Listen to the November mixtape

28th October 2024

Time codes are in bold | Track titles are in italics

00’00 A muntjac is barking in the darkness. A sharp call every four or five seconds for what feel like hours on end, night after night. My feet crunch on the crisp gravel as I walk outside to listen. One night I hear this deer being joined by another. I cross the road alone in the moonlight to find them. When I get close enough, I flatten my body against the hedge, out of their line of sight; passing cars send blinding beams flashing across the grass. I can see them but they can’t see me (drivers and muntjac both, I guess). The deer start to phase in and out of time with one another in realtime: one left, one right.

02’24 Untitled #19, I might call these little bouncing balls of sound ‘comfort work’, the absolute basics, the simple stuff that made me fall in love with modular synths. The sounds I could listen to all day if I had to. A simple four-step sequence with individual harmonics plucked using a euclidean rhythm generator. A two-note bassline pushing against a low pass filter. A scattering of percussion. Very occasionally one note in the sequence will change and your ears will prick up. I apply some modulation to the euclidean patterns so they skip around. Joan Halifax, a Buddhist nun, being interviewed about a near death experience, fades in and out, “When I was four, I woke up…”

10’11 The click that starts the turntable spinning. The crackling static of a needle against a piece of vinyl, signalling warmth and safety. Burial eating his heart out. Sound as material, sound from material.

10’56 A peaceful, English-accented voice (it’s Eric Thompson, actually) starts to read you two stories at once. Side A and Side B have the same structure, the same cadence. Both protagonists are child animals who live with their parents: one at the top of a hill, the other behind the panelling in the parlour bar. The textures build. As I start to turn the record player on and off, the voices swoon. The Swingle Singers provide layers of Jazz Sebastien Bach, a barbershop of schmaltz. (Did I mention I fished these 7-inches out of a bin?)

A new voice starts to fade in, made of a different element to the others. It’s floppy and maleable in my hands, a cheap flexi-disc that must have come free with something. It has an incredibly low noise floor, no audible texture at all. Another man with received pronunciation (it’s Michael Aspel, actually) promises us the Sounds of the Sea. It all sounds very ninja tune “early 00s wry-sampling” if you know what I mean and then when I check discogs to find the date, it seems my hunch is confirmed. Mr Scruff and Lemon Jelly both sampled it.

13’11 Dry electronic gargling noises made using a Jupiter Storm oscillator, an Old Crow filter and a Mutant Vactrol start to mingle in with the Ribena-sponsored adventures in the BBC Sound Effects cupboard.

“There he is! A gigantic walrus […] It’s a funny noise to make when you’re wide awake”

Well, here are some funny noises I made when I was wide awake.

13’32 First thing in the morning. The dishwasher turns on in stereo. The gargling sound experiments imitate the rhythmic motorised swishing and jetting. Very faintly, I can be heard practicing in the next room.

15’20 The nine-step sequence of Untitled #20A swirls slowly into consciousness. A glimmer of harmonics, a thick slab of pulsewidth-modulated bass.

17’40 Untitled #20A fades out. The mechanised labourer lurches towards the end of its cycle. The dry-heaving oscillator gargles. One thing to know about me is I will re-arrange everything inside of there before I turn it on. I know of someone for whom that was the last straw in a long-term relationship. I met her in the kitchen at a house party. She said, “He just couldn’t leave it, had to re-stack every item.”

19’40 Untitled #20B hoves in. A sequence of chords in C minor, notes split out across 3 oscillators (one with harmonic options), being phased in and out by VCAs connected to LFOs moving at different speeds. When an LFO is rising, the volume on its note rises. As it falls, the note dips away. The lowest note in each chord is being effected by FM modulation from a separate bass sequence, which causes a rasping jagged edge of discordancy to both sounds. This bass sequence is another iteration of Untitled #20A.

Later that day, I post a sentence somewhere on social media, “made the strangest music of my life this morning, so that’s good”, a comment which I stand by, actually.

24’51 A lush filter sweep and a final resolution on those awkward chords brings things to a close.

I am re-doing the silicone in the bathroom because the shower has begun leaking through the floor. You can hear the high metallic click of the trigger mechanism on the sealant gun. The instructions say to half-fill the bath with water. As water gushes from the tap, I spin the sound recorder round on its cord, hopeful that it might create a Doppler effect when I listen back.

25’30 Now, the sound of a drill on screws. High-pitched whines and hollow wooden thonks are processed through a granular delay. Frequencies skitter across the highest spectrum. Somewhere in there someone arrives at the house and I say “Hiii-iiii!”

26’50 A year ago this month I played at Hackney Baths for bleep43. This is the recording of The grounds are changing as they promise to do taken from that performance. The jumbled-up voices at the beginning are the sonic ‘cover’ I’ve been using to move between patches up until now. I wrote at the time about how enriching being part of that gig was for me. One of the artists I met that day asked me to contribute a track to their remix album. I think it’s coming out soon, but I don’t think I can say more than that yet?

32’45 I’m walking in that cluster of fields up past the ghost barn, being drawn towards an electric clamour. Hundreds of sharp little finches are perched together, covering all the branches of three trees in the hedgeline. Clusters of outliers group and disperse, landing on the ground to feed before rising up as one.

I catch a black-and-white-striped underwing, a slick of reddish pink here and there. Linnets! Perhaps some goldfinches too? I can’t quite believe how many there are? I can’t quite believe how many there are! I can’t quite believe how many there are …

I’m holding my phone out to record, counting three fields within my eyeline with corners ablaze with flowers: seed-rich havens for overwintering flocks such as this one.

I stand still in the golden autumn sun, low in the sky even though it’s morning, the birds dashing all around me. Feeling warm and hopeful, soul-lifted.

34’00 There’s another sound being brought up in the mix. Dave is tapping on some resonant railings outside the hotel in Bristol where we stayed for Machina Bristronica. Hello again if I saw you there! The railings start to disintegrate and reverberate under the force of the granular delay.

What I’m hearing is reminding me of that Matthew Herbert piece where he layered up thousand of copies of the same sound and played them all at once, but when I try to Google combinations of words like that I draw a blank. So either I imagined it, or have misremembered it completely. If anyone can help me with identifying it, do let me know? It’s been bugging me.

36’20 We’re approaching the time of year that warrants the daily lighting of the burner to keep the house warm. I’m opening and closing the door. Performing the full range of clunks and clanks.

The dry whispering of the flames is mesmerising but my hand is kind of burning from the fierce heat at its heart and I’m worried the recorder will melt or stop working. Ticks and clicks are emitted as the metal carcass, the firebox, the glass front panel and the flue all start to heat up and expand. The sound of passing traffic can be heard down the chimney.

37’20 Untitled #20C. I leave you with one final iteration of this sequence. This time I feed a gate into a second CV input on the harmonic oscillator, raising the sequence of notes up by a fifth and then down again every nine steps without needing to program it. I think this one is going to go somewhere …

40’05 Fin.