The first track this year from yours truly. Faster and shorter than my usual modus. Banging?
Great love to anyone who takes a listen and even more so to those of you that take the time to comment, irregardless of whether you like it or hate it.
Got some well deserved critique regarding the mixing.
A new version has now replaced the old one in the first post. Does it sound nice?
Timbrally, it kicks. However, it doesn't seem to 'breathe'; overall, it's kind of the same throughout and we don't get to hear anything like development and change in the texture created by the different elements. Maybe getting less happening at points, allowing certain parts to carry sections and doing some change-ups with those parts in their respective sections would work and then allow more overall length while providing internal variety that prevents the track from being so uniform.
Breakdown at the mixpoint is...eh. Could be longer, play with the listener's expectations more. Do unexpected things with it.
Careful with elements that 'jump out' and don't overuse them. Case in point: that speed-drop sound. It's all over the place and whenever it came up, it went right to the forefront and got distracting. I'm not sure if it was my imagination, also, but sometimes when that sound came up, there seemed to be a timing issue that lagged the overall pulse a tiny bit.
Last thing I would do would be to beef that bass up, but again, maybe just in certain sections. Doubling the line an octave down, either via a divider or running a parallel voice, would pump that up really nicely and make it pound harder. Going back to the 'contrast' idea, this might not be something to use everywhere, but I'd definitely put it thru the whole play-out after the break. Make 'em HURT!
Many thanks for your thoughts on this!
Interesting thoughts too. I take them to heart. I can't help feeling that you disagree with the concept of the track, though. If I made it longer, less monotonous in each section but less hectic overall, retracted the tape stops and breaks a bit and beefed up the bass.. it would be a veery different track, wouldn't it?
Well, then if that's the actual concept, it succeeds up to a point. It does accomplish that hectic/monotony thing quite well, but at the same time, maybe...ah, too much so?
The problem is one I've dealt with at points over the past 40-ish years. It came up at the very beginning of my early 'garage-level' experiments in trying to concoct something that was both irritating AND listenable enough that the listener would experience the irritation...which is definitely a paradox! And it persists to this day; in fact, once I'm done here on MG this evening, I have to fire up Ableton and rework a track for my next album which doesn't quite walk that musical tightrope between polar reactions the way it ought to for the duration of the piece. Thought I had the project in the can, but noooooo...
Like I said, this is a whole weird area: trying to draw in the listener to fully experience and appreciate a 'negative aesthetic value'. These days, you don't find people trying to hit that rather tricky mark very much; you'd have to wind the clock waaaaay back, I think, to things such as the inceptive acts in industrial music to see some really good examples of this trick being pulled off with real mastery. Not a bad reference point to look at, either, given that the more electronic-based examples of that are definitely great-great-grandparents of the sort of direction here. While they might be a pain to find, I'd suggest a couple of Cabaret Voltaire's earlier albums: "Voice of America" and "Red Mecca" as useful points of reference. Also a few other tracks: Throbbing Gristle's "What a Day" and "AB7A", "Warm Leatherette" by Daniel Miller aka The Normal (in this case), and also maybe SPK's "Desire" from their "Leichenschrei" album...which is an amazing and very oppressive listen in of itself. And one piece that I think nails this paradox is actually out of the 1960s choral repertoire: Robert Ashley's "She was a Visitor", which is more in a creeped-out ambientish vein but pulls this off masterfully.
But yes, it would be different, and you have a good point there! Kudos to you for trying to hit a pretty difficult target!
Thanks!
The problem is one I've dealt with at points over the past 40-ish years. It came up at the very beginning of my early 'garage-level' experiments in trying to concoct something that was both irritating AND listenable enough that the listener would experience the irritation...which is definitely a paradox!
Definitely and definitely a desirable goal to me. More so when I was younger, I'm a bit more mellow nowadays, but it still seeps through.
