Synaptic Constellations

January 17, 2010 8:30 PM

I'd like to dip deeeeeeeeeeeeeep into the well of Gyrophonic past (less than 2 years ago) to one of our first recorded improv sessions--divided into 6 contiguous "movements."

Recorded the night of September 18, 2008 on a pair of Rock Band mics on 1.5 laptops, simultaneously recording in Audacity, with a bit of noise reduction added much much later. All effects, all panning, all of it is as live as it can get. No direct feeds from the amp, no monitors, none of it.

Some of my favourite sounds I created were entirely on accident. The sound at the end of Section II was created by not fully engaging my distortion footswitch all the way. The entirety of Section V was because I (stupidly) plugged the effects loop back into the amp (after having unplugged it for Section IV) without turning anything down or disengaging the distortion beforehand.

As with most of our improvs, the dynamic range on this is pretty extreme, so you may want to listen with headphones, to get the most out of it.

Naturally, there is some quality loss in downsizing it to fit under 10MB. A high bitrate mp3 is available here, though, of course, only so much quality can be gained, given the nature of the track's recording process.

Divisions are as follow:

I. Siamese Oracle Predicts Rain 0:00
II. Blue, Upholstered Megalomania 2:50
III. Mutual Solitude 5:08
IV. Phone-in Nightmares 6:48
V. The Horn of Defeat During the Downfall of Constantinople and the Collapse of the Byzantine Empire 9:30
VI. Synaptic Constellations 9:42

INSTRUMENTATION:

Timbill: Vocals, Effects Manipulation, Amp Distortion/noise, Carpet, Fingersnaps
Tréteque: Baritone Sax, Blue Upholstered Megalomaniophone, Fake Casio Concertmate, Cloth-muted Cowbell
Pheatherwäit: Flute, Guitar

This was also track 6 of our first album, [Obligatory Eponymous Debut], which was a mixture of mono and stereo tracks, both composed and improvized, all recorded on Rock Band mics.

posted by askmeaboutLOOM (2 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite

Wow, this has it ALL. The only way this could be any better or more fun, would be if it was a soundtrack for a really great artsy film. Good show! (Probably not common practice, but, it would be really easy to write a screen play around this.)
posted by snsranch at 5:34 PM on January 20, 2010


Thanks, sns. I really think this is easily one of our best improvs. I only wish we'd had better recording equipment at the time. Sadly, it wasn't for another 4 months that we finally had proper mics to use for recording--though that certainly didn't stop us from doing so.
posted by askmeaboutLOOM at 8:08 PM on January 20, 2010


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