For my second portfolio project I am focusing on my musical practice and recording an album over the course of the rest of the term. Minimalism, pitch alteration, sampling, dissonance, and texture are themes and techniques I am using to guide the creation of this collection of songs, however, each track will act more as a weekly artistic exercise than anything else. I plan on recording around 2 hours worth of music by April, and I hope to share the piece on cassette tapes and if I get the means I am planning on recording the majority of the tracks onto a 4 track tape recorder, emphasizing the lo-fi aesthetic of the simplicity of the music. So far I have recorded 5 tracks ranging from 1 minute to 7 minutes, using guitar, bass, and sampled drums with processing effects such as varispeed and tape saturation.
PROJECT 2:
BRÜN
Project No. 2, currently titled ‘BRÜN’, is going to be an album that documents my weekly exploration surrounding minimal composition. I am focusing on the use of guitar – alongside recording techniques that I am not as familiar with, including sampling and pitch alteration. I am setting a limit on the number of mono tracks I can record and manipulate in Logic, hopefully switching to a 4 track cassette recorder by February 2025. Currently I have three recordings complete for this project, however, the final piece will be substantial in length and in recording techniques and devices used.
I have recently been fascinated by recordings from Sam Gendel and Sam Wilkes, including albums such as blueblue (2022), Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs (2021), iiyo iiyo iiyo (2024), and Live on the Green (2019). The recordings combine the complex tonality of standard jazz quartets and trios with modern pitch shifting and arrangement, while simultaneously abstracting and ‘destroying’ the audio to a lo-fi pulp.
This collection of tracks will be a minimization of previous albums I have made, eliminating decipherable vocal tracks, and limiting the scope of color available when arranging and recording the instrumentation of each track.
Below is a sample track from the completed recordings:
