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213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 8 - Sands of time.

That title was a joke about Granular Synthesis. It means a little more than that, but we'll get to it after this latest iteration of the-

With this being a day-in-the-life of a one year-old, there are points in the video where I am being breastfed, or am naked. These parts will be removed for every video edit hereafter.

Then came the process of actually installing all these components.

I had no idea what I was doing and don't intend to learn it.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 7 - Last Friday, mostly.

CRITIQUE TIME, BABY.

People were a little apprehensive towards interacting with the exhibit during the class presentation. The instructions were solid, although I still had to nudge people to touch it.

"I love the interactive element, and how it needs to be activated..." "The audience has control over the space... if you go in and there's too much noise-" "You can turn it down." "-exactly."

The energy was good - some were too immersed with playing around with the sliders to even make comments - others were enjoying the soundscape. "It's a very audience-friendly setup..."

The use of MP3 players received praise, perhaps a little unexpectedly, as their black colour-scheme blended with the walls, which people enjoyed. Of course, the single green audio cable stuck out a bit.

I chose to not have a spotlight shine on my piece, partly to accentuate the lights from the mixer, but also because the ambient lighting from the other spotlights in the room would be more than enough. This turned out to be a good decision- "...lights are a part of the piece, you gravitate towards it because it's illuminating, and parts of the [MP3 players] light up..."

I did, however, notice that one of the cables kept disconnecting from the MP3 player - and made the mistake of pointing it out; as then the idea of it glitching in-and-out was suggested as a feature.

People were having fun regardless, at points turning up volume knobs that weren't labelled, the resulting distortion warranting me occasionally stepping in to avoid speaker damage.

Emma asked why I chose to make it interactive - in my sleep-deprived state, I jumbled together my general mission statement for the work - the action of rearranging the sentence wasn't as well conveyed, and words failed me on what statement I was trying to make on nostalgia as a whole.

Then again, did there need to be? The samples were well recognised, what people chose to make created - beyond a rearranged sentence - a personal, sonic interaction with nostalgic sound.

Surely that idea would come across well...?

"It's got a nice nonsensical-ness running through the whole piece"

Bugger!

As for next steps, Fiona suggested the introduction of a visual element to the sampling; and Emma agreed - and it is here that the prospect of VJ'ing comes back to discussion. Olivia happened to come across a book on the topic a month ago, about time I read it.

Event photos courtesy of Marcelo Duque Cesar - Professional photographer and family friend. Check out his work at mdcfoto89ba.myportfolio.com.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 6 - The Trenches

Back in the weeks of July, I got three books from the library. I've had them sitting around for a hot minute, about time I actually got to talking about them:

The September 11 Syndrome: Anxious Days and Sleepless Nights by Dr. Harriet B. Braiker

The Nostalgia Factory: Memory, Time and Ageing by Douwe Draaisma

Nostalgia: A History of Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster

Why the general focus on nostalgia? Beyond my exhibition group, it's worth establishing that the action of sampling is a few logical steps away from remembering.

For my Introduction to Fine Arts hand-in report a few weeks back, I wrote the following about this conceptual link:

"Through the sonic traversal of yesterday and today driving the process of sampling, it was only natural that if any concept were to drive my workings in this second semester, it would be cultural memory. To reinvigorate the past through music will just as easily reinvigorate its memory, a collective longing visible in resurfacing trends, genres… and sentiments. 

"In Nostalgia: A History of a Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster, she recalls a survey ran by Spotify prior to the introduction of ‘Your Time Capsule’ – an auto-curated playlist feature on the platform, letting the user “Throw it back with nostalgic tracks picked just for you.” In the survey, Spotify found nearly 70 percent “…said that nostalgia can help ‘change or improve their mood…” Music was outlined as the “number one trigger” for nostalgia. (Arnold-Forster, 140)."

nostalgia a history: PAGE 130 (bottom of page) + PAGE 131+ 142 The nostalgia factory takes a notably more psychological approach to the phenomenon, however page 69-70 QUOTE

SEPTEMBER 11 chapter Step 5 creating a comfort zone "actions you can take to enhance your comfort zone" Nostalgia as a means to combat trauma

Nostalgia has the capacity to dramatically reframe past histories

as does sampling

is it a personal archival, or are both misguided?

not a plunderphonical chronicle but briefly mention..... BOARDS OF CANADA NOSTALIGA

⋆⋆⋆

Some 'break' that was. It felt no different than going to class again. By this point, we had all our resources prepped for the big day. Mike had reserved my mixers. We had speakers, cabling, and spotlights galore. A lot of my time was spent formatting the pamphlet with Olivia as we kept things in check.

From there I could step back a little, as the actual printing, room painting and vinyl cutting was delightfully not my responsibility.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Interim - A Mad Dash

Beyond our Instagram group chat; a huge chunk of group organization takes place in our dedicated "Planning Slides" document.

Olivia had taken the reins with getting our progress and ideas jotted down; which has really helped keep us all on pace.

Alongside a timetable, these slides act as one big checklist - with sections for planning materials, room painting, and a moodboard.

We all invited friends and family to the exhibition, with an estimated 40 people checking it out at once - to which we've been informed could be on the unsafe side, as 2E Dark is not the most crowd friendly.

The room is also a little inconspicuous. Sandwiched between two studio spaces, we should aim to draw people in with wall text. There's also talks to remove the door in favor of a curtain.

On the first Tuesday of the study break, (almost) all of us met for a discussion. Written atop this note page is the 'pipeline' for getting our space primed and ready for presenting.

Two days later, we met up with Mike Bridgeman to lock in our equipment requests.

There were bundles of extension cords, a projector and three spotlights already in our space, so a lot of the borrowing would be on my end.

This was a little humbling. Turns out - I don't know much about mixing. There was an expectation that I would be practicing mixing in my own time - or in the very least learning more about it, and I watched Mike's smile quickly fade as he had to explain that there are different inputs for mono and stereo sound, and different audio jacks, too! If I wanted to play music from four different MP3 players, I'd need a very large, expensive mixer for the task! And amps are a thing that exist too! Jesus Christ.

It needed some more thought; and I have a lot to learn. From this, I started re-drafting my presentation. I was not letting go of my driving concept, but how could I adapt it?

I came up with an alternative, and emailed Mike.

Back at home, I started toying around with SM64 loops in Audacity, with the idea that I could load them onto my SP-202, and divvy the mono tracks up from there.

It's a unique challenge - create four 'songs' that can play over each other at different timing, all in the same key and timbral range.

I amassed seven loops in Audacity, and arranged them in a song format for your enjoyment.

While some of the more 'textural' sounds that came from this are worth looking at further, such things as drum beats and chord progressions quickly become a slippery slope.

The same problem forms as did back with my presentation back in Week 6 - where the processing is too clean, and the action of sampling is lost on the listener.

Instead, the loops have to be rougher. Simpler. More jarring. The SP-202 was going to be used regardless, but instead of Audacity being the middleman, the SP-202 is where the bulk of the composition takes place, and I'll load sounds right into it.

This was also the time that my group began drawing up our pamphlet. I let my creative desires get the better of me and largely left myself with designing the whole thing - however I did consult the group every step of the way, sending screenshots and drawn-ideas:

As a successor to our proposal document, I made sure to format the pages in Word, as this meant the formatting could actually transfer all the symbols over to a PDF. Microsoft Word also comes with some ancient, deep-down features that can still be used: like this palm tree border which really ups the tackiness factor.

The cat you see was picked by Ruby and I, when we were Googling 2004-2010-era cat images. This one is from 2010, and immediately struck us as representative of our shared concept.

To match the font-graphics theme, I gave the image similar treatment - using point-and-click-paths to give this clean look without any line wobbliness. I also turned the whole thing into a vector, allowing it to be infinitely scaled, like a font!

And I wonder why I'm sleep deprived.

I was battling a bit of music block at this point, but Em was a great motivator for getting my sampler back out and jumping back into it.

The workflow was straightforward. No pre-preparing samples in Audacity, just recording them straight in and going from there. Old school.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Lethal Lava Land

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

Koji Kondo - File Select

Recording back into audacity, I would then trim-up the tracks, loop preferred sections, and bring up the volume. No further polish from there, this was time for the SP-202 to shine.

Listening back on Time Isn't Real Strategy, copying the mono tracks into each ear and pacing them slightly didn't cut it, and the resulting sound was hollow. With the mono inputs of the mixer in mind, it was best to let that mono goodness shine.

Mike got back in touch, and the ball was rolling once more. This time, he'd acquired four MP3 players, along with a mixer, which for the meantime, was still sitting in the Block 6 recording studio.

This meetup was a godsend. My two-MP3-player-audio-split idea could work, sure, but with the power of a stereo-to-mono jack converter, using four MP3 players was possible again.

We tested on the mixer, and I got a crash course for how I'd be wiring up my project in practice. I needed four 3.5-to-3.5mm (stereo) cables, two of which he could provide. An equal amount of 3.5mm-to-6.5mm (mono) jack converters were also needed, of which I'd also need to buy another two.

Hooking one MP3 player up with this 3.5-6.5mm, stereo-to-mono array, we tested the mixer audio - which was great! The cables, jacks and all four MP3 players were provided in a Tupperware container, and I head off to Jaycar to get the rest of my equipment.

