Listening through to Cassandra Jenkins Album “An Overview On Phenomenal Nature” i was instantly attracted to the composition of the track “Hard Drive”.
It’s a collage of different moments delivered in spoken word over a bed of smokey saxophone and jangling guitars. “Hard Drive” creates a kaleidoscope of “slice of life” commentary backed up with musical romanticism.
Its structures feel fresh but also seeded in the traditions of american folk. Its been my most played song this week and an easy one to recommend:
Subway came about towards the end of the album’s completion, in its mixing stage with Mark Chadwick. At this Point I had almost removed the idea of having individual field recordings in the album as I had used almost all of them as samples within the tracks themselves.
The album and track order had been discussed quite a bit at this point as I wanted to try and reflect music chronologically with the dates of the recordings. However after some reflection this didn’t really work for many of the tracks which featured multiple recordings from different times. Nor did this mathematical approach create a flow between the songs that worked.
I have always been a huge fan of albums that merge the tracks together (And The Glass Handed Kites by Mew being a favorite of mine) and I wanted to incorporate that technique into my album. We finally decided on a track listing by working out which tracks really worked well together and then organizing those chunks of tracks into an order that flowed between more intense and relaxed energies. This did leave us with 3 problems in the record where the collections of tracks connected or in this case didn’t.
To get around this Mark suggested we use some of the field recordings I had made going back to our original discussion about the album when I asked him to help me with the mix. I went back through the tracks I hadn’t used and highlighted only a handful of the ones I liked “Subway” was one of the stand out recordings.
I recorded this track on a Subway underpass in Osaka as we were walking through it. It was quite a shambolic recording as we were rushing to see the Umeda Sky Building before it closed and as we entered the subway I could hear a busker playing a steel drum in the distance. I took out my recorder and just recorded us walking up to and then past the busker thinking it would be great to use in a track. Unfortunately the majority of the recording has too much foot fall in it to be usable and a pushbikes ratcheting sound overpowered about half the recording. Multiple attempts to use it as an element in a piece of music never quite worked.
However cutting out this 25 second segment and treating it with RX caused an interesting addition as RX’s processing of the reverb from the tiled underpass on the steel drum created an almost vocal/choir like sound. I thought this would work really well between the tracks “Airport Pianos” and “Yamanote Line” as they both feature choir samples and “Yamanote Line” is built around the recordings of trains in japan.
Out of all the tracks on the Album Airport Pianos is the one that I enjoy listening to the most. I think this is mostly due to the experimental way of making the track with has distanced me from the process resulting in something I feel that I curated instead of composed.
The Original Idea behind this track came from a field recording Made in Haneda Airport whilst waiting for a flight between Tokyo and Osaka during my trip.
We had arrived early to make sure the check in process ran smoothly and that left us with a few hours to wait in the Airport for our flight. Whilst walking around the terminal to I heard this audio instillation in one section of the terminal.
The audio instillation was plying random notes from a piano which formed chords that reverberated around a large cylindrical hole in the ceiling. I really enjoyed this relaxing and close to ambient sound caused by this generative piece of art. It was a quiet morning at the airport with only a handful of people about and so I set up my field recorder in the space and let it run for half an hour to record this instillation.
When I got home I listened to the recording with the thought of turning elements of it into a track to add to the album. The first issue I came across when listening back to the recording was just how noisy the space had been. Although there were only a handful of people who walked past the space in the half hour I was recording. The very reverberative nature of the space enhanced their talking and the clattering of their case wheels on the hard tile floors. Attempting to remove these resulted in a recording that was so full of holes it was closer to a Swiss cheese then any usable piece of audio.
After attempts to cut out the louder sounds failing mistrably I wondered if instead I could create something usable by concealing them a bit more. With some EQ, and specific gain reduction useing RX I reduced the louder clacks, knocks and shouts in the recording but then ran the whole recording through a large reverb.
This worked surprisingly well as the material in the recording I wanted to use was already slow shifting piano chords in a large reverberant space so adding more reverb to them didn’t take away the texture I wanted for airport pianos. However It had a great effect on the shorter more jagged parts of the waveform smearing the dialogue and knocks into long atmospheric pads that created a brooding texture underneath the piece. I bounced down this recording with the reverb applied and then cut out certain sections I liked to the most to arrange into a melody for the piece.
