In Between the Walls (disquiet0238) by Nate Trier

Still pushing myself to include voice in my Disquiet projects. I've tried wrapping up a pop song in the Disquiet approach before; this time it took!

The first thing I noticed when I began using my portable recorder is that when I breathe I sound like a 60-year-old furnace. So I knew that this was my chance to use my respiratory racket in a project rather than edit it all out.

This gave me the idea to write a song about "breath," so I went with a pop song format. I've always thought moving into a new place was kind of creepy, and I've always been interested in the supposed traditions used to christen new home-building projects (like burying somebody alive in the foundation? How, uh, comforting for when you move in...?), so I thought the idea of someone's breath "hanging heavy" in the hallways of a house after they've moved out would be interesting.

(Please note that this song IS NOT autobiographical and is 98% made-up or cribbed from other people's lives. My wife wanted me to make sure the Internet knows that neither of us have punched holes in walls.) I've been listening to The Mountain Goats lately and I love how John Darnielle assembles a whole song out of finely sliced little instants. I tried to go for the same minute details in this song.

I recorded my voice using an El Cheapo mic that I got from a now-defunct Internet music company AND ALSO my Zoom, which was a little further away. I put the song together to near-completion and then added the Zoom track, which I knew would be oh-so breathy. I used a "flipped" gate in Ableton to gate out anything *louder* than my breath (i.e. I made a track of just my breathing and gated out my singing). Then I added a LONG tempo-synched delay on that so any sounds would hopefully stick around for a while and make a rhythm. It's a little subtle but it's there. (I think it works well with the theme of the song).

A pleasant surprise was the sound of my office chair squeaking as I wheeled around my studio and the occasional keyboard tapping. I looped this to make a not-quite rhythm.

So this is my very-much demo and experiment.

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More on this 238th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Record a piece of music, emphasizing the sounds of production over the music itself” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0238/

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Image associated with this project adapted from one by Alf Storm, used thanks to a Creative Commons license:

https://flic.kr/p/6pazwd