Back with the team, I locked my attention into getting the pamphlet done, first and foremost. Olivia and the others went into our newly assigned space for some mapping, as we needed a top-down view. These were their notes, along with some format planning for our pamphlet.

By this point, the first page of the pamphlet had shaped out nicely, with all subsequent pages following suit.

Following another pamphlet-making session on Word, I got back around to my sampler, and loaded up all eight pads with enough material for three whole tracks.

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Game Start

Koji Kondo - Peach's Message

Koji Kondo - Powerful Mario

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Dire, Dire Docks

In-Game Ambience, "Outside Peach's Castle"

Samples used:

Koji Kondo - Cave Dungeon

Koji Kondo - Inside The Castle Walls

The text on the front of our pamphlet was tricky, as we all had a fair bit in common, but enough differences that making one big mission statement would not be easy. Olivia shared around a word document with the first draft I made, and we each had a hand in editing in/out parts that best represented our works, to which I made the final edit, which the others greenlit.

We went with the following:

"OH HI – we come from internet. It’s been around for about two decades longer than we have. In that time, it has expanded exponentially alongside the development of the devices we now glue our minds and fingertips to. We frolicked freely in these pixelated fields, while the world played catch up. Where did those good times go? It was all so fun, but how much of it was real? At best, it was a lens. At worst, a mirror.  "We didn’t feel alone, but nobody else was in the room with us. It wasn’t an exclusive experience, our consciousness was part of a collective, our realities fractured and sewn back together. The emotions of self and stranger were intertwined and projected back out; and as we retrospect, simulated familiarities pull us back into the maelstrom of bygone emotions, a haze of ‘better days’ to feed into our past, present, and future. How do we get back there?  "The digital age is a perpetual melancholy, the past unobtainable – but that is all the motivation we need to chase it endlessly. Each of our artworks follow memories and experiences in these real and virtual spaces; familiar motifs spoon-fed into our young minds, and the lives that are both fictional and our own.  "From thereon, we are what we eat.  "This is Personal Storage."

Stevee-Renee's portraits came in, and we each got to submitting our individual work profiles for adding into the pamphlet, to which I formatted like so:

I then got back into Audacity for the rest of the tracks...

…pushing through a couple late nights...

…until everything sounded just right!

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 5 - Dire, Dire, Dire...

We find ourselves in the present day. Not for long, I still haven't even covered J Dilla. I have, however, stumbled across these two albums, both from 2023, and both from Brazil, where half my family is.

These being: Mimosa by cabezadenego, Mbé & Leyblack, and Sexto Dos Crias by DJ Ramon Sucesso.

Both these were found browsing RateYourMusic for plunderphonic essentials, to which I was pleasantly surprised to find two Baile Funk albums in the ranks.

I wrote about this for Contextual Studies last semester, so I'll quote myself for the following:

[Baile Funk is] "...a music genre of hiphop and Miami Bass sensibilities that originated from the Rio de Janeiro slums - or favelas - in the early 1990s, with a jumpy, vulgar and generally fun attitude."

This was referring to the album Mimosa in particular, which-

"...uses energetic sampling of Afro-Brazilian music new and old, particular the genre Baile Funk..." "The sampling approach, as well as very straightforward lyricism about gay sex; entails an incredibly danceable musical experience of black queerness in Brazil..."

In an interview with Gabinete last December, group member Luiz Felipe (seen pictured on the album cover) outlined the motives behind Mimosa:

“For me the sample has the function of reframing (?), you recount the history via a new perspective […] I find that the sample has a profound connection with black culture through its principles […] it is based on our very own history. And the sample for me isn’t just in music, it is in the argument; you can sample video, you can sample ideas, you can sample words, the way in which we created this project was entirely sampled.”

Sexta Dos Crias is much the same, with DJ Ramon Sucesso using his DJ controller to zoom across fragments of funk at lightning pace. No sample sticks around for long, instead, you find yourself tumbling between- "...firework-like bursts of classic funk carioca samples, his own productions, mainstream tracks, nonsense TikTok sound bites, and tons of his trademark beat bolha. All contained within an unparalleled, mischievously non-linear rhythmic flow."

Now in working mode for the next presentation, I tinkered around with the Super Mario 64 soundtrack in Audacity until I came across a neat sound.

Sampling the first four notes in the track Dire Dire Docks, I slowed the speed by 95%, and again by another 95%. Doing this required me to segment the piece and individually slow each of the segments, as doing the whole thing at once would cause Audacity to crash.

I then divided the resulting track into a left-ear and light-ear channel, playing at a slight delay to each other, forming a 'panning' effect.

Over this year, I've learned some audible differences in 'slowing' techniques.

A regular 'record' slow lowers both the pitch and tempo at once, sounds clean, and takes very little processing power to perform.

Just shifting the tempo is a little trickier; a low-fidelity tempo slow repeats small sections of the audio every fraction of a second, creating this ssttaaggggeerreedd ssoouunndd.

The high-fidelity version of this sees Audacity artifically 'filling in' these staggered gaps. This results in a stretchy, metallic sound.

A "paulstretch" also doesn't affect the pitch, but drenches any slowing in cavernous reverb.

Here's a little comparison I made:

For this next one, I took the "yahoo!" sound that Mario makes when performing a 'long jump' action in-game, and slowed it using the lo-fi tempo slider, shaved off the latter 8 minutes, and slowed it again; until it was 3 minutes of repeated "ya-" noises; otherwise representing a fraction of a millisecond.

Experimenting further, I added a 'delay', pitch-shifted so that each 'echo' would play at a lower key. Reversing this sound created a turkey-like noise, which I then looped in turn.

I then took the theme from the game's "File Select" menu, again slowing it down to a 20th of its speed. From there, I took the opening fraction-of-a-note and looped it, lowering the key each time to create a jiltery progression.

Press play on both tracks and they... kind of work together!

Ruby, Ariel and I caught up with Mike for a brief talk on materials, which we mapped out to the following:

Then I remembered something cool. Being a fan of Aphex Twin would come in handy eventually - meet SampleBrain.

It was available as a free download on Github.

After loading it up (and convincing my PC that this was not malware), the program looked like this:

I followed the instructions and placed the shorter tracks from the SM64 soundtrack into the "brain contents", and loaded a loop taken from OPN's Zebra into the "target sound".

⚠️ PLEASE LOWER YOUR VOLUME! ⚠️

Will this be my go-to sample-processing unit? Time will tell.

Being the algorithmic hymns of a straightforward piece of software, it gets loud. REALLY quick. Using this software more in my work will require a lot more effort in the mixing department.

𝕙𝕒𝕕 𝕒 𝕓𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕗 𝕥𝕒𝕝𝕜 𝕨𝕚𝕥𝕙 𝕖𝕞𝕞𝕒!

I showcased my current project, sketches, different audio methods I'm using (SampleBrain included), as well as playing what I've made so far. This was mainly a catch-up for prodding into my own motives, rather than critiques.

The qualities of Super Mario 64 (SM64) are a hallmark of internet-era nostalgia; and for me, a nostalgia not just from the unreal, but the unlived; to be nostalgic for I game I haven't played, from a time before I was born.

The development of the presentation side of my work following the Week 3 critique came with a need to tear down barriers in audience interaction, remove that digital suspicion that we hold onto through the introduction of the familiar to the modern.

This will be a very 'modern' piece, but I still will be using MP3 players; like a letter symbol on your Gmail app, or a rotary speaker on your Phone icon.

I was listening to the Runescape soundtrack the other day.

It's this fantasy game from the early 2000s that I know jack-shite about, but the music is nice.

Nevertheless, it's clearly evoked a longing for those that grew up playing it, as every comment is reminiscing on lost times.

So I thought - what if I took one of these comments and just... removed any and all reference to Runescape, video games and even music - from it? What is left?

Runescape was, and is not a real place, but these are very real feelings.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 4 - Ducks in a Row

With my Age of Empires 'beat-tape' published and critiqued, I set my sights towards sampling the Super Mario 64 soundtrack. I had the idea back in June. I made a minute's worth of music, sampling the in-game song Cave Dungeon in Audacity, looping it to a soft layering.

The tongue-in-cheek attitude towards nostalgia in my current project is already present in the title "Ouroboros", referencing an ongoing cultural cycle of longing for the past.

This got better refined in a title I came up with for this new project:

This particular font is taken from the in-game text in SM64.

Better yet, the title can be rearranged.

This June prototype also consisted of two iterations of a potential album cover for the whole thing - I collaged different 'skybox' graphics from the game with an edited screenshot; small segments of the in-game experience, identifiable if only by the corner of one's eye. I won't be using these, but will draw inspiration from them.

Our group got together after class for another meeting.

✦ WHAT DO WE (as a group) NEED BY NEXT WEEK?

Proposal with everyone's statements.

A chat with Mike about our tech needs.

Following proposal and space selection... -> Scope out our space.

Link planning slides to workbook!

Following this catch-up, I drafted up an idea for my piece:

The work, under the title discussed before, centres around a mixer, with four [chosen so I don't get overwhelmed] MP3 players hooked up to it. Playing on loop (each at different speeds), the whole setup is connected to speakers, which not only project the piece, but accompany the group exhibition as a whole.

