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East Peoria, Illinois, USA
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interstitial - marco polo
Release StoreTags: ambient, minimal, drone, field recording
Author: jkn on June 27 2006
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This is an older track written for a compilation on AtmoWorks ( link ) called 'Portraits'. The intent was to paint a self portrait in sound. I found it amazingly difficult to sit down and write a track that was supposed to be 'me'. So I ended up doing a lot of sitting and staring instead of writing...
Adding to the fun, our electricity in our house suddenly went dim in January of that year. Went downstairs and checked the fuse box - to my horror - a main block fuse had started to melt. Tried to get an electrician in, absolutely no one had time to look for at least a couple months - so I begged the company that handles the electrical work at my work to recommend someone and put a good word in for me (who knew that electricians would be that backed up?) - and instead - he came out the next day and looked himself. Sure enough - we were in trouble. Not only did we need a new fuse box, but an entire house rewire, and a new main line coming in from the outside - the current one was starting to turn our white siding black from burning... Ah - the fun of owning a home!
So from January to beginning of March - I couldn't record anything anyway due to minimal electricity (and let's face it - recording isn't as important as keeping the refrigerator going, etc... :-)
By March - the electrical rewire was finally done - lots of scary things found in our walls, but that was all fixed. My track was due in March - time to record.
I actually did it the final weekend - and all of a sudden it all snapped together perfectly. I don't know whether it was the stress of the last few months and the sudden relief - the whole 'not thinking about it' at all thing because writing a song just wasn't on my mind while dealing with the electrical issue and sorting out how to pay for it, etc... but I was thrilled when that Saturday evening in the course of about an hour I was suddenly not looking at a blank session in Vegas and looking at a done one.
So... What's in the track?
It starts with a field recording of children playing the game 'marco polo' in a pool at a hotel I made a couple years earlier. I'd always wanted to use that recording in something - and I suddenly remembered I had it and the memories of my own childhood that it gave me. I was standing on the balcony of my hotel room next to a few pine trees which are filled with bugs - and the insect noises are blaring loud on the recording. Also in the background is a busy interstate. I dialed back the traffic noise quite a bit from recording so it's not overpowering.
The drone synth line is Juno 106 - the change in pitch is coming from hitting the octave button... This recording was also sitting in my archive from several months earlier - something I was working on and never came back to.
Another drone synth line - also Juno 106 - recorded probably a year earlier - sneaks in a few minutes later. The two drones fit together so well it was kind of amazing.
The melody line - not that it's much of a melody, but that's a bit of DSS-1 playing - I think it's the only bit that I actually played while putting this track together.
On top of this is the metallic screeching sort of sounds. This ones a bit hard to explain - it originally was a simple jam of a friend playing drums, me playing bass, and an echoplex heavy guitar player - we were jamming in a basement - making a heck of a lot of noise. I took this track and created a bizarre experimental track - very gapper/snipper - 'playing' the track live in Sound Forge as if it were an instrument and recording the preview results out to a track in Vegas. I'd posted this years ago on the old mp3.com - but it hasn't seen the light of day since. Why I dug that out of my very old archives for 'marco polo' - I don't really know. It just felt right. I took that recording and threw it into Sound Forge - did a lot of pitch shifting, reverb, a bit more gapper/snipper - totally changing the character of it.
I was really happy with the results so far - but it didn't feel 'right' yet. If it's a self-portrait - it needed piano. About six months earlier I'd recorded some piano stuff on my mini-disc out in the living room and there was an improv bit that I liked and felt would work... for me it did. (your mileage may vary...)
So that's basically it - mixing, eq, and mastering all happened the next day - and I mailed it off to the label on Monday. About a week after the deadline, but he knew what was going on with the power in my house.
This is so opposite my normal method of recording - it's the only 'collage' piece I've put together. I normally take months and months of tweaking a track and this one sort of 'fell from the sky' in a sense. On the other hand - it fell from the sky only because I'd recorded all the elements months (and years) in advance - it just took that long to have a reason to come together.
Hope you enjoyed my long winded ramble...
jkn
Here's the tracklisting for the release:
1 Saul Stokes - Iris My Observatory (6:39)
2 The Circular Ruins - Camera Lucida (12:15)
3 Christopher Short - Transmissions For Dawn's Color Music (10:52)
4 James Johnson - Nightfall (10:48)
5 Interstitial - Marco Polo (9:00)
6 Vir Unis - The Slow Motion World Of All Desires (7:48)
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Comments
06/27/06
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ignatius
awesome tones on this track. intense and somber. i like it. the change in the middle is cool too.. i like how it meanders a bit but it flows nicely. cool track.
06/27/06
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jdg
wow long description.
the track is the dope tho.
06/27/06
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jkn
Thanks for listening... and yeah - I rambled far too much in the description!
06/28/06
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bodo
very nice stuff here, so subtle and mysterious
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