Escalate, Walk Away ... And Say Nothing (Granular Synthesis, based on Nova Express) by Cork City Gamelan

A sketch towards a kind of musical sorting out of my thoughts, feelings and ideas set in motion by reading and re-reading Nova Express by William Burroughs since the 1980s. It is my main music composition project for 2014, the Centenary Year of William Burroughs.

It took me almost four years from conception to getting started: In order to reflect the cut-up method which Burroughs used to create the text, it is entirely a granular synthesis project. Doing granular synthesis means extracting small "grains" of sound from recordings or from a live feed, re-combining them to create "grain clouds", and shaping those clouds to make music.

I found the available software programs too restrictive for what I had in mind. In order to move forward, I needed to learn Max/MSP, a function graph data flow programming language, to create my own granular synthesis tools. I made this sketch entirely from sounds scraped and beaten out of objects I found in the streets of Cork City. The actual piece I have planned should also include sounds made from recordings of some text from Nova Express. Getting permission to use that text seems to be the most difficult aspect of the project …