I also decided to change the title to "Everything [IS] Better Yesterday", as this more effectively covers the retroactive lumping of the past into a 'glory day' of anything not 'now'.

I got to work creating our group proposal - necessary for securing a gallery space of our choice, but also doubling as a means to create a visual style for our whole group.

I went HAM with all manner of formatting tricks, letter sizing and typography - creating this kooky reinterpretation of early-90s office aesthetics, with as many instances of Microsoft Wingdings as I could muster.

This black-on-white-default-font-straight-out-of-a-1995-online-learning-manual look fits within a visual style typically accompanying a deeply style-centric music genre of the same name, called 'Utopian Virtual', nostalgically evoking a time where the possibilities of computing were bright, and Microsoft Word was king.

Style comes at a cost however, as the amount of Wingdings and Webdings and otherwise Google Doc-specific formatting means that Word is not compatible, and a straight-to-PDF conversion ended up erasing half of the symbols. At least we had our pamphlet to look forward to.

Of course, the main goal for the exhibition proposal is to secure a space; and we set our sights on T24 Dark for its spaciousness, built-in projector, and pitch-black immersion.

To legitimize our request, we'd need to give a good idea of how we'd use the space, and I decided that two perspective drawings would do the trick.

Being terrible at drawing perspective myself, this involved 'rebuilding' the space in Minecraft. From there, our team drew rough estimates of their work onto the space.

I then re-mapped this into Minecraft.

From there, I traced up our space, along with labelling each person's works, framing them to the best of my knowledge. The whole process took about two hours.

We didn't end up getting the space. Instead, we were assigned 2E Dark - a fair deal smaller, but hey - less painting!

That Friday, we had our first workshop class! I chose Mike's tutorial, which guided my group through the Block 6 Studio, showing off the ins and outs of the gear at hand.

Passing through Block 1 afterwards, I took note of a stripped back, four-input mixer, all hooked up for talks. Perhaps it could be worth borrowing?

Around this time, I was browsing forums for fresh ways to get the most out of my SP-202. I stumbled across this neat suggestion - will I use it in my current project? Maybe not. But it's good to keep building my knowledge of this machine.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 3 - Crit Week and the Eternal Sleepiness

With group members Olivia, Bella and Stevee in attendance, we headed around the available gallery spaces for a little window shopping:

Eugene is our mentor, and we had a productive conversation with him.

ⓈⒾⓍ ⓇⓊⓁⒺⓈ ⒻⓄⓇ ⓂⒶⓀⒾⓃⒼ

(according to Richard Reddaway)

You should make it with your skills and knowledge, and with the materials and processes familiar to you.

It must interact with your body, made so that it can be worn, held, stood on, or something similar.

It may not be functional, apart from the function art has.

You should be imaginative in your design, even fantastical. What you make must be abstract, it must not represent anything already existing in the world.

Perhaps it will evoke something that has yet-to-be-seen.

Yet you and I can see the world through this thing - therefore it may have eye holes, and these must be two of circular and between 45mm (1 3/4") in diameter, and spaced 65mm (2 1/2") apart.

It's also worth acknowledging the sound-based side of Richard's works. Not because I'm drawing influence from them at the moment, but they sure do look cool.

Meanwhile with the group, we were all busy getting a grasp on the dimensions and requirements of eachother's works.

For such talks, we have a groupchat on Instagram, which is especially useful, as we've still not all been present in a room at the same time.

For my little Age of Empires project, I overhauled the Pop Concrète Bandcamp page I used last semester, now decked out with pixellated snippets taken from the in-game graphics.

I miss playing this game until I remember how frustrating and obtuse the in-game mechanics can be. With Age of Empires being classed as a real-time strategy game, I chose to swap the words around and name this project:

Time Isn't Real Strategy - a tongue-in-cheek observation on rose-tinted hindsight. Emotional past perception can't be trusted.

With this presentation being a small-scale catch-up on process more than anything, I kept a small scope, only making two songs total.

Audio was sampled from YouTube and compiled straight into Audacity. I even took a 'sword fighting' sound effect and combined it with the drums; which I sampled from Kirk Lightsey And Rudolph Johnson With The All Stars' Habiba.

Using audacity, I adjusted all the audio to be in the same tempo, and from there, I hooked up the SP-202. Recording had to be timed to EXACTLY the right intervals in order to loop properly; with plenty trial and error.

Mixing was tricky. Amplifying audio brought warmth and punch to the drum beats, but would create loud 'pops' that needed to be ironed out. I was only able to do this following the presentation.

The song was also in mono, to which I added a little stereo reverb so that it'd better fill the eardrums.

After a light dusting in extra in-game sound effects, it was finished.

Presentation, although discussed with Emma, was an afterthought. I added a QR code to the Bandcamp site, rehashed the 'sound player' graphic I used for the Pop Concrète stickers, as well as placing another screenshot from the game; choosing something that had a variety of in-game objects to jog the memory.

Come presentation day, I chucked the print onto a plinth and let the critique group go ham, interacting much how they did with Pop Concrète.

I should also add the Bandcamp link too, so you can listen for yourself!

CRITIQUE TIME, BABY.

People scanned in their own time. Had to step in and give a warning about the unmastered volume 'pops'. Couple heads bopping, some feet tapping.

Needed to be more inviting, QR codes "always look sketchy". At least with the QR code on a brick, it was silly enough that you don't take the risk seriously. On a piece of paper, "...anyone could do that"; "...feel like my bank account will be stolen..."

Different types of links... email? Stream? Non-labeled QR codes in a gallery setting? Generational divide in listening? Focus on breaking down barriers of suspicion.

Everyone was playing the music off their phones - but the intention was not to create cacophony this time - Gallery listening vs. personal listening -Listen to it in the gallery, download to listen later? Is your audience an individual on their own timeline or is it a group of people passing your work?

"Make it available to all, [so that] everyone can get a piece of their work..." "Why are you in Fine Arts and not studying Music?" -> With my art and presentation, I can "...define the difference."

"Unlocked memory..." Didnt recognise the sounds, seems familiar; "something about that property is evocative..." Two people recognised the source material: "...didnt realise I knew Age of Empires, I just remembered [sound effect video from game] as a kid..."

Dissemination - I might lose some engagement from a plinth presentation. Relational Aesthetics by Nicola Boreau. Post-production: Contemporary art draws from either the "computer programmer" and the "DJ" - people that draw from existing material and reform/recombine it.

For today's edition of the Plunderphonical Chronicle, we jump forward before jumping back. In 2010, Chuck Person - alias of Daniel Lopatin - released Eccojams Vol. 1, coinciding with cryptic video releases on his channel Sunsetcorp.

Internet music afficionados may call Eccojams the foundation to vaporwave, a (sadly flash-in-the-pan) genre of plunderphonics, characterised by slowed, echo-y 1980s pop, usually playing in its entirely with little modification.

Eccojams itself was a little more 'swaggy' with it, repeatedly looping small lyric segments of popular songs to re-frame their message. On track "B4" for example, the line "...there's nobody here..." from Chris De Burgh's Lady In Red is looped over and over; creating a familiarly un-familiar atmosphere.

For an example, I created my own 'eccojam'.

I took Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters, looped the line "...all my best memories, come back clearly to me..." and soaked it in delay effects. Given the nostalgia theme of this semester's output so far, it's quite fitting:

Of course, when it comes to Eccojams and the wider output of the vaporwave genre, we once again must attest that-

The late Robert Earl Davis Jr. was from the Houston hip-hop scene, characterized in the late 1980s by a slower sound compared to other hip-hop genres at the time.

Going by DJ Screw, he took it even slower. The tools of the trade were a turntable and E-mu SP 1200: a 1986 sampler that I omitted from my sampler timeline, but holds just as much influence as the MPC. Admire its dated, exorbitantly-expensive beauty.

Performing these slowed mixes, the listener would have more time to sit and reflect on the lyrics, upon which DJ Screw would scratch and loop certain lines for further emphasis.

Consumption of Codeine - taken in the form of lean - was on the rise at the time, and the mellowing effect of the drug was a contributor to the sound... and appeal.

An example of this is 3 minutes into Inside Looking Out, where Screw's record scratches allow the lyrics a chance to breathe, placing emphasis on certain lines through their repetition.

We now call this genre Chopped and Screwed, the forbearer genre to all things vapor and ecco; which still continues today in honor of DJ Screw's passing by codeine overdose.

From one skull-album-cover to another, and back to 2011 with Daniel Lopatin's - going by Oneohtrix Point Never - album Replica.

There are few pieces of music that I have played more than Replica, in fact, my coming-across of Replica last year was what kickstarted my interest with plunderphonics as a whole; and what continues to drive the ethos of my works; from style to concept.

As an album, it's a beat-less, brooding and largely atmospheric collection of synth progressions; that either play on their own or - and most alluringly - accompany a sample.

Weingarten, Christopher (October 2011). "Download: Oneohtrix Point Never’s Buzzing 'Replica’“. The Village Voice.

How Lopatin samples on this album is most interesting. He entirely sources from 1980s-90s TV adverts, cutting them down to a small fragment, and letting it repeat; as synth swells gradually build up to accompany it.

"I like this idea that I’m not actually a musician and that, instead, I’m kind of like Indiana Jones — an adventurer who is looking for old things that are meaningful. So, like, we don’t tend to think of television commercials and ephemera like that..."

