On rM I was asked if I could say more about the Fractured trilogy and why the use of acoustic sound sources:
The Fractured trilogy developed over a number of years from the initial inspiration – the moment of ‘fracture’ when a musician pours the first sound into the waiting space, breaking the silence.
Initially I hoped it would be a single release. I was going to record an album where I fractured sound in a variety of ways, but with an extra twist….I wanted to keep the foundation of each track in the same order, but shift the later additions around creating 4 versions of the album – so if people were commenting about the music even the feedback would be fractured as people tried to understand why they were hearing the same things but in different places…..
Unfortunately it sounded like crap – the tracks had their own integrity and cohesion, despite the concept and sound processing, they could not be broken in that way.
Over time I found a variety of ways of ‘playing’ with the music – out of which Fractured II arose, as I continued to record and explored other sounds ‘Shards’ started to materialise.
Fractured I is on the way to release – and I like the way it is coming after the third part, continuing the concept in yet another way.
Fractured II (7 Broken Mirrors) will appear last, self released on Bandcamp. It will include a bunch of artwork images that I originally designed for a very limited 3 disc set.
As for the acoustic aspect – a bit of background – I love being in wild places where there are little or no sound of human activity. I had the pleasure of living and working in a large ancient forest in North Wales for about 5 years. Many people could not understand why I did not take a walkman….But I loved the ‘silence’ and by merging into it I met some very interesting beings in the woods, like a snake that always shed it’s skin in the same place, like birds of prey that came really close because I was not noisy or ‘separate’.
I find acoustic sounds more subtle, complex etc than a guitar or even a synth. The susurrations of tree leaves in the wind, the complex interplay of quiet sounds in a gentle stream. Listening to these I find myself drifting through the sounds, drawn to this, then called by that. Given my history of laying in Motorhead bass bins as a youngster……
I used field recorder to capture sounds from all sorts of places – such as wine glass for Shards, bird wing for Fractured etc. Then I started playing with them in a number of ways including separating out frequencies in a single sound and then shifting them in time so they shifted through each other. I might pass a sound through a number of effects, then back again, then pull out certain frequencies or textures – finding aspects of the sound not usually heard. Often I layered different treatments of the same sound together, creating new and shifting textures.
