NND-DUB (disquiet0233) by Nate Trier

This is a remix of three different experimental tracks that ended up as a dub noise track.

The "Macro Dub Infection" compilations blew my mind when I was just getting into electronic music, and their aesthetic guided my approach to making this track. The art for this track is my little homage to their album art.

I downloaded the three remix-friendly netlabel tracks and went through my usual procedures of finding interesting noises: I listed to them double-speed, half-speed, I found things close to pitches and threw them into a sampler, I found rhythmic loops. I'm pretty happy to say that a lot of my techniques were influenced by my participation in Disquiet Junto projects during the past year.

I tried really hard to restrict the process of finding sounds to one stage and arranging the song to the next stage. The three tracks I worked with were:

“HNY” off the album Wormbole by ʞık (Karl & Karlik) on the Bump Foot netlabel: http://www.bumpfoot.net/bump207.html

“Pepper Jelly” off the album Recombinations by Andre Darius and Riley Theodore on the Haze netlabel: https://hazenetlabel.bandcamp.com/album/recombinations

And “Autista 3” off the album Autista by Pablo Reche on the Impulsive Habitat netlabel: http://www.impulsivehabitat.com/releases/ihab113.htm

I played the bassline by sampling the first snippet of HNY and throwing a sort-of pitched section into a sampler. The other sounds are largely unmodified. I made the groove by layering "loops" on top of each other - but with no attempt to make them line up to the grid or even to each other. So a Pepper Jelly excerpt is looped against a modified HNY excerpt, and you're hearing two rhythms that don't quite synchronize. Surely our ears are ready for a genre of found-sound entrainment?

The final step was to take excerpts of Autista 3. I chopped up the first 30 seconds by when various phrases ended and used the shorter segments as flavor between sections of the song, and there are longer "melodies" from Autista 3 at the end. I like how the free improv excerpts took the role of horn blasts in a dub track, and it reflects my own musical tastes pretty much perfectly.

Otherwise, this track is structured like most of my tracks - statement of theme, diversion, theme appears again but modified, and then various digressions. The digressions are pretty extreme in this one. There's also a brief coda; this is HNY at double speed.

The mixing was tough, as it always is when you're trying to get "noise" sounds to sit like traditional instruments.

More on this 233rd weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Make one track from three different netlabels, courtesy of a Creative Commons license” — at:

http://disquiet.com/0233/

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