The sample-work is jarring, too. At points you're left with nothing but a fuzzy sample playing over and over - not even as a groovy loop, but as if midway through a sentence.

"I categorized the sounds a few different ways, mostly by theme. One strain of infomercial [which I called], "The Middle Class Lie," appealed to me the most. Those had products that were supposed to make you feel wealthier than you actually are..."

Samples were taken from an archive website called Videomercials, from where Lopatin would buy a DVD compilation and quickly skim through.

Some moments are emphasized. The song "Remember" repeats its name, itself taken from a McDonald's ad. Lopatin's works regularly dabble with memory; so take it as instruction.

Replica is fascinating because it's nowhere. An advert sells you a potential experience, and while it can evoke a bygone time, the memories aren't lived. Replica sonically leans in to this discomfort, cutting away the legibility of each sample until all that's left is distinctly unnatural mush.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 2 - Humble Beginnings

I suppose I should begin with the stuff I just plain wasn't able to add to last week's post; particularly, an instrumental track I made over June for an album TBA under my musical alias, Staffroom.

While two thirds of it are 'regularly' composed within Garageband, the first section is entirely sampled; including a home pool recording sent to me by a friend.

Samples used (in order of appearance):

Dreamlovers - If I Should Lose You

Jeff Harmon - Introduction

Aeron - America Today

I also was challenged to sample Ed Sheeran by Olivia, whom I had considered 'un-sampleable', but ended pleasantly surprised:

I've gotten my hands on a delightful self-help book called The September 11 Syndrome: Anxious Days and Sleepless Nights from the uni library. Being released in 2002, and quite clearly for (predominately) Americans impacted by the 9/11 attacks, I'm hoping this text will provide an snapshot into a collective mindset.

I've also picked up Nostalgia: A History of Dangerous Emotion by Agnes Arnold-Forster, which, with being published in 2024 and of a more pop-culture focus, is just what I'm looking for.

🆃🅰🅻🅺 🅰🅱🅾🆄🆃 🅶🅴🅰🆁 !

With it now playing a much larger role in my musicmaking, I should explain the workings (and limitations) of my SP-202.

As a sampler, the SP-202 doesn't make any sounds of its own. Instead, you record sound clips to each of the pads, which in turn play the sound back to you when you press them.

The SP-202 has limited space. Recording in 'Hi-Fi' will quickly drain your available recording time; even more so if you record in stereo sound. A recorded sound can be looped, reversed, or 'gated', allowing you to play it like a piano key.

Your eight pads are assigned to a 'bank'. You have four banks - two saved on internal storage, and two on a removable 2MB SD card. Playing sounds from the SD card is not recommended however, due to the limited polyphony.

The polyphony on the SP-202 is four 'voices'. That means you can play four pads at once. Recording a pad in "Hi-Fi" will use two voices, recording in stereo will double it.

Therefore, it's better to record in mono, at a 'Standard' recording quality (or lower). Using effects on a pad will also take up a voice. Using the SD card doubles this again, which isn't fun.

Effects can be assigned to single samples; including a tempo-only stretch, delay, two types of frequency filter, and a robot-like 'ring modulator'.

These, combined with a necessary use of mono, low quality recording; contribute to an unmistakably crusty sound.

Even for the time, this was a fairly primitive option for beatmaking, as the SP-202 comes without a sequencer; which means that you won't be programming beats as with a drum machine, instead - and unless you're looping a pre-recorded drum beat - you'll have to finger drum as strictly as possible.

The effects are uniquely rough, and can all be interchanged on the fly; leading to many musicians using the SP-202 as an effects module - to the same vein as a guitar pedal.

Looking into samplers has also led me across the Roland P-10 Visual Sampler, a similar-looking tech that samples video clips - as opposed to sound - onto pads.

Released around the mid-2000s, I initially was confused as to where sampling/playing clips on the fly would be useful - family projector nights?

That's where Bella let me know about the concept of VJ'ing - which is Video DJ'ing. This functions in both a live setting; quickly playing clips alongside a stage act; or as a standalone art!

I'll stick to my guns for now, but I have some ideas looming in the distance about sampling a home video, would it be worth in investing in this ~$500 piece of outdated equipment?

Bella attested that both Mike and Eugene's interest in the VJ-ing art form would likely lend them to having some similar equipment in stock, so here's to it!

I'll get to sampling Super Mario 64... eventually. It holds a lot of weight; and I want to test out some ideas on a game a lot nearer and dearer to my heart: Age of Empires.

A point-and-click 'real-time strategy' game from 1997; Age of Empires sees you building up a settlement from stone age to the classical era, managing resources and going to war. Six year-old me played it daily; and the compressed MIDI soundtrack has been etched into my brain.

So I sampled it! I went with a 'boom-bap' style; assigning a kick and snare drum to individual pads on my SP-202. From there, I picked a song from the soundtrack at random, and added a voice clip from a developer interview.

I didn't have any intention to go beyond week three's showcase for this idea, and with this game being less popular than SM64, I have more room to try shit out - and even use my sampler for its designed purpose as a beat maker; rather than whatever the hell I was doing with Taylor Swift last semester!

After recording my jam in Audacity, I added in-game sound effects for that extra nostalgic charm.

Emma caught up with me for a little IPO talk; which at this point had been submitted, although it came across "...complicated and difficult to read" - for my next iteration, I'll put some more focus in simplifying the language, and putting emphasis on outlined concept a little further.

As for the presentation-side of my Age of Empires piece, QR codes were the choice suggestion; which depending on placement - "....completely change how you perceive" a work (or exhibition), and "....force people to look quickly or slowly" - could this also be utilized in the group exhibit?

NOTE: Editions of the Plunderphonical Chronicle [a polished digest of sampling history and my means to source artists] go all the way back to Semester 1! The most recent is in Week 7, detailing the history of samplers right until 1988.

Now, where were we?

The Akai S2000 was a sampler released in 1995, and visually looks to be a step back from the delightfully accessible MPC. It was, however, a cheap option for studio sampling, trading portability for hefty memory and computer power.

For Darren Seltmann and Robbie Chater, better known as The Avalanches, this machine would be foundation to, hands down, the pinnacle of sample-based ambition; Since I Left You.

Released in 2000 and entirely sampled from front to back; Since I Left You is the funky counterpoint to Plexure; with all the same scope, but flowing from track to track with far-more-accessible disco soundscapes, each one lusciously layered to the maximum replayability.

An interview with Sound on Sound would outline their expansive recording process:

"People think you buy a sampler and away you go, you turn into DJ Shadow or something," he laughs. "It's really a game of patience. In the beginning it was literally 'OK, I've got 10 sounds. Two are in tune.' Creating chord changes can take a week — to make the chord change that you need without plugging in an organ. There is a bizarre satisfaction to be got out of that, and maybe that's a more intense satisfaction than actually playing it yourself."

The muddled nature of those recording sessions means it's impossible to know for sure, but a conservative estimate from Chater places the number of samples used at upwards of an astounding 3,500. "Squinting back, most tracks had at least two S2000 programs full of samples," he says. "That's 100 keygroups per program, one sample per keygroup, multiplied by 18 songs..."

It's daunting to think about, especially since we haven't really seen a plunderphonic project that matches this level of production intricacy since; as if we stood back and started moving lateral.

It's also inspiring. The amount of time needed to go out and find a record, listen to it, buy it, sample it, and modify it - multiplied by 1000 - is a testament to what sample-based music can be.

Here I am now, able to instantly gather a sample from YouTube and record straight into Audacity by clicking twice. The world is my oyster.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 1 - Project Outline

Semester one was my space to toy around with facets of the artform, presenting methodology first, contextualization taking a backseat to the abstract. This semester will see me place deeper intent within this process but retaining the creative actions of sample ‘plundering’ as my avenue for messaging.

In the first semester of 2023, a perverse interest into the oversaturated visual culture of YouTube ‘thumbnails’ leant itself to a series of satirical response pieces, which soon transitioned into a general commentary on modernised visual culture by the second semester. The culmination of this was in the BRAZEN FUCK OBJECT (and children), a lumpy, three-legged sculptural beast of cardboard, spotted mass; a texturally overwhelming amalgamation of all things accelerated and visual – warped beyond recognition into an alien presence.

My work this year, while taking a step back from the distinctly visual – spiritually picks up where the concept was left off, now borrowing from, and rearranging the ever-growing expanses of man-made sound into something of a shattered, mosaic replica. Much the same in the world of music as with visual culture, the accelerating catalogue of past creation poses new challenges for the future. Specific movements are harder to pin down, motives see a greater focus on profitability than practicality, speed and quantity are key to material success. The capitalistic, slow death of the artisan permeates both years of study as such, and much as stripping away and re-meshing visible pieces of online culture bore a dystopian parody of what seems to come, to undergo a similar conceptual action in the collage of music is to bear fruit of similar flavor.

