b-side records aotearoa

Id`i·o·e·lec’tric adjective [ Idio- + electric : confer French idioélectrique .] (Physics) Electric by virtue of its own peculiar properties; capable of becoming electrified by friction.

The Idioelectric project is one part of an attempt to explore ways of performing with multiple instruments as a solo musician, and to experiment with looping in what I hope will be a less obvious than usual fashion.

The music presented here was recorded live over 7 days at Draw Inc Gallery in Hamilton as part of the 2011 Fringe Festival. I spent a couple of hours a day in the gallery space – as a living part of an exhibition – experimenting with the process of layering loops of percussion instruments, home-made electronic devices, and environmental sounds captured on the fly.

The results are presented here as Idioelectric, two album’s worth of instrumental music now available for download or as a two-CD set. (The CDs come with 3 bonus tracks, and schematics of the devices used to make the music are individually hand-drawn on each disc. If you’re in Hamilton you can check them out at Artifice on Collingwood Street, this week only.)

recording process

The instruments and devices were set up on a table in the gallery with the electronic devices plugged directly into the mixing desk and a single microphone for the acoustic percussion instruments. Other microphones were placed further off in the gallery space to record the room reverb and ambience, and outside on the footpath to capture the sounds of the city going by. There was a bit of construction going on just up the street which was helpful.

I used Mobius do the looping, it’s a great piece of software that works like a loop pedal.

[Note: Not everyone reading this is familiar with recording tech & terminology, so if you know how loops work then this paragraph is not for you, ok?
A loop is just a piece of recorded sound that can be played back repeatedly and seamlessly; originally a literal "loop" of audiotape, now most commonly a digital equivalent. In the context of loop pedals & software it works like this: You press a button to start recording and you make some sort of sound. Press the button again to stop recording and what you just recorded immediately starts playing back over and over as a loop. You can then repeat this process and keep adding layers of loops which all play back in unison. It's a simple idea but it takes a bit of practice to do it smoothly and seamlessly and keep everything in time.]

The Mobius software allows for eight simultaneous loops and has fully customisable MIDI implementation, so I used the assignable knobs on my Akai LPD8 (conveniently there are eight) as a mixer for the loop channels.

Using the submix bus on the desk allowed me to have any number of things happening live at any one time, and send any one or any combination of them to the looping software.

The entire output of the mixing desk – including the loop playback, the indoor and outdoor microphones, and whatever else was playing – was recorded live in stereo onto Minidisc. This is the source recording, and just over seven hours of audio was recorded in total.

editing process

In editing this project down from seven hours I followed two basic principles:

1. Subtractive edits only. So lots has been taken away but nothing has been added to the source recording.
2. The sequence of events within each piece should remain unaltered. So (A)(B)(C)(D)(E) might become (A)(B)(C)(E) but never (B)(A)(C)(E)

Following those two principles helped to preserve the integrity of the recordings and ensure that the project remain live in orientation and not become a studio-based creature.

I’ve also tried not to clean the recordings up too much as the glitches and accidents are all part of this way of making music.

equipment used

• Sinewave/Squarewave generator
  
• Circuit-bent and otherwise toy pianos
  
• Alesis HR16-b drum machine
  
• Ring modulator
  
• Optical theremin
  
• Atari Punk Console
  
• THE DESTROYER
  
• LFO-controlled squarewave siren
  
• LFO clock (555)
  
• Bandpass filter
  
• Mutant radio synth
  
• Ribbon-controlled squarewave monosynth
  
• Sovtek Big Muff
  
• Delay/distortion/pitch-modulation pedal built by Sean Kerrigan
  
• Plus a pile of percussion instruments including sticks, wooden tongue drum, wood block, agogo bell, oven timer bell, other bells and shakers, a few mics and a ten-channel mixing desk.

I learned a lot on this project that I hope to incorporate into the various other ongoing projects I’m involved in. I particularly enjoyed blurring the edges between real-time sounds and looped sounds – listening back I’m not always entirely sure which are which – and finding ways to blend acoustic and electronic elements rather than juxtapose them, both tonally and in terms of playing style.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

oh ps I stole the name from my friend Chris, I hope he doesn’t mind but it seemed appropriate (and dude, you’ve been sitting on that word for years )

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