Final Major Project