Last semester saw me tucked away at home, accessibly experimenting within the limited capabilities of a YouTube player and Audacity, a free sound-editing software. A CD player paired with bargain-bin CDs put the actions of transforming source material to the forefront. However, the overarching intention was to utilize what I aimed to be the workhorse of this year’s projects – a vintage Boss SP-202 sampler, purchased from eBay back in February. While a small, ‘lo-fi’ piece of machinery, it brings with it a method of creating deeply rooted into the mana and artistic history of plunderphonics. As much a plaything as an instrument, my (later than expected) use of the machine was a step outside my comfort zone, but the break has given me some time to familiarize myself; to which I’ll be making much greater use of it throughout this semester.

With the actions of sampling established, from here I can use sampling as a tool for remembrance, reconstruction, and illustration. Being from 1998, the SP-202 has 2MB of internal memory. But what I can evoke from using it fits on so much more.

With the imperative to find a group for an eventual joint exhibition later-on, fellow artists Olivia, Ruby and Steevee were on radar, with our works each following a method-focused, anectodally-driven interpretation of past media.

Anya was initially in our group too, but split off not long after.

We jointly created a group chat, as well as a Google Slides document for compiling notes. This was my moodboard going in:

From left to right, these interests are: My SP-202 sampler, a materially stripped-back approach to making (exemplified by Alan Vega from the band Suicide), Age of Empires - a game I have fond childhood memories for, the concept of nostalgia (or generally making fun of it), the album Replica by Oneohtrix Point Never, and Super Mario 64. More on that.

Over the past two months, I’ve had rough plans (and a little bit of working) towards a sample-based album entirely composed of audio taken from Super Mario 64.

When it comes to online sentiments, nostalgia is a driving factor to defining the now; and the associations of a ‘then’ manifest in cultural snippets (samples?), or as is often the case, specific published forms of media seeing a resurgence through childhood re-ignition.

This can be a means towards many things - a sentimental return to an old enjoyment, a reconnection with a newfound audience to share it with, and new media produced in admiration of such. 

It makes money, too. Pokemon and McDonald’s as brands are fully immersed in the value that nostalgia plays in securing a loyal audience, with the latter being a chilling example of how brand recognition can be ensnared in those valuable childhood experiences, to where you’ve guaranteed lifelong loyalty from the customer.

Video games are just one of many, many avenues for nostalgia to run free among a user base, in this case, perhaps a little more prone to bigotry. Indeed a familiar anecdote found in fan base communities of the ‘old being better than the new’ can turn concerning when faced with any degree of social progress within and around the game since.

Super Mario 64, like numerous other ‘childhood greats’ in the video game sphere, saw a return to popularity in the late 2010s, its every element picked apart by a now-adult audience, keen to re-immerse into naive wonder. 

I’m no different, my work leans into the growing concept of ‘liminality’ (concurrent with a return to remembered spaces of any kind). The game was released seven years before I was even born, and it’d be another nine until I would play it. Well, the 2004 remake, that was, but I begged my parents for the Nintendo 64 console so I could play the original. It never happened, but for a while I made sure I learned as much as I possibly could about it. To this day I’ve never played the original, and any nostalgia I have is as an outsider, absorbing an experience second-hand from YouTube gameplays. 

Perhaps this distance contributes to a somewhat aloof sound I’ve adopted in the audio portions I’ve pieced together so far, and of a general message to ‘go outside’. Now that I find myself in a group exploring similar concepts, I’m presented with the opportunity to resume work on the project, now with the grounding of research, plenty of written references, and bouncing off the exhibiting ideas of the others in the group.

The SP202 - a self-proclaimed sampling ‘workhorse’ for last semester’s work (which in fact only saw limited use from May onwards) will be returning, now with extra practice and me NOT nearly burning the house down with an incorrect adaptor. The Plunderphonical Chronicle will also return, picking up right where I left off, with the late 90s-present still yet to be covered. Stay tuned!

⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ ⋆

I surprisingly had less time over the 'holidays' to work on my music than I do in Semester 2, but what I was able to make, mainly came from sessions with Audacity, as well as the SP-202.

The goal was clear, to compose ENTIRELY from music samples, with not a finger to a keyboard note. Note the lack of a detailed categorization with these, I have no idea in which order I made them...

My pride and joy from these sessions would have to be "GETUP", a 1-minute house loop that uses 7 samples and took 2 hours to make!!

Samples used:

Jammin Gerald - Pump that shit

LVL1 - GOBL1N

Stock fire alarm sound

Jimmy D - Rescue Me (Imagination)

First Patrol - Get Up (Have Some Fun Tonight) (Acapella)

Shante - Big Mama (Acapella)

Fatboy Slim - Gangsta Trippin

There's a couple more, but Tumblr has an Audio upload limit.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Summative Assessment Hand-In Statement

Tumblr has a strange layout, so when reading:

Be sure to scroll almost all the way to the bottom, until you reach Week 1.

From there, read down, then scroll back up to Week 2, then read down again. Enjoy!

This semester has seen my complete artistic immersion into Plunderphonics, a style of musicmaking that involves the sampling of recorded material. Coined by John Oswald, there are a variety of forms that this style takes – from satirical collage to groovy soundscape assemblages, or the varieties of hip-hop beat making.

My works have been developed through, and carried by, my learning of sampling tools, as well as a lengthy history to look back on, as written in my workbook section: the ‘Plunderphonical Chronicle’.

The aim has been to have the medium and technique be on the forefront of the audience experience – conceptual depth has largely taken the backseat to showcasing the transformative capabilities of sampling, be it through different audio tools, source material, or visual accompaniment.

Pop Concr​è​te is a culminative piece, much of the ‘objectified’ varieties of last year’s works; thoroughly dicing and blending down minute snippets of the latest pop hits into a compressed audio deluge; a logical endpoint to fast-paced music consumption, as disjointed voices of pop stars clamor over one another for a second or so of glory, before being engulfed into commotion once more. It owes itself to the plunderphonic DNA of ‘punching-up’ at the music industry, caricaturizing it through exaggeration. It’s louder. Shorter. Faster.

The title is a play on the Musique Concr​è​te, a dense genre of sound collage (and precursor to Plunderphonics) popular in the mid-20th century and popularized by The Beatles’ Revolution 9. The presentation of Pop Concr​è​te further solidifiesthis, with the audio accessible via QR codes, pasted onto bricks I left around campus; placed in a public – as opposed to gallery – context for passers by to notice, scan, and listen.

With 20 samples in less than 1.5 minutes and a free download to boot, it’s about as accessible as pop can get.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 11 - Back to the Drawing Board

With eyes on the street, I've noticed these small graffiti sculptures showing around town, appearing to be cement shapes mortared to concrete walls.

The approach I've been veering towards with my work has been of free-for-all interaction, and expressing my work through a structural statement might be just what I need.

At work, I came up with Pop Concrète, a square concrete vessel containing an embedded MP3 player, and a headphone outlet. The title a reference to Musique Concrète, the looping mix would contain the same sensibilities, with plunderphonic pop samples so dense that they'd only warrant a brief listen.

The audience interaction with this piece would reflect this, with the block - in later redesign hollowed out brick - being placed on a table, with a chair implying a one-at-a-time listening experience. This would be inspired by the presentation of Em's 'overstimulation' sound collage last year, where audience members would individually come up and listening, the overbearing soundscape being too much to bear for more than a couple seconds at a time.

Likewise, Pop Concrète, its presentation a literal reflection of the sound, would be just as dense; one brief earful and you've already got the full digest - a brick of pop!!

A chat with Bryce made me realise that I could keep further with the times, and bring the subversive distribution element back in with the addition of QR codes. By just pasting these to a brick, and leaving multiple around campus, I'd also be working smarter.

Grabbing hip by the handful, I chose the following songs from the Billboard charts:

Tommy Richman - MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Ne-Yo - Closer

The Weeknd - Blinding Lights

Gwen Stefani - Sweet Escape

Sabrina Carpenter - Espresso

Miley Cyrus - Flowers

Benson Boone - Slow It Down

Djo - End of Beginning

Laila! - Like That!

Doja Cat - Paint The Town Red

Billie Eilish - LUNCH

Tyla - Water

SZA - Snooze

Jack Harlow - Lovin on Me

Sean Kingston - Beautiful Girls

Maroon 5 - Sugar

Steve Lacy - Bad Habit

Koi Leray - Players

Lay Bankz - Tell Ur Girlfriend

Some I like, some I don't like, I'm painting with as broad a stroke here.

I created a test track sampling Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso, but deleted the file on accident. Just imagine a skipping CD and you'll get the feel.

I also set up a Bandcamp page for the project, which the QR codes would link to.

I put the sampler on the backburner for this one as I was mainly mixing the track on campus via Audacity.

Everything was done by hand. To get a sample sounding extra choppy, I'd cut, loop, reverse, cut again, copy and truncate until the sound was recogniseable only by timbre.

Before long, I had a couple seconds to build upon. The idea would be for a short, track. With something so sonically dense and chock-full of samples, I would be putting all my time into someone only a minute or so in length regardless.

There were so many tracks and small clip edits that I had to split the file project into two parts!

I would import the mixed MP3 file into the program, and then pick up where it left off, allowing for easy editing without breaking my hard drive.

The whole process felt very automatic - keeping my brain stimulated meant having some parts being incomprehensibly complicated, and others being legible, coming up for fresh air with a danceable beat, if so for a couple seconds. I'm happy I took this approach, as it lends itself to a well-flowing listening experience, rather than the audible screams of a dying record player.