After the pad like melody was created I felt like airport pianos still needed some texture with stronger rhythm/transients for the listener to latch on to. As the original recording was of a piano I decided that I should continue that trend with a more forward melody driven piano part. However I wanted to stay true to the generative nature of the original audio and remove myself from the composition process as much as possible.
To do this I experimented with the ability in Ableton Live to turn audio into midi data. I took the long reverb tales from the piano chords and turned them into over an hour of midi data which I then fed into a piano sample library. I then went through this piano roll and selected the sections that could work in the track.
Although the algorithm was really struggling with the reverb tales, most of it was in the correct key and I found that the end of the tails were the most rewarding. The amount of midi data refined into fewer notes that had an almost human sloppy playing style as the algorithm tried to derive notation from a weakening signal. It’s these moments that become the end of Airport Pianos. I chose the more erratic midi generation as the track progressed to give the feeling that the track was collapsing in on itself.
With the track and its running time now finished, I still felt like the spaces between the notation was a little too vast. I had a speech sample from the original recording that under reverb had become this larger ominous pad sound. It provided some texture in those gaps but it only seemed to work in about a third of an octave range before sounding too digital. To circumnavigate this I replaced the higher and lower pitched tones with an old recording I had made of Male and Female Choirs in Manchester treating them with the same processing.
I finished Airport Pianos about halfway through making the album and it marked a turning point in my composition for the rest of the record. The hours of experimentation started to pay off with music that I struggled to define and yet had a clear style. I continued to use this collection of techniques on other tracks changing the tone of the entire album.
On her album “Silver Ladders” Harpist Mary Lattimore creates soft, shifting tracks that are rich in character.
It the way the Harp interacts with the other instruments throughout the tracks that really gives the pieces such an identifiable quality. Most of the instrumentation is made up of small repetitive motifs that are played with slight iterations each time. Each instrument doesn’t seem to stay locked into tempo instead they all seem to drift around each other and as they do they interplay with different notes from other instruments creating new textures and chords.
“Til A Mermaid Drags You Under” is a great example of this drifting style. Harp and electric guitar interweave with each other to create wide and beautiful ambiances that undulate over time resulting in a track that continues to change whilst holding a collection of simple melodic structures:
“Shrine” came about as an experiment; just how much could I create with the smallest sample possible?
I had recorded a 1 minute sample of a young boy ringing a bell in a shrine in central Kyoto. The boy ran up and rang the bell for prayer before running back to his mom shouting with glee at the noise.
I thought this may have enough elements that had both interesting textures but also tones that I could turn into melodies.
I went through this small sample multiple times and sliced mini clips out of it, with the intention to turn some into percussion and some into melody. I processed them using different synthesis techniques and effects to produce almost the whole track.
It was a long process to turn it into the track here but I was proving to myself that I could get a lot out of very small samples with the application of some creative techniques. Techniques I develop further on other tracks.
The work of Burial was the main inspiration on the opening of this track. He always uses interesting elements in his percussion to create a pallet of sound that sets the listener into a world he creates. I knew I wanted to use some of those techniques on a track, and I felt that the slithers of audio I had managed to extract from the original field recording would be perfect for this aim.
Originally the track was only percussive and ran closer to two minutes of play time, but it lacked a progression. The early ambience created by the soundscapes quickly fell flat to me, when I returned to it after a break working on other music.
I realised that using the foundations of the piece, but adding a more melodic element to it, could create something that would work over a longer play time.
Finding the melodic element from the original recording was the main problem though. Unfortunately the melodic elements of the boys voice of glee and the bell ringing varied rapidly in pitch and putting them straight into a sampler to play out created an atonal mess. It got worse the more you tried to wrangle it into something that worked.
This had stumped me for several weeks. How could I create a melody that was controllable from a sample with such varying pitches.
I attempted to use melodine (a software a little like Autotune) to force the bell and the boy into a more fixed pitch. But this always ended up sounding robotic, as the pitch correction overworked to try and force a pitch out of chaos. I then tried the PaulXStretch plugin as used on the track “Locks,” but it again created a texture that didn’t fit with the rest of the track.
