax and forget that the causes of stress are very rarely a life or death situation! It may be idealistic but I believe that if people paid more attention to this many of the world’s problems might be more easily sorted due to the dissipation of confrontation stress causes. Abstract (ie. effectively imaginary) concepts bring about these stresses and ironically enough, these imaginary ideas are actually what causes physical conflict and strife. Think about all of the murders that have been committed due to pride and perceived pressure.

For a while now, Lesley and I have been talking about a possible project collaboration bringing together our ideals into an audio-visual experience, our interest in dreamy atmospheres and a need to envelope the viewer/listener sensually and conceptually being a main starting-point. With my current research into sound design and sound as art, this project is proving very interesting for me and very fruitful for my musical ideas as well as honing my more conceptual goals too (as I have been ranting about in previous posts).

The next step for us is to show a few friends what we have come up with so far and to see what reactions we get… We need to see if our work is getting the desired effect, and if it isn’t we will look at how we can refine what we have to get to the very essence of what we want to say. I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes!

Thanks for reading.

Tuesday 7th September – Music with picture and it’s combined perception

Posted on September 7, 2010 by transientmusic

So, I have previously mentioned a project that I’m involved in with the photographer Lesley Flower (I’ll tell you about her website when it’s ready – should be soon!). As her background is in artistic photography, I originally asked her if she would be interested in a collaboration where we look into the relationship of sound and vision (namely still pictures).

My initial idea was to improvise to pictures with different guitar sounds and synths to produce different moods. This could then be ‘displayed’ with the picture using headphones; both elements combining to produce one exhibit. From my musical viewpoint, my playing would be an immediate reaction to the picture and when displayed together, the audio and visual ideas from both of us would combine to create an enhanced experience that neither photograph or music could produce on their own.

A few months later Lesley presented me with a photograph she had taken near her home in Reigate (yeah she’s a busy woman!): a picture very characteristic of her style (an example of previous work can be seen here). This weekend, I sat down for my first experiment with this picture having a fairly solid idea of what the output might be as the mood of the picture is pretty obvious….. but something strange happened… My playing, rather than being a transparent interpretation of the picture, actually started to influence how I saw the photograph. I started to see the picture in a whole new light and something totally new crept out from the print rather like an unexpected extra in some kind of zombie film! This made me think along the lines of how music is used in film – to influence emotion to the will of the film-maker. I started to wonder how I could distort the perception of a still image using sound. With Lesley’s photograph, I had managed to turn a calming and serene picture into something quite disturbing. Listening whilst looking at the picture made me feel on edge, and it also did the same to her. The picture definitely did not warrant this!

This was all very interesting and the effect was akin to staring at one of those magic eye posters and gradually seeing a sailboat or something emerge from the pattern. However, I was gently reminded that art needs a conceptual focus and by making this music I had changed our original focus from enhancing the overall experience to morphing the experience into something completely different…

I wondered how I let this happen but after some thought it came to me…. Playing an instrument and improvising does not just pluck music out of the air… it is a cumulative effort of experience, technical and theoretical ability, as well as immediate stimuli. You could say that improvisation if seen as something totally made-up is actually impossible in a similar way to the practice of true objectivity. And in not taking this into account, I let my previous experiences with music get in the way of what the picture was actually saying…

For now, we will continue on our previous path of enhancing the overall experience and let this little blip in the creative process hang around for a different project….