After a day's work, I was happy enough to call it. I realized it wasn't a necessity for the piece to loop, but it did anyway. The whole thing was only 1.5 minutes, but hey, Plexure took Oswald a year (At this point, I should give him writing credits).

While I have no doubt that any amount of listening will be small-scale, under the small-but-non-negligible-off-chance that I could be in any legal trouble, I selected the following Creative Commons license for publishing:

I also credited, in alphabetical order, all sampled artists. I spruced up the Bandcamp page, uploaded the file, and BAM. It was done.

Part of it, at least. I still had the whole 'presentation' side of things to get to. I was able to turn the link into a QR Code online, and from there, created a little graphic that I could print out.

I chose to include a little 'player' at the bottom to serve as a visual indicator of the link, song and associated website without being sketchy or vague. I tested the link with my phone, and got to printing.

I then mixed up some glue, and dusted off the bricks for pasting.

I left five bricks in total around campus, all positively slathered in QR codes for all to see. I was initially planning to leave one in a gallery space, but chose to further commit to public interaction/distribution, leaving them alongside places of foot traffic.

As well as outside the music block, because I thought it would be funny.

Come the next day, and inbetween showcases, my rōpū walked by one of the bricks, and we all stopped to give it a scan and a listen.

I thought most people would just save the link for playing in their own time, but instead, a bunch decided to play it all off their phone speakers all at once!

The resulting cacophony was brilliant, the dense sound coming out of tinny phone speakers, layered over itself - I couldn't have asked for a better presentation. And people enjoyed it! Scanned it at their own volition!

I was glad to see the turnaround in sentiment from my previous work, and hopefully, as these concrete bricks sit around campus for the next couple weeks, more passers-by can enjoy it all the same.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 10 - Puppeteering

I made a sound collage composition for my creative cultures course - Nohoanga - titled Shetland Replica.

Taking inspiration from both style and namesake of Oneohtrix Point Never's 2011 plunderphonics album Replica; reapplying the message of cultural mirroring to a personal length, with me choosing to sample tourism advertisements for various ancestral locations of mine.

I also made more silly Taylor Swift noises.

This one, taken from the second track of TPD (I will gage opinion during critiques before I make more) is shorter, but I'm more proud of it, especially with all the delightful references to gay sex that I was able to twist Taylor into saying.

Featured is a parody album cover I whipped up in a couple minutes, starring a cat I could only assume had attempted listening to her album in one sitting.

Every song file you create must have metadata so that the computer and user alike can know what it is, so I had the joy of labelling these monstrous compositions as 'easy listening.'

I was happy with where I was, so I got to wrapping things up for the presentation. A USB acquired, I loaded up the tracks.

For the unsure, I also made an instructions file on the USB drive.

The next day, I got a plinth for presenting - both to highlight the USB, and to provide a surface for the laptop. An extension cord that I brought in would also (hopefully) provide encouragement.

I was still pretty worried that people would view the USB as is, so I added some extra small (and snarky) instructions for anyone taking a closing instructions.

CRITIQUE TIME, BABY.

I MADE THE BAD DECISION OF HAND WRITING THIS.

The following is a near-1:1 transcription of my critique, with my recorded words in italics.

Right in that corner, right in that wall over there, there it is Very, um, promising..... [I don't like] being dingus, someone else can be the dingus. [Laughter] What's that last word say? Dingus. Dingus. Ah, yep. It's very playful, like when I came around the corner and saw it on the plinth, I laughed. Wait we can plug it in! Who's fine being a dingus? Who's got a hole? [Laughter] First the 'lube' and now this? [Laughter] Um, it says to plug it in... is it plugged, like, an insert on the ground? That's a USB insert, I wouldn't plug that to a USB, so, um, that's interesting to me. Indio would you like to touch....? I'm, uh, just letting people figure it out. Is that thing on the ground like a [plug] is it going to be in slightly, or...? [Inaudible] USB, you put the USB... Well you could even [inaudible] but you could put it anywhere. I'm not cooperating, someone go look for computer, [I feel a bit(?)] shitty. Yeah. I was hoping somebody brought their laptop...[I looked around the room] no laptops today. I can go get it. (Thanks Fahsai) I, um.... If you want me to...? Yep. You're asking a lot. [I got defensive] Quite a bit. To plug something in, y'know... *phew* Well, yeah. [Inaudible] Well just... asking somebody to have their computer with them- Assuming... -yeah, assuming that we would have something, and then assuming that we would be happy to plug something [Inaudible] do you think that sounds good to you? ...I guess so. Yeah, like, if it was in a gallery space, I don't think anyone would come in with a computer to [Inaudible] I suppose we're here, there are computers. If there was, you know, context... I mean it's not the plugging in though, like maybe that's the whole thing, you're just supposed to ask... 'why is there just a USB here?' Like a kind of... social contamination, like, what information are you going to upload... access... [Peeling off the tape] Had to destroy the artwork... Yeah, tear it off. Nice. But that also tells me that you don't want it to be picked up, because it's like, stuck onto the thing... [Multiple people] Yeah. If it was just around the USB... It's so rude... [Inaudible] [USB is plugged in]

A campus photographer happened to be around during my presentation, taking a couple photos of the critique group while my song played.

[Track 1 - Your Wife is Gay plays] [Several pained expressions form around the class.]

[Reading the room, I stop the track one minute early.] I might just pause it, um... It's only about two songs so far, but... How long is it? Four minutes, right? It's like... four minutes long in the file. Again, I think it's very humorous, focusing on words like 'Fortnite', 'gay', 'come'... I really liked that. And like, at first I didn't realise it was a song by Taylor Swift; when I was hearing 'Fortnight', I was just seeing the game, rather than the word 'Fortnight'. Yeah, and I do encourage everybody to go close and see what I did to the songs... To the file? [Inaudible] It says 'Your Wife is Gay'. Pfff! And there's one called 'Sodomy'. I feel like it would be nice if you had your laptop, or something we could plug it in, rather than expect someone to have it on hand. And also your work is like, very [Inaudible] in your Pecha Kucha, you showed a lot of inspiration, like, you were on a really good track with the visuals, as well as the musical engineering behind it, and that would've been nice as well... to see a video, and actually looking at the sound. Is that cat in the bed your own? Uh, no. [Inaudible] Well it's actually taking the piss out of the album cover. [Inaudible] ...there's a word for it you use, like a specific type of musical engineering, right? Yes, plunderphonics. Plunderphonics... like taking bits of different music and putting it together [Inaudible] ...it's like a type of self-generated AI-type of thing, right? Really overstimulating... [Laughter] I got anxiety [Inaudible] Anxiety? From brutalising Taylor Swift? Yeah! For sure. I didn't get that at all, and I have sensory issues, so... The second song is half the length and even worse. Oh no! Maybe after some further talking I can put that on but I also saw some people shaking their heads so I'm not sure about that. [Laughter] I thought that, like, the first one was like.. have you seen Danganronpa before? No. It's an anime about [Inaudible] ...when someone gets executed, there's like this song that plays, I thought that was what [the first 10 seconds] were leading into. I thought kind of, like, the vibes of the genre was like hyperpop, or like, breakcore kind of stuff... I think the reason I didn't get overstimulated was because it reminded me of YouTube Poops- [Laughter] -like that, kind of meme, it's like that certain type of editing on YouTube... yeah, kind of meme culture. I feel so fucking old. [Laughter] I feel like [Inaudible] I don't know if this is harsh to say but... this would probably be better displayed in like, a formative, like a three-week crit, and then to work towards that, towards like, something more visual... I thought this was a three week crit? Technically, yeah. Well yeah, but it's crit week, it's a big week for fine arts students, I feel. But yeah, I would've liked to see this in the formative, and like, the feedback you got from formative to be displayed today. Oh, oh yeah right, sorry I misunderstood.

I'm still very confused as to what this student meant, but my best guess is that they're saying that I didn't take my formative critiques on board.

