the theatre production of gormenghast happened back at the end of november, and in the end all of the sounds i performed were encapsulated in a laptop/ableton/apc40 setup, and i hid down the back of the immense church behind the audience, and pushed brightly lit buttons in the dark. it was great. i had been working on various foley objects and some guitar pedal/contact mic setups to play live for the performance which never made it to the final piece – purely because the job became so huge and the sounds multiplied themselves many times over, and i only have two hands. a laptop became the best way to achieve the sounds we needed, so i’ve parked the other ideas for another project. here are a couple to listen to.
this was my very first idea, and the one i pitched way back when at my interview… a contact-mic-ed wooden box (in this case, a speaker i ripped open) filled with soup mix, monkey nuts and metal a4 pad spines (i wasn’t this specific back in august, honestly). swooshing the whole lot around, pouring the little beans and processing it all through a delay pedal makes some convincingly horrific rain/storm noises.
this is the same idea really, but the contact mic is on my broken music box, one of the best things i bought this year. she cost £1 at omni centre car boot sale, and was broken, but after some judicious wiggling with a screwdriver the mechanism woke up again. she was the music box for cora and clarice in gormenghast, as well as finding her way into a lot of uni assignments this term. nice. this clip is the box played through the delay pedal again, but by manipulating the delay time and repeat rate the sound warps all over the place.
