BLIND #2/BINNED #2
A failure.
One of the easiest ways to fatten a soundscape is through the use of delay. For the novice, this is one of the easiest ways to get started, filtering a sound through a DL4 or some similar device and creating a wall of echoing cacophony. When I listen to an experienced noise act, however, I prefer these techniques to be a bit more camouflaged. A piece of noise should deliver the illusion that each sound has been uniquely generated. Alternatively, delayed sounds can add rhythm or texture, but if they are to remain overt they should (at the very least) be sufficiently warped through another filter.
This record is a “fan favorite” on communal music sites such as rateyourmusic, but because of the self-imposed principles stated above, it has been ruined for me. When I hear a blood-curdling yelp front and center in the mix, only to notice it clearly regenerated several seconds later in the right channel, the crucial fourth wall has been toppled. When the band makes no effort to rebuild the wall, executing this misjudgment of method continually for 30-minutes, I turn off the piece and move on to something else. This band has essentially taken one of their previous classics and fed it through a simple delay chain to beef the sound: the equivalent of mirroring a wall in a restaurant to suggest expanse. At the very least, they could have covered it up.
Deleted.
Or–to put it simply–there’s potential for a really good joke involving Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, and a taxidermist.
My father and I used to play a game called What Was That. We’d sit on the couch and listen to silence, waiting for an occasional, unexplained creak or bump to prompt a jump and a hammed-up “WHAT WAS THAT?!?” As an adult, the moments I take to time out and just listen to the sounds around me have their roots in this childhood game. Much like an open shutter exposed to the starry night sky, the ear can gradually pick out more sounds than a cursory listen would suggest, layer upon layer, mechanical and organic (or absent: the high pitched, stereo-panned tones of tinnitus are always some of the first “sounds” to register). Telephone conversations, tires over wet pavement, truck horns and high school cat calls, my landlady calling out from the stoop, reggaeton bursting from pimped-up cars passing from west to east down Irving Avenue, a bird, a gull, a dog, the wail of Engine 277/Ladder 112 as they answer a call, the refrigerator, computer fan, stomach, white noise generator in the baby’s room and on and on and on, a sonic ecosystem. And if this weren’t enough, I’m a slave to my own mind and the endless conversations that bounce around beyond my inner ear: Tasks I was supposed to remember, conversations, confrontations I’ve had, may yet have, probably won’t have, song ideas, shopping lists. A New York consciousness is a noisy one.
