Hannes
The last months have been quite busy and chaotic, so this new instalment of Making of Intimate Spaces comes with a bit of a delay. This will also be the last update on the matter here on Horizontalpitch, my notes on the remainig 3 tracks can be found on my website: kvsu.net/kurodama.
My process here was a little different from the other tracks in that I used a simple, homebrew Puredata patch to come up with a first musical sketch. Short loops taken from the recordings were pitched down, layered and sometimes reversed. I was mainly after the implicit rhythmic quality of the sounds, which emerges in the second part of the track.
Later, I recreated this sound collage in the DAW and combined it with rhythmic patterns made using a granular processor (Mutable Instruments Clouds) and several layers of drones made on the modular synth.
The main sonic element here is the drip sounds coming from the service room. I really liked them, and due to the strong reverb, and the added resonance of the room, they were even more interesting when pitched down and/or reversed.
Like all the tracks, this one underwent several changes over the years. An initial version featured a drum part, made from the drip sounds, which later was removed. Here’s an early version in which the watery sounds were a lot more present. Later, also thanks to some valuable feedback from a couple of friends and fellow musicians, I turned these sounds down a bit, moving them more towards the background.
Some of the modular sounds provide hints to the knowledgeable listener that while working on this track I was testing – a then still to be released – module from Mutable Instruments: Tides v2. I really liked the “different frequencies” output mode, which quantises the output to just intonation intervals, and I used it extensively.
As in all of these tracks, not everything that sounds like a synth really is one. Often, it’s just the recording that was heavily processed and mangled. For example, the dark drone sound that can be heard from 3:20 until the end is mostly just the noise floor, from the service room itself.
4 years after making the original recording, I went back to the service room. Interestingly, I could hear completely different sounds this time. The highlight was a plane passing by, resonating in the pipes and creating this wonderful roaring drone.
