I’ve released a free EP of some of my older work on my Bandcamp store. I discovered and developed my unique style of working with field recordings in these four songs. Sonidos de Cuba was born from these early acoustic explorations. I like to think of them as musical larvae or protozoa, which is why I’ve called the EP Proto-Sonos.
The first song is Rain Down. It rains a lot in Vancouver. Therefore it was a natural choice to use a bed of rain recordings as a foundation for a song. I also recorded a number of samples from an acoustic guitar. I made the mistake of trying to teach myself guitar on a cheap terrible guitar. The bridge was warped so the strings were all high off the fret board. Everything I did on it sounded rattly and awful and it was painful on my fingers. For the recordings on this song I gave up on trying to play it like a guitar and instead used it more like a foley instrument. I hit it and scraped objects over the strings, and plucked it on the wrong side of the bridge. I then mangled those sounds in Ableton Live to get the sounds you hear in the song.
Dream Sequenced is a song that I heard first in a dream, then managed to reproduce afterwards. All of the recordings on this track were gathered during a camping trip I took with my wife and some friends in BC’s interior. If you listen carefully you’ll be able to hear recordings of rain on our tent, loons, ravens, and a train.
A recording of a backhoe with a jackhammer served as the backbone for jakd. I also used a twisted recording of a BC Ferry engine. I used a Roland R09 for the recordings on this EP as I had not yet acquired the Zoom H4N. This song was released years ago with Rain Down by Micro Recordings as a two track EP. I’ve remastered this one, and all of the other songs, using the techniques that I learned from SDC.
Buoyancy was built from a number of recordings I made with a hydrophone I borrowed from Vancouver Whale Watching. I spent a day wandering around Vancouver recording various fountains. My sister caught me wading into one outside the Sheraton Wall Centre to retrieve the mic after it got stuck. I also made a number of bubbly and splashing sounds in my brother’s large fish tank then manipulated the sounds in Ableton Live. This was one of the first songs I made after acquiring an MFB Kraftzwerg semi-modular analog synthesizer. You can hear it used on the bass tones and the swishy percussive zips and zaps.
SUBLIME SOUND 