Luckily I had been developing a technique that was working on the track “Airport Pianos,” which I thought could apply to this one.
If I pitched very small snippets of the sample (all under a second in length) and then fed them all into a fully wet reverb, it would create a sound that was both reminiscent of the original audio and the reverbs used inside the piece, whilst still being fixed in a pitch. I could then turn it into chords and melody. It worked!
I did this with both the boys voice (which became the background chords) and the bell sound (which became the step sequenced rhythm).
I developed the sequenced bell sound out of a desire to replicate the style of the famous Roland bass synth; the TB-303. I thought a 303 would be perfect as a lead for the more melodic track that was developing.
My knowledge of this particular synth was that a lot of its character derives from its filter rather than the fairly simple oscillator. So as long as I used a small sample of audio that was close to a square or sawtooth wave with a squelchy filter with a ringing resonance, I could create a similar effect.
I put the bell sound into Ableton’s sampler and triggered it with a step sequencer and played the filter and a send to a reverb live to create the sound you hear on the track. This technique was certainly influenced by the work of Aphex Twin.
Sadly I had to make one exception to the rule of making the whole track with a single sample, and that was the repeating kick drum sound.
Attempts to replicate a decent thud for the kick from elements of the sample never quite achieved the sound I was looking for. Eventually I gave in and layered one sample of a kick drum along with layers from the field recording to create the kick you hear on the finished track.
Apart from that sample (which is under half a second long), every other piece of audio in this track comes from the aforementioned 1 minute of field recording.
For those who are interested in the original field recording the majority of the track was built from I will add it to youtube as a curiosity. You can hear on this link Shrine original recording:
“Locks” was one of the later tracks I made on the album. As the pool of available recordings from the trip became smaller, I started to rely on more creative processing of fewer bits of recordings to make each track.
The vast majority of “Locks” comes from a recording of a Geisha performance that involved dancing, singing and an orchestra of eastern instruments. I sampled very small sections of this 90minute recording using Izotopes RX software to isolate individual instruments, before moving into samplers to make new instruments I could play myself.
This process resulted in a large collection of instruments that worked well in very small frequency ranges before they started to lose any semblance of organic texture.
This limitation in instrumentation and the octaves available to me really helped solidify the scale, tempo and style of the piece, as it was a very fine line before they would quickly fall apart.
Listening back, the only instrumentation that wasn’t from the 90minute field recording comes in the second half of the piece; the bass line programmed on a Prophet 05 and the drums in the second half taken from a sample library of a Simmons drum machine.
A highlight from the track for me is the pad like collection of chords that comes into the track from 2:19 to it’s conclusion. This was made using PaulXstrech; a piece of software that pulls even the smallest parts of audio outwards into cavernous elongated pieces. It turned a single note played by the woodwind section of the orchestra into the sound you hear on the album, processed with some audio degradation tools to smooth out the sound.
It is a great example of the creative use of processing to completely warp the original signal into something new but also how the ability of the technology forced me to keep it within this particular note range.
Daft Punk are calling it a day. Who knows the future for the two musicians and producers behind the project. Whether that be working together or separately on something else, or if they’re just going to stop all together,
Whatever the outcome they leave behind a small yet great catalog of music that was released over their twenty eight year career. On the surface they were a group focused on dance music but their albums always went in a more varied set of directions.
Their singles were so ubiquitous that for a passing listener it would be easy to think they represented everything their music represented. I was the same until I listened to “Discovery” in my early teens. Their love for the music of the 70’s was evident when you listened to the whole record, Not just Disco but rock from the time period was a key element of their sound.
Discovery is a fantastic album from beginning to end but the track that was and still is my favorite Daft Punk track is “Something About Us”. Its arrangement has something of the Nile Rodgers about it years before they got to work with him on “Random Access Memories”. With synthesizers taking the parts that would usually be filled with guitar.
This is probably the first track I heard that made me think about Synthesizers as an instrument of interest. Before that point I had played Trombone and Bass Guitar, but hearing “Something About Us” made me think about the unique sounds the synthesizer can achieve. A sound I wanted to replicate.
