Field Research
I try to go out as much as possible when working on my musical projects. It's easy to cave yourself in your bedroom or studio and listen to loops of decontextualized sounds for hours on end. It's a sad reality of electroacoustic musicianship that our ways of working are often accompanied by isolation.
One way I have done this in the past is through field recording. Just like my past projects, I went out of the comfort of my cramped studio apartment and into the streets armed with a field recorder, two small microphones and a backpack to stealthily record my surroundings as I wandered through the city. But unlike my past musical projects, I decided not to wear headphones during this process. Instead of "hunting" for interesting sounds, I tried hunting for interesting lighting scenarios. Not being able to hear what you are recording already changes how you interact with sound; you interrupt the "Listen-Move-Record-Listen" feedback system and develop a certain degree of distance from the sounds you are recording.
Whilst certainly less intuitive than my previous field recording workflow, this new approach of creating distance between me and the sounds I record has changed how I interpret field recordings in my practice. If previously they acted as a sort of sound documentation of a real lived experience that could be modified, warped and recontextualized to fit my aesthetic needs. Now my field recordings exist within my music-making process as a piece of audio to be re-discovered through editing. Whilst in the past I placed a big focus on applying DSP and Synthesis techniques to re-appropriate my recordings, I now start to gravitate towards more "primitive" methods like Looping, cutting and super-imposing recordings. I think this shift in the process results from a change in how I value field recordings within my work. In my previous musical projects, I processed field recordings to make their emotional significance more apparent, as I recognized that a recording alone might be interpreted more literally than I would intend. I'm still trying to convey the emotional significance of a recording, but now I let the field recording "speak for itself" as I augment its meaning through the other elements in my composition.
Alongside these recordings, I also started documenting some of my experiences with light through simple photographs that I would take on my phone. I used some of these photographs as a sort of emotional reference to how the tracks of Screen Glare should feel. For now, I'm using photography as a compositional tool, but I'm interested in the possibility to integrate it more deeply into my practice. I've included some of these photographs in this blog post.
