PVC

Sunday 29 April 2012

Quote

"The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without the work"
Emile Zola
Sent from my iPhone

Monday 16 April 2012

New track: "Transparency"




This new track "Transparency" comes from a recent laptop jam we had at Andi's place. The week before I had been in Herne Bay, Kent and along with taking photographs for a new project that I am working on, I did some field recordings. The bassline from this track was made from a recording made a distance from Herne Bay pier, which they are in the process of dismantling. We filtered out the top frequencies, which left this fantastic low rumble, which must have been the sound of the power tools they were using. On playback, I thought it must have been a motor boat, but I don't remember seeing any about that day.

Herne Bay pier (with workers)


Andi created all the drum sounds on the iPad using the Korg iMS20. The rest of the sounds are treated versions of recordings made of  shortwave radio from this Phillips thing I found in a charity shop recently. I got it because it has two bands of shortwave. It just about works, you can only record off of one channel, and sometimes the interference is ugly (and that is going some by our standards!).

The Phillips D 8523 "Power Play Machine" with spatial stereo


In recording I picked up all sorts of fantastic distortions. I was searching for voices and noise mainly, but suddenly these two melodic sounds leapt out. One was some kind of eastern instrument, I never got to hear it clearly, and so it remains pretty much unrecognisable, but you can hear these manic notes running about like some crazed lead guitarist. The other melody was a distorted voice. And, yesterday, while I was putting the edit and mix together the lyrics began to seep through and I eventually identified it as "Beez In The Trap" by Nicky Minaj and some pillock called "2 Chainz" who goes on about how he has "a private home started from the public houses", how on earth does that work? And I am no where near hip enough to know what "f*ckers on your biscuit" means.. nothing to do with custard creams I am guessing. Its a fairly unexciting rap track to us, but there is something interesting about the minimal production on it and the melody in her voice. It gets a whole lot better when distorted to near oblivion.

The original lyrics of the song go:

"Bitches ain't sh*t and they ain't say nothing
A hundred motherf*ckers can't tell me nothing
Beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap
Beez in the trap, bee beez in the trap"

Through some distortion, chopping and looping it ended up sounding like "a hundred days straight and they ain't saying nothing" which made me think about David Cameron's empty blah about so-called 'transparency', hence the title of our track. I can quote Cameron on transparency here: "Information is power. It lets people hold the powerful to account, giving them the tools they need to take on politicians and bureaucrats. It gives people new choices and chances, allowing them to make informed judgments about their future". Well, he knows that all too well doesn't he? I just get the feeling his so-called transparency is no such thing. You wonder how much they are hiding. He may reveal his tax figures but I bet that doesn't tell the whole story, for example if we dig a little deeper we find them accepting donations in return for changes in policy (see: the Cruddas resignation), and there is bound to be more that we are yet to find out. Cameron's "transparency" is a smoke screen.

Anyway, stopping myself from going off on one, we hope you enjoy this track, its a bit of a frenzy. It's the sixth in a series of free tracks for 2012. We have loads more waiting for mixdown. We will get them out here soon. There are plans for live gigs and more jams on the radio too, plus some multimedia activity and some remastered and unreleased tracks from the past, we will keep you informed of course.

See you soon

Simon x

PS" The artwork photo for the track is by Andi.