Something About Us was a gateway and influence for me its sound and style ooze a coolness that still holds up to this day even with synthesis becoming dominant in modern pop music. I love and will continue to return to this track for the rest of my life. It’s a must listen for anyone:
After returning to the UK, “Tokudawara” was the first track that came together on the album.
There were several tracks that I was playing with and testing at the time from the recordings of the OP-1. However, I was struggling to find something that worked.
The easiest tracks to go to from my recordings were the melodies and chord sequences I had created. They provided great bases to build the rest of a track on. However, many of these experiments only ended up making it to the record after some major alterations. All except “Tokudawara” and the final track “Leaving.”
The main collection of chords/melody on “Tokudawara” was played straight into the Tascam from the OP-1 and had an evolving pattern that I decided to strip back to selection as an 8 bar loop. I layered these and treated them with different FX, EQ and panning to turn a mono collection of chords into a larger stereo image.
One of my favorite tracks of all time is the “Telefon Tel Aviv” track “Fahrenheit Fair Enough,” and I especially love the way that the main melody/chord progression stays the same throughout large sections of the track, whilst the other instrumentation and percussion shifts underneath. This was certainly an influence when starting to make this track, but after many attempts at iterating the other instrumentation, I ran into a bit of a cul-de-sac with the piece as a whole. It stalled for a few weeks whilst I worked on other tracks.
The breakthrough came when I started to use a sample library of organic drums on other tracks in the album. I wondered what it would be like to re-create the electronic instrumentation at the beginning of “Tokudawara” with traditional instruments. The piano seemed to me like an obvious choice, and when I re-recorded the chords on a piano and added it to the sound of a real drum kit, I knew I had a complete track.
The field recordings on the piece came from two different events.
I first added the vocal shouts, which came from a Gyōji at a sumo wrestling match. I wanted to use samples from the sumo match because I recorded the OP-1 synth after returning from this match. I thought it would be great to link it in.
The second recording of birdsong was a continuous recording of the garden at the Okouchi-Sansou Villa. Field recordings of birds happen several times on the album.
I find blending these larger soundscapes of wildlife has a stronger effect when mixed with electronics. It was also referencing of one of my Favorite albums “Fin” by “John Talabot,” whose opening track “Depak Ine” features a background of jungle calls.
Perhaps because Tokudawara was the first track I finished, it set up a sound and a style that influenced the rest of the album. It also felt to me like something that was the closest thing to a “single” on the album, being easy to understand on first listen. Both of these reasons made me move it to the front of the track listing.
This track is rather simple compared to others on the album, so I am also going to include the background to how the album came to be in this article.
I have always been a fan of albums over singles. The act of creating a theme, motif and textural world that a collection of tracks inhabit interests me more than individual tracks. For me, it is the purest artistic form for a musician.
The journeys I have gone on by listening and re-listening to albums have shown to me music at the peak of its powers. And in turn, making an album was always my grand aim over writing individual tracks.
My love for a long play record and my respect for music has been a blessing as a listener but has hampered me as a musician. My attempts to create an album have always weighed me down with many near complete but failed attempts due to the weight of importance I give to my favorite medium.
This is probably why the album Made In Japan never started with the idea that it would become an album.
I knew from a young age that I wanted to visit Japan. In high school, I would play video games and watch films and anime from Japan, and knew that they came from a culture that was so alien to the one I was used to growing up in. I wanted to see it for myself.
In my mid 20’s I decided to set myself the goal of saving to visit Japan before I turned 30, and finally arranged to do it with a group of friends and my sister just under the wire for my 30th birthday.
My main passion in life is audio, and after university it became both a hobby and a job. Whilst I’m out and about, instead of taking photographs, I have always drifted towards recording interesting sounds. I tend to make field recordings on holidays for my own interest.
So, going to Japan and making recordings were always going to be linked. As I got closer to the holiday and I realised its importance, I started to formulate a plan to make a deeper collection of recordings whilst in Japan to form a more complete audio “scrap book” of experiences.
Although I have a Sound Devices field recorder that allows me to record very high quality audio, I decided that I would need a smaller device to get these recordings whilst I was there. A device that could fit into my pocket whilst not in use. I picked up a Tascam DR7mk2 for both its stereo mics that could be switched into different positions and its Line In connector, which would allow me to record my other main piece of equipment; the Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesiser.
