As time goes past me at warp speed as I get older I care less and less about the actual process of recording, I’m just on a burn-out to see what produces something that still sounds interesting even though the methods are dubious.
It’s very trendy, and has been for some time now, to make things deliberately distressed, and lo-fi, I love all that but it’s interesting to take it further, and try to make extreme malfunctions and distortions work in my music. This is a bit of a stupid statement really, as I’m the one that has the power to say "this works, it’s OK, because I said it is"
But the danger we have as musicians in general is that we love the music we make simply because we made it, but that doesn’t make it good, or valuable in any way whatsoever, we need external feedback, an audience as the final judge, it doesn’t matter in any way what we think.
But a good idea is a good idea, and a lot of modern technological musicians take something that is already quite extreme and just add more, more of everything, it’s worked for a lot of people, and musicologists theorise endlessly about the evolution of new musics, but often the reality is that the musician in question just reached for the aux send that had a flanger on it, and just turned everything up to maximum, and left it there.
Take Cool Jazz, and put it through a Lexicon = Space Jazz, slow down an opera singer and add even more Lexicon = Diamanda Galas, loads of cool dudes with delays and we got Dub, take a bit of Erik Satie and add a whole studio production to it and you’ve got David Sylvian, listen to a Bulgarian choir, it’s Kate Bush without the the effects.
I loved the Shadows as a kid, they are still one of my favourite bands, they had that magical machine the Copycat, Michael Brook the guitarist with Martha and the Muffins met Brian Eno and it was instant Shadows, the only difference was a ton of delay.
You just have to have the guts to turn that knob up to 11.
I had two synths on the go yesterday, a load of dodgy pedals, effects on the mixer distorting, but every time I made the smallest adjustment to either synth it produced humongous changes, harmonics were poking out of the gloom, like tall sparking rain-drop covered grass on a bed of dark earth, it was time to hit record, and bring those out with ReaEQ.
I’m getting more patient, a lot of the pedals I own have nearly got sold because they seemed too far out or too lo-fi, but I’m learning to make the most out of their weaknesses, and all of a sudden what seemed useless turns into a indispensable diamond.
I’m treating everything like this now, and connecting stuff up in endless chains, I can highly recommend it, it’s like putting a massive magnifying glass on the end of any instrument, you almost just have to breath on a knob and interesting things start to emerge.