Yeah I think for me, you know, yeah, so obviously, I do come from a different place because I'm [Inaudible] YouTube Poop is not the vibe... um, so for me because it is audio, I think I would have maybe liked you have the sound in the dark space. Yeah, maybe because of the way it's presented we're missing a lot of it, like it took us a while to get the laptop, and a lot of people were too shy to do that, and we haven't actually heard the whole thing. I don't know if it's the most accessible, but I do like the idea... [Inaudible] [Multiple people] Mmm. I feel like the scrambling around and getting the laptop and stuff, that's not my least-favorite thing about it... it's, you know, part of the making side of it, putting the bits and pieces together to have your final thing; I felt like it wasn't terrible [Inaudible] pretty quickly... Wasn't that kind of irritating? Yeah, for me it was a bit, yeah. [Inaudible] But yeah, it was annoying, but yeah, so the music was supposed to click something like that into your brain anyways, so I feel like that wasn't the most annoying part about it... in the best way... [Laughter] I don't want to be a bitch- No, you're doing so well! SHANNON: I feel like if we're kind of, like, baited into this kind of low-level antagonism it's okay to voice that... [Inaudible] Yeah, I suppose, not that I find the audio kind-of irritating, but it is a very particular way to set the scene for sure. I wonder whether you've kicked the legs out of a part of today's conversation because of that decision... we're talking too much about that, we should be talking about [Inaudible] What's there to [Inaudible]? SHANNON: Maybe none of it, you know, but yeah, maybe there's a kind of parallel between the antagonism of the work and the framework of our participation. In any other setting, I could've easily seen people not engage.. At all. SHANNON: At all. Yeah, that would've been my- SHANNON: Yeah, which would've been fair game. Yeah. SHANNON: I suppose the gap in the work is that you had to kind of nudge us to go and get it. [Inaudible] But then, I already feel like that's kind of divergent [Inaudible, referring to USB on plinth] what's at stake here, surely it's got to be something more interesting than that. I mean, yeah. So if that laptop had been there, same thing, I would've put it in... but do I want to be called a dingus? There's been worse things said than- Well I know, but for me, dingus is fuckwit, so do I want to be told 'pick it up fuckwit'? No fuck you, I'd walk away! Well, maybe. You think you're so clever, I'll walk away. [Laughter] I think it's informative you presented with Em, and that [Inaudible] and more people focused on the visuals in relation to the sound, so I think it's a tricky situation just to present the sound without the visual, and I think the USB is a very interesting approach to that, and I think could be effective in... you wanting people to engage with the music rather than engaging with the music, with visuals. Yeah. For me the part that gets me is that is that, um, there's also an instruction manual attached on there, just an extra layer if anyone wants to whip that up... Sorry, the instruction manual? In the actual file... Pretty compliant audience... [Laughter] Ah, there we are. It's cause Fahsai's so nice. Can I read it out? Yes please.

I might just prematurely stop it there. The recording goes on for another 9 minutes, with the general sentiment continuing along these lines. The particular gut punch with Shannon's critiques was the pretentiousness of the piece, in particular the general cynicism in attitude.

I had taken a particular stance against an artist, and my work asked the audience to share the same - and with such negativity, snarkiness, expressed; people aren't going to want to partake.

This is especially apparent with my hands-off approach; at the critique, I wanted to allow for audience discovery, artificially creating the dead-drop environment in a gallery space. Humor was not shared with 'plug it in, dingus', and likewise if I'd been more involved in guiding each step, it'd appear obnoxious all the same.

If I want to convey plunderphonics - and further - a subsersive approach to music listening, then having unwilling people recreate a desired interaction and then having the whole group listen at once just ain't it, chief.

Some solutions to this dilemma were proposed by the group: Shannon suggested that the whole thing would be more appealing if I just committed to the bit and made the whole album, while quite a few desired the dark space environment for listening, perhaps pared with visuals. I wasn't feeling it.

A particular step forward, proposed by Shannon, stuck with me - to get with the times, and put the thing on a music streaming platform, and have people listen when they damn well pleased.

What I took from this was to move further towards personal listening experience. But how?

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 9 - Dead Drop Gorgeous

For my USB dead drop piece, I got to thinking as to how I could get to the roots of the plunderphonic ethos in the modern day. Where Oswald made daB and James Tenney made Collage #1, I could likewise take a page from their books, and do the same for a similarly popular artist from my time.

Taylor Swift is alright - if not oversaturated. Smack dab in the middle of a new album cycle, the iron was hot to mess with her latest release, The Tortured Poets Department, with my plan being to squash and smatter each song into a Taylor Swift-flavored soup, a remix album of sorts.

I could then call it "(Indio's Version)", stealing the namesake of her album re-recordings, and then give it the free-USB-download treatment. How devious.

The best part is, I hadn't even heard the album until I started loading up the sampler.

Going track by track, I started off with Fortnight. I quickly discovered that the sampler was a great tool for making Taylor say really silly things.

I then edited down the SP-202 recording into its best bits, utilizing this wonderful feature in Audacity called 'truncate silence'.

Recording was pretty quiet, so I amplified the end result by a couple decibels.

Of course, all this button mashing had a cost, with there being quarter-second segments in the exported audio where the overlapped samples got SO INCREDIBLY LOUD that even lowering the general volume wouldn't suffice.

I noticed that uploading the audio to this blog would 'erase' these moments, but re-downloading it would see them reappear.

So I had Audacity record the audio straight off the blog, and the problem was solved.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 8 - Techno Pop

In about three weeks from here, we'll be revising our IPO based on our artistic developments so far.

My ideas have remained the same these past weeks, and it's worth mentioning an artist example that, despite being the love of my 10 year-old life, I will not be citing, rather comparing my own working philosophies to:

Kraftwerk - German pioneers of chirpy electronic pop, fully acclaimed and deeply influential to all things synthesizer. But beneath mechanical brand image and even colder sound, is a longstanding artist vision for the love of making.

It's a deeply innocent constant - novel technologies and transportation methods; and above all, songs about the music itself. Meaning doesn't need to be textural, the effort has already been put into making the song sound how it does, why distract the listener from all that hard work?

Instead, lyricism leaves the brain untethered by deconstructive ruminations and fully devoted to sound.

Of course, things have a tendency to loop back around, as a number of their songs, especially Nummen and Trans Europa Express have been sampled to oblivion throughout hip hop. (See Planet Rock and practically any song in the miami bass/hip-house genre)

This week, and for the first time ever, I christened the sampler. Plugged it in, checked everything twice, and turned it on. I'm still alive to tell the tale, so it was a success.

For my first ever bit of sampling on the machine, I chose a late 90s remix of Dreamchild by Strawpeople - it has a straightforward 4/4 beat, so it'd be good for experimenting with. And yes. It was a whole world of fun. And a weight off my shoulders.

Mood was high going into class that week, with Bena and I having a very productive conversation about where to take things.

Bena brought up the YouTube music video for Superstar by Jamelia, a which was removed from the site for a couple years for likely legal reasons. In its absence, Bena stumbled across this shoddy 2008 video camera recording of the music video, which has been terribly compressed, with audible mouse-clicks and shuffling; achieved by pointing a camera at the monitor and hitting record.

The dude's channel is filled with videos like these, all of them barely legible, audible, or even playing properly.

There's an appeal in the uncannily 'out of time', garishly degraded to the point that it seems deliberate - I myself experimented in this last year, taking a blurry screenshot from an early 2000s game, compressing it to the point of distortion, then using AI to upscale it back to the size it was before.

The article In Defense of the Poor Image by Hito Steryl (and recommended by Bena) validates the artistic importance of the lo-fi image in the frame of class struggle; of the hierarchy of quality, of somehow being more real, believable; the more compressed, copied and shrunken the image gets.

This also happens with music; with the polished, focus-group-tested sound of pop feeling uncannily removed from human connection, even the face of the performer seems untouchable - whereas rougher, utterly imperfect sound, brand image, it's closer to what we know.

So what am I really trying to convey here? The plunderphonic techniques that have inspired my work so far are dated - I've been sticking to the roots of the style; but for me, I see a good reason for it.

Here's why.

Back in the 1970s, there was this proto-punk band called Suicide, composed of two dirt-poor artists, stylistically out of time, making rockabilly compositions on nothing but an organ and a drum machine. They were poorly received at the time, and shows would turn violent.

Their philosophy was much the same as In Defense of the Poor Image - to stand against music as some luxurious escapism. They would lock the venue doors, and bring the destitution and decay of the streets into the venue with them.

I've been inspired, as such, to 'bring the streets' into the compositions I wish to make - find ugliness in well-crafted veneers and chop, remix and amplify them until they stand in utter spite of source material.

And much in the spirit of Oswald once more, the way in which I present this should reflect this disorderly approach, thinking of the space in which the audience interacts.

A somewhat outdated, but charmingly rebellious example would be the USB dead drop, an artful, practical - and subversive - way of sharing information, devised by Aram Barthoull.

In a musical context, it evokes the less-than-legal filesharing of the early 2000s, or of John Oswald's distribution of the Plunderphonics album, allowing listeners to "...tape it off the radio for free."

I want to audience to engage with it as such, and in physical form, that would be a USB, elevated on a plinth, for which anyone is free to come up, download from, and even share; an ugly-fied pop song, for perhaps an air of grounding 'real'-ness to the listening of music.

I hope they don't think it has something to do with Marcel Duchamp.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 7 - It's Like Breathing

If you’ve heard David Bowie’s Space Oddity, then you’ve probably heard the Mellotron. A beefy keyboard running a tape loop, it was expensive, but cheaper than a string section. It was also what we would later call a sampler.

Tape degrades with time, however. Digital doesn’t, and electronic engineer Roger Linn addressed this with his LinnDrum, introduced in 1980 as the LM-1. Unlike previous drum machines, Linn’s used a chip, sampling acoustic drums rather than generating synthetic ‘clicks’.

A year later, E-mu systems would come through with the Emulator, a sampling keyboard that worked - with a 128kb capacity - off a floppy disk that the artist themselves would supply. While swapping the sample 'source’ was possible in previous samplers, to be able to record onto a floppy disc was cheaper, more accessible - and you didn’t have to rewire the damn thing to do it!

In 1984, AKAI would bring Roger Linn’s expertise along for the S612, a rack-mounted sampler designed to be connected with a MIDI keyboard.

MIDI, or Musical Instrument Digital Interface, had been introduced some years prior as a standardised 'language’ between different makes of synthesiser, and saw the creation of MIDI instruments - that don’t synthesise sounds themselves, but rather trigger sounds on a MIDI-connected device.

