A couple of field recordings of downtown San Antonio mixed in Ableton Live with some resonator filters to fill them out. A bit of Tension and Collision. Some distorted vocals. And a drum rack full of household items being struck, stroked, and otherwise misused.

I started out with a bike ride downtown. It was an overcast day, so I had no desire to shoot. And as I have this new front rack for my bike which holds all my equipment to do field recordings, I thought I’d check out a few sites with some interesting sound properties. The three areas I chose were the Arneson River Theatre (an outdoor performance area on the riverwalk), the bus stop at the downtown library across from the Southwest School of Art (it’s a portion of Navarro Street with a lot of echo and constant buses driving by, stopping, and idling), and a little fountain at a peaceful pocket park under the Augusta Street bridge. I ditched the Arneson recordings. There was some horrible compressor running in an adjacent construction site. But the other two seemed nice. What I’ve been doing lately with these ambient recordings of wild sound is to process portions through some of Ableton’s resonator filters, to fill in a sort of modulated orchestral sound. Than I built a drum rack with about ten sound clips I recorded of various items at hand (small wooden box, glass votive candles, an empty fish bowl, masking tape being peeled off the roll, etc.). I added all sorts of filters to give the sounds depth–corpus is a nice one for this sort of percussive work. Then a couple tracks of very spare melody, using two Ableton instruments, Tension and Collision. I finished it off with a few clips of me reading short passages from some of my short stories (the voice has been filtered through a Max for Live effect which emulates a voice over a telephone). I spread the tracks about by panning them across the stereo field. I also played some with automating elements within the various track envelopes. It’s probably the most tinkering I’ve done with a sound project. I like the feel of the piece. Also, I think there’s a nice balance of the intentional, and the accidental (though, I suspect, this is only something I would notice).