I had been using the OP-1 as an instrument for several years to make music on my hour and a half commute to work between Leigh and Liverpool. This has made me very competent in its abilities, quirks and systems. However, its one weak point is its recorder.
The OP-1 allows you to record 4 mono tracks of audio, each 6 minutes long. To circumnavigate this, in the past I would move those tracks to a hard drive on a PC and then bounce them down back onto a single track in the OP-1. This allows me another 3 mono tracks to continue to build up compositions inside the unit.
However, in Japan I realised that I would have little to no access to a computer throughout. This meant, another method of recording the tracks would be essential. The DR7 was a perfect way to save ideas for future use when I returned back to the UK.
So in summary, my initial thought process was to make several field recordings for an audio “scrap book” as well as have the ability to record any musical ideas from my OP-1 onto my DR7 during the time I was in Japan. The idea of interweaving these two things together only started to come into my mind towards the end of the holiday.
It was when I returned home that I started to realise just how many recordings I had been able to achieve. Even then, I only believed it would be enough music for a smaller EP.
When I did get home and realised there was more potential in the recordings to turn it into a larger work, I decided to set myself some rules to stick to when creating the album.
I decided to create rules because in the modern music production world, limitless possibilities are stifling. Forcing myself into boundaries is the only way I have found to ever get anything done.
The core rules were basic and fairly simple. Although I could embellish and move away from it, the core idea of each track needed to come from/be built from the recordings made in Japan.
This limitation meant that only a few of tracks on the album were made completely in Japan, as many needed to be created later with samplers and heavy processing of the recordings.
The first track, “Made In Japan,” is one of the few that features content exclusively from Japan.
Although the start of the album, the track “Made In Japan” marks both the beginning and end of the journey to create this record. It’s the first field recording I did when arriving in Japan, but also the last track myself and Mark finished when working on the album, which gives it – for me – an overarching story for the complete work.
The original recordings on this track were taken from our first night in Japan.
After arriving in Tokyo mid afternoon and finding our accommodation, we walked through Ikebukuro in the evening to see the nightlife. I made one long recording walking through the crowds and past the shops and arcades. The one English voice you hear in the track is my sister’s now husband Ben signaling our friend Stephanie to come over to him. The rest is other people sharing the street with us.
The whole recording was close to 10 minutes originally and was one of several longer recordings of the streets in cities throughout Japan. I wanted to open the album with one of these pieces as a way to immerse the listener into the way I felt on the first night in Japan, with a my jetlag being barraged with the sensory information of the Tokyo streets and the emotions of completing a life goal.
During the final mixing process, Mark turned the 10 minutes into a shorter 2 minute collage that highlighted certain moments, and added a more frenetic pace that works its way to the first piece of music, “Tokudawara,” which I will talk about tomorrow:
It’s been almost a year since I finished all of the compositional work on Made In Japan. Followed by several months mixing and Mastering with Mark Chadwick. Over that time I put so much focus on how the record sounds that the how I composed the record became quite cloudy in my memory, a memory I continued to loose after the albums release.
I felt burned out by the music I had spent nearly 3 years of my life on. The idea of going back and thinking analytically about how I made it was just not on the cards 6 months ago.
However with some time away from the work I thought it would be great to go back to it, remember how I made it and what I learned from the experience for future work.
As I’m putting the whole album on Youtube over the next two months I thought now would be the perfect time to go back and offer a retrospective on the album. What I remember about the technical processes of making it and the thoughts and influences I had whilst composing particular tracks.
I’m doing this for anyone who is interested but also as a collection of diary entries for my future self. As I get further away from its creation and my memories get foggier it’s starting to feel like it was made by someone else altogether! Hopefully by writing this I will leave myself a record of what I was thinking and how I made it for future analysis.
Hopefully you will enjoy my thoughts on each track and maybe even learn something about my process that you could apply to your own creative endeavors. If anyone does please let me know as I’d love to know this work has been useful for more than just myself.
So, from tomorrow, each Tuesday and Friday I will be releasing a track from the album in order and writing a post about it on the blog. I will write down what I remember about the process, including thought processes and influences I had whilst composing particular tracks.
Tomorrow will start with the opening and title track “Made In Japan”.
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