Weinstein (disquiet0240) by Nate Trier

This week's Disquiet project was to make a piece that evolves out of a drone.

I was staying at the NYU dorms for an (awesome!) conference and discovered one note (low E or Eb) resonated magnificently in the bathroom. I recorded myself singing that note for as long as I could, intending to make that the drone and then use the fluctuations in the pitch to generate the melodic material.

However, that took a little more work than I had time for, so I used the "track and hook" method we learned about at the conference to just riff on the sound of my low singing and improvise melodies until I ended up with something that I liked. I ended up with something that used the notes of an A major pentatonic scale but treated "home base" as E (making a modal pentatonic scale?).

To make the drone, I stretched out my low note from 11 seconds to something like 45 seconds using Ableton's Warp feature.

Then, I thought I would record the sounds of the street below me and find a rhythmic loop (a la Disquiet#220 - https://soundcloud.com/triermusic/arrite-disquiet0220-rhythmicarrhythmic). New York may be the city that never sleeps, but at 8:30 AM on a Saturday it's pretty darn quiet. Finally at about 10:00 AM there were some construction sounds that I could loop in my field recording. That loop shows up under the vocal melody.

I made the loop "slowly evolve" (as per this week's assignment) by working backwards and un-deleting the sounds that came before the loop. In other words, I took the loop, made a copy, moved that copy in front of the loop and then re-added the 2 seconds of street sounds that were there before the loop. Then I took the loop, made another copy, moved that in front of everything, and re-added the 4 seconds of street sounds that were before the loop. Then on and on. The idea is that you hear the field recording of the street up to what will be the rhythmic loop. Then a little less field recording, then what will be the rhythmic loop. Then a little less field recording...until finally the loop comes into its own.

When the lyrics are finished, the process repeats in reverse: this time exposing more of the street sounds that occurred after the loopable part.

The lyrics are about a physical crash I had after a week of travel. They're a little hard to understand, partly because of the mix, partly because I had the laptop mic pointed away from me when I recorded to try to capture the bathroom's resonance. But I think it suits the piece!