Track One – Typewriter

My first piece was inspired heavily by Musique Concrete, particularly the mechanical and industrial sounds found in the works of Pierre Schaeffer. I also wanted to give myself creative limitations by exclusively recording my typewriter. An element of spontaneity in music is something I really enjoy, when I took the recordings that I needed, I made sure to type genuinely, pausing to think when I needed to, if I remember correctly I was just describing what I had been up to that day. Afterwards, I looked at my typewriter as if it was a drum machine, for example, I intentionally pressed the space bar as if it was a kick drum. I made sure to be bold with the GRM tools towards the end of the piece letting it descend into chaos. I did this because unlike my Voices track, the variation of sounds is smaller, I had no way of predicting what my friends were going to say, or how their different inflections would sound.

Structurally, the piece starts very mechanical and my use of GRM tools is subtle. I shifted audio files down an octave to make the typing sounds sound clunky and thick. However, the piece gradually crescendos into a wide soundscape that sounds hardly anything like a typewriter at all. I put the same recordings through several different GRM tools to create unique evolving textures.

Around the time I made this track, I was listening to a lot of breakcore and experimental electronic music, however my favourite album was Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett by Venetian Snares which I leant into by using GRM Shuffle to mimic drum breaks.

I ended the piece with a recording of the typewriter bell and the rewind mechanism with no audio effects and no GRM tools applied in order to bookend the piece. I also loved the way that Jonty Harrison describes the concept of Pete Stollery’s piece Onset/Offset: “
“Onset / Offset explores the interplay between the real-world connotations of recognisable sounds and their spectromorphological characteristics (their purely sonic qualities). The resulting ambiguities lead to some startling displacements and dislocations between events/articulations and their continuations/extensions.” I paid close attention to the commonly used electroacoustic term sound sculptures. In the beginning, the sounds are controlled and ultimately, they sound like a typewriter. But the sound sculpture opens out and widens until it sounds like a mechanical creature raising its head. The piece begins with “real world” and “recognisable sounds” and then descends into layers upon layers of “spectromorphological characteristics”

Here is my recording:

Track Two – Voices

Whilst writing my second piece, I was going through a turbulent time in my personal life and my mental health was poor. I could not help but write something that sounded like how I felt. However I decided to embrace it and I was consequently reminded of a quote from a 2025 interview with one of my favourite experimental musicians, Li Yilei: “I don’t make music because I want to make a carefully curated selection of nice music. I just want it to be my diary and a diary is not supposed to be liked or not liked.” I have also recently found Li Yilei’s masterpiece of an album, OF, very inspiring in my day to day life.

To contrast this piece with my first piece, I made sure to focus on organic sounds rather than mechanical sounds and I could not think about anything more organic than the human voice. Since owning a typewriter was a large part of my personal identity, I decided to use this as another way to contrast the two. I recorded my friends speaking and I asked them two questions, I asked them what the words “identity” and “community” meant to them, adding a subtext that contradicts the first track; the idea of community identity as opposed to personal identity. One of my intentions was to ensure that it would be impossible to make out whole sentences, this is because often the human voice is often associated with lyrics, but I wanted to use the voice as a tonal instrument instead. I also recorded a friend of mine speaking Norwegian so that I would have the timbres of two different languages. I did this by using GRM shuffle. Once the words were shuffled, sometimes I would run the same recordings through the GRM comb filter in order to bring out any harmonic layers that were hiding.

One of my inspirations for this track was Scherzo by Andy Lewis, I loved how sinister it sounded, despite it being, in theory, a very sentimental piece: “Recordings of my three daughters’ voices together with some of their more musical toys provide the main source material for this celebration of — or lament for — childhood.” Whilst I see my piece as a celebration of community, mostly because I recorded some of my closest friends, sonically it sounds very threatening. In some ways, as Andy Lewis created both a lament and a celebration of childhood, I feel as though I did the same thing, but for community. In a world which is increasingly divided I find myself wondering if community is truly dying and we therefore must lament, or if it will evolve and grow perhaps the greater and so we must celebrate. Not only did this piece represent the way I felt at the time, it also reflects my anxieties about the further instabilities that would come if community as we understood it were to disintegrate.

Here is a list of my recordings:

Discography

Andy Lewis. 1992. Sherzo [Fixed Medium – Stereo]

Li Yilei. 2021. Of. [CD] Metron Records

Pete Stollery. 1996. Onset/Offset [Fixed Medium – Stereo] Electroacoustic Music Studios

Venetian Snares. 2005. Rossz Csillag Alatt Szuletett [CD] Planet Mu Records Ltd.