MIDI is in just about any digital instrument worth its salt nowadays.

Collaborating on the production of Death Grips’ avant-garde 2014 album N[____]s on The Moon, Bjork provided the band with a number of her vocal samples, with which the drummer, Zach Hill, connected, via MIDI, to different pads on his electronic drum set.

The second half of Big Dipper features a solo entirely made out of MIDI Bjork noises. It’s beautiful.

In 1988, the modern sampler was born. The Akai MPC60 is what was called a groovebox - an all-in-one workstation designed for affordable, accessible use. Samples could be loaded on, edited, and assigned to big juicy pads for replaying. The whole thing was portable too; the people’s sampler.

Four years later, a struggling artist that we now know as DJ Shadow saved up his money and brought one.

Mastering his craft, DJ Shadow released his debut album Endtroducing in 1996, a culmination of two years of entirely sample-based composing; minimally produced on the MPC60, a turntable, and an eight-track tape recorder. It’s straightforward.

Oh, but it pays off. With front-to-back trip-hop instrumentals, DJ Shadow put the beats to the forefront, the samples the main attraction. Hours a day, spent at the record store, listened to over and over for the perfect little snipped, every sample raising its voice, stating its case, and leaving politely.

One of my favorite examples of this is on Organ Donor, where an organ sample of a descending scale is transformed into a groovy solo. Listening closer, every note from the sampled organ has been assigned and re-arranged on the sampler. Y'know, he could’ve just brought a keyboard, but he didn’t.

Presentation week! Chasing down Mike at last, we got to talking as to the audio side of Em and I's dual presentation.

A projector was already set up, but speakers still needed to be brought in. He let me borrow a pocket MP3 drive to load my track onto, which would then connect via Bluetooth to the speakers. Meeting two days later, and bringing in the speakers, we had a little tech test, and things were working well.

On the day of critique, I came in 10 minutes before class, set up the tech, and all was good! It feels nice to have things go right.

CRITIQUE TIME, BABY.

Aside from some hiccups with the projector, presentation went just as planned. The speakers were fantastic, and as the critique group walked in for viewing, neither our pieces were beginning or ending.

Following a full four-minute cycle of my song, they had this to say:

The audio achieved a calming atmosphere, at points nostalgic, and even descending into an eerie distortion; flowing in forward, circular motion that neither ended nor began. The ambience created by this soundscape would likely work well with most visuals, remaining ‘level’ in its tonality throughout.

While both pieces were made separate to one another, the two pieces sync to the degree that they appear inseparable, to which the experience would differ without one another.

In watching, the mind yearns for a narrative, as Em’s hopping, dancing motions appear to respond to the music. Fabric bellowed and swayed like butterfly wings, evoking the emotions towards the slow, comfortable sounds that came and went in forward progression; that moved in ‘one direction’ that reflected the forward motions of the video.

Although sonically enjoyable, it doesn’t come across as a work of plunderphonics. The sound palette and smooth transitions progressed with too little markings of its choppy creation process, looping not as the focus, but as the accompaniment to Em’s video.

Over-polishing seems to be the issue behind these issues of distinction– if I wanted to better convey the actions of sampling, there could always be a more jarring variety of sounds present; even drawing from non-music samples – and still striking that balance of audible creation and visual representation.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Week 6 - Preparation and a Degree of Reassurance

Getting ever-better at my craft, I began to get used to manually chopping and rearranging clips by hand. What you see below is the inner-workings of 0422_012-Reopening, itself reassembled from 0316_006-Gift from a month ago.

Just before the break ended, my partner-in-crime Em had a drag king show, and chose a song - Butterfly Doors - from my extracurricular music act Staffroom for the performance!

A satirical pop song about rich influencers, I added an extra addition of samples ripped from YouTuber apology videos for the intro. The sampling skills came in handy!

Critiques were coming up, and I thought back to the Week 3 critique, and the yearning for visual accompaniment. Around the same time, I'd been with Em while they were recording their own video performance for critiques, themselves lacking any audio.

It also turned out we had booked the same space. Some stories write themselves.

So now, with more time to each focus on our pieces, I worked on creating an audio loop to play at the same times as Em's looping video projection.

I stepped away from directly referencing their piece during the creation process, as to create something in some degree of isolation to theirs. If they synced, they synced.

I started out by 'reopening' my track 'gift' (I hope one appreciates all the gags I fit in this workbook).

The tempo was inconsistent, which isn't a problem on its own, but when I tried to add drums from Groove Collective into it, it was a struggle to go anywhere.

I figured that one of my acquired albums - Terra Firma - being a modern classical LP, would prove good accompaniment to the track.

Sampling the choir from Baudelaire sånger- Till Konstfullt Uttänkt List into numerous choppy segments, I attempted, once again, to add further texture to the base song structure, and again to little satisfaction.

So I cut my losses and started anew - with only 23 hours until the presentation.

Building up from some of the tracks I made earlier in the month, I kept on moving.

Samples used (in order of appearance):

James Hill - Down Rideau Canal (ukelele 'chicken scratches')

Imelda May - Knock 123 (vocal samples)

The Players Association - How Do You Like It (break-beat)

The Players Association - Turn The Music Up (guitar Sample)

Sample, chop, sync. Sample, chop, sync. Altering the speed of an audio lowers the pitch, but is smoother. To just alter the pitch or tempo alone takes longer to process, and is rougher in sound. Furthermore, each part must blend with another. I wanted polish; with tracks blending in and out.

Knowing that Em's video was over 10 minutes long, I slowed (most of) the track by 15% to better space things out. God bless DJ Screw.

It loops perfectly, as was the goal.

How to watch:

In two different tabs, place audio and video on loop respectively.

Put on headphones, watch the looping video, and enjoy.

[fineartsjournal]

213341 Art Studio IIIA ⋆ Interim - Study break-ing my heart

Out of campus for the break and with my emails to Mike unanswered, I cut my losses, went on Rubber Monkey and ordered the UCA202 myself.

A few days later it arrived - the final piece to my procrastination-fueled sampling puzzle.

It was exciting! For the first time in two months, I was actually going to turn the damn thing on and USE it.

Everything was hooked in, the sampler was now fully connected to the computer, and I was ready to rock and roll.

…I had enough time to tap the buttons a couple times before I heard a loud pop, turned my head to the outlet, and saw smoke coming out of the plug.

The following is a recreation of the event:

After yelling a number of expletives, I hurriedly unplugged everything and sat with the very real possibility that I might had just burned through $500 in 10 seconds.

A text exchange with my dear friend and recent BFA graduate Zero roughly pinpointed the cause to be with the incorrect voltage of the adaptor I was using, and the SP-202 manual more-or-less confirmed this.

Wanting to make the most out of an increasingly-shitty night, I put some of the CDs to work in Audacity and did a little plunderphornicating for a couple hours.

It was my first composition in over 3 weeks - so here's to not having a creativity gap that wide ever again.

...it could've gone better: I spent an hour alone just trying to get the individual components to sync-up pitch-wise; and not to much success.

Audacity is a finnicky, obselete, idiosyncratic and utterly annoying piece of tech to use, but when it gets me down, I remember: Any recording artist even 25 years ago would KILL for software such as this, let alone it being free.

Samples used:

Trey - With or Without

Trey - Wall-paper

Kim Stockwood - Soap

Aside from the musicmaking session, a brief smell test put the plug, adaptor and extension multi-plug into the bin, but not before an outing the next morning to Music Planet for some diagnostics.

The young man at the desk there was a good help, further clarifying the issue to be with the plug (that was shipped from Japan with the sampler) having a different...voltage... transform.... thing than the New Zealand... forgive me, this is like learning a new language.

I would need to buy a new adaptor plug, specific to the details he wrote on the back of a business card. If I were lucky, the current (fried) plug would've absorbed the damage, but otherwise, the Rockshop would provide repairs.

It was then on to Jaycar, as I brought myself a new extension multi-plug and adapter plug, and watched $50 disappear in front of my very eyes.

The chap there was also quite handy, whipping up some wiring diagrams of the Boss Sampler to show that, if there had been any damage, it would only be in the region near where the plug goes in and I forgot the rest.

I could, if I had wanted to, plug the new adaptor into the sampler and try working things again - at my own risk. I was a bit fearful in reference to the following graph:

TWO WEEKS OF PUSSYFOOTING LATER (est. Week 7)

...and so I hauled my gear to Rockshop, to see what I could do about it. After wincing at the nearly-burning-the-house-down-backstory, they plugged in the sampler with the new gear.

They were jumpy about it, and I couldn't even tell if they were joking - a decent chance they were just as unsure as I was! But low and behold... IT WORKED!

I tapdanced my way back home.

I mean, I still had to actually learn to use the damn thing.

During the meantime, I was back in the lab, creating small 'beats' from the CDs at my disposal.

Samples used:

Kim Stockwood - Truth

Fruit - Tales and Truth

Samples used:

Joakim Unander - Vibracell

Joakim Unander - Terra Firma

Groove Collective - I Want You (She's so Heavy)

Samples used:

Trey - Arcade Warrior

Clay Aiken - Touch

Clay Aiken - Measure of a Man

I was having fun! I almost forgot what that word meant! I was also getting more familiar with the Audacity layout - each beat took only an hour to assemble.