This is Chatter by CLAWED.

Chatter is another work that was created using DAR samples. For this piece I used a number of environmental sounds I recorded in downtown Toronto. I often take my recorder out with me on walks, just to see what sounds I run across in the city soundscape. I've found when I don't have my recorder on me or don't have it running, I'll often hear something and think, wow, that would be great in a piece! So I've found the best way to capture is to simply capture a LOT of material, then review it later and work with the bits I think have the most potential.

Chatter is meant to evoke an experience. I had an odd, ghostly experience at the Winston-Salem graveyard in North Carolina in the USA.

I've been to various graveyards before and never had anything  like this happen. Most graveyards seem really quiet, like parks with stone markers. :)

Winston-Salem did not seem that way at all to me. I heard voices. At first just a couple, but then LOTS, like a buzzing. I got a very quick onset migraine and asked to leave.

It was very odd. I could just explain it away as some kind of strange migraine aura, but I don't know. It felt weird. It felt like ghosts trying to talk, way too many of them...

That's the experience Chatter is trying to express. Ghostly voices, trying to talk.

The video is a visualization, so you'll notice the imagery is very reactive to the sound.

This is Enhydris Enhydris from the first CLAWED album.

It's made entirely of heavily manipulated and processed sound samples. I used samples from the Large Hadron Collider and recordings from my DAR (Digital Audio Recorder), mostly of a professional plumbing company snaking the drains in condo where I lived. :) Fun fact, there are no human voices in this piece!

The video is a visualization, so you'll notice the imagery is very reactive to the sound. I like the way it looks like waves in water and includes a spectrum of colors as that matches the themes in the song.

People often tell me my works sound "cinematic", like soundtracks to a movie they're not seeing & yes, I think the pieces do paint a picture. I often do have a specific scene or sequence in mind. For this piece, in my mind it's a fantasy/sci-fi scene of a strange rainbow water snake ritual (thus the name Enhydris Enhydris) being performed by monks in robes (human? alien? who knows, robes!) with metal singing bowls. :)

Oh, I should probably also say this piece intentionally has "healing frequencies" included in it. So if you're actually listening to the full resolution version with speakers than can reproduce the frequencies (20-20K Hz), then it can have an affect on the body. I'm particularly fond on the low "cat purr" frequencies which have been studied and apparently can help heal bones fractures!

I've heard "Hey Ya!" getting some airplay again lately and it made me want to share this great cover by the Toronto band, The Blankket.

It's my fav version! I love the delivery and the tone; it really adds a certain urgency to the tune. :)

Hope you enjoy it!

For this week's post, I'm going with art and another edition of exposing people to experimental music.

I think for many people their first introduction to experimental music is soundtracks. Whether you have realized it or not you probably have heard it in some of your favorite TV shows or films.

One of the early pioneers of experimental music is Daphne Oram.

In listening to her music, I realized I had created some pieces that were similar in sound to hers.

I don't know if I actually heard her works before, but she did work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and her sounds were used in Doctor No, Goldfinger, and a number of other films, so it's possible.

I also learned she used a similar technique for some of her music creation. She was the creator of Oramics, which involved drawing shapes on film that was then translated into sound by a machine.

Some of the music I create uses software to translate images into sound, so it's a very similar process. I can choose how slowly the software "reads" the image as a score, the note range for the sounds, what sounds are used, how the colors in the image are interpreted, etc.

For a good read, check out the Wikipedia article for more details.