ARCHIVING, ARCHIVING... *sigh*... this is tedious work, but so very worth the time. I have over ten years of taped noise to peruse in baskets. The cassettes are unmarked, unedited and unkempt. Some of the noise recordings I did date back as far as '94, when I first began fucking with tape recorders. Crazy.
It never ceases to amaze me how sound engineering technology has made it so easy to clean out static and hiss from tape or vinyl. Even that annoying air-conditioner in the background of all my oldest recordings is easily cancelled out.
Once I get all my noise recordings archived, I'll have an arsenal of sampled noise at my disposal to finally finish all the songs I've written. At this stage in my field-recording game, I've gotten just about every urban, subterranean, organic and natural sound I'll need to write my first few recordings with. What's so amazing for me is how autobiographical these recordings are in tandem with the very personal lyrics they'll be sampled to accompany.
That first eerie creaking-door-sample I got from the entrance to the laundromat of my first apartment, which goes from sounding like a violin, to an electric guitar, to a tortured animal, from a regular steel door squeaking, while the mechanical drone of the washing machines moans underneath. That night I went out smashing bottles, crushing cans for sounds... recording cat fights and bickering crackheads in Langley Park. That argument between my father and his second wife a few months before they got married. Various unremembered metro journeys with a tape recorder in my hand. These sounds are all on record as the definition next to my own name in an audio dictionary. They say alot about who I am and why I'm so eccentric.
I remember playing Einsturzende Neubauten for some friends of mine one night ten years ago while we all were getting obliterated together. They showed little interest. After this, I asked them to indulge me in playing one of my first ever noise recordings. It was just me scraping and banging on a cookie tin a friend had given me for Xmas. We all laid there, trashed as fuck, while these alien, metallic sounds enveloped the room. Everyone told me they liked it better than Einsturzende. I beg to differ, but the shit does sound cool.
As Tape Decays and digital becomes more cheaply available, you see more and more former punks throw down their guitars in favor of laptops. These same pissants who gave me shit for making music with machines, who now carry cellphones everywhere and fuck around in Garage Band on their temp-job lunch breaks. This results in alot of crappy electronic music. I hear it EVERYWHERE, and I'm quite relieved noone is working as hard as I AM. It takes effort to make music from pure noise. Rather than just instrumental sounds. Rather than pthe prepackaged voicings that came with your synth or your computer program. Rather than something you can learn to play with the right instructional video. Noise is a new territory... I see many embark upon it these days... AND FAIL, with much acclaim.
The sampler has a very negative reputation as a musical instrument. It's mostly used by hip-hop moguls and gay techno DJs to steal beats and riffs from record collections of bad music from the last four decades. I hate all of it unapologetically. I wouldn't fault you for calling me bitter, either... it causes me physical pain to see so much unimaginative 'music' recieve so much airplay. It bothers me. I'd rather listen to puppies being steamrolled than the latest Black Eyed Peas single, or Moby's latest fresh dropping of pop shit. All this shit sounds the same.
I'd love to see what would happen if you gave a sampler to a monkey. It'd probably create a whole new language with the fucker. The ability to record and playback sounds is a marvel of human progress in itself still yet to be fully exploited, just as much as film or even astronomy. The unlimited potential offered now by sampling workstations, home computers and synths makes me wonder what's keeping music so dull. Oh yeah, now I REMEMBER ! I'm a fucking SNOB. A snob with creativity, who can afford all this nice studio shit.
Yay!