Implied music

["T.W. Hartnett" <hartnett.t@apple.com>]

Last night I'd been working on some loops, using a DOD 3.6sec delay and 
my Vortex.  Typically I build a simple loop, lock that in, and then play 
on top until something else suggests itself, add that in, etc.  After an 
hour or so, I wandered into the living room to see what my housemates 
were doing, and I left the loop cycling away in the next room.  There 
were watching a movie on TV, and as I sat there, I could still hear the 
loop.  It sounded as if the loop was changing, violins, voices, all sorts 
of things coming out of it.  At times, it reminded me of north African 
singing, even though I knew what the loop "really" sounded like.  There 
wasn't any music in the background of the movie, but it seemed to me that 
this aural "mirage" was the result of interferance between dialog, people 
in the room talking, and the loop.  It was quite beautiful.  

I've found the same sort of thing when I listen to Lou Reed's "Metal 
Machine Music", a record frequently described as one of the most 
unlistenable collections of sonic information ever assembled.  I believe 
Lester Bangs said that it could clear any party out in under three 
minutes.  Naturally, when I heard that I said "Whoa! Gotta get me one of 
those!"  It is very harsh, and seems to be the result of overloading a 
bunch of amplifiers and guitars and every chain of the recording process, 
and then multitracking it.  It just starts, and goes on for 16 minutes a 
side (did I mention it's a double record), with no form or apparent 
planning.  I think I read that he wasn't in the room--just turned 
everything on, ran tape for an hour, and chopped it into four pieces.  
When I listened to that, I heard the same sort of 
violiny-Lygetti-transmissions-from-space sort of sound.  Of course, 
everyone else looked at me as if I was crazy, which I suppose we can't 
discount.

After I bought that record (I'd also purchased My Bloody Valentine's 
second album around the same time), I wanted to explore regenerative 
music systems, so I loaded up my guitar into two or three distortion 
boxes, a chorus, a flanger, whatever else I had sitting around, and then 
into a two-second delay (the great Digitech big blue box), and then into 
a recently acquired Boss Delay/Pitch Shift box (the half-rack model from 
the microstudio series).  The Boss unit does around 800ms of delay, but 
the most interesting part is the Reverse setting (not very common at the 
time), which can also be combined with pitchshifting.  I found that if I 
set it an octave up, reversed, and then turned up the amp moderately 
loud, the whole system would burble on in a self-directed manner.  I'd 
just sit the guitar on it's stand, turn everything on, and let it start 
feeding back.  Every now and then I'd tap the body or flick the strings 
behind the nut to introduce some random information into the loop/system. 
 The pickups were also fairly microphonic at that point, due to the huge 
amount of gain, and so loud sounds could also be picked up--such as 
handclaps, loud music from my stereo, me yelling into the pickups, and so 
on.  After a while, I'd go sit out on the porch and listen to it mixed in 
with the sounds of cars going by, enjoying the worried looks of 
passers-by.  I found that turning the amp in a different direction also 
had an effect on what happened, probably because the room I was in had 
high ceilings, no carpet and was decently sized.

Maybe this is a little off-subject for the group, but I thought I'd 
delurk.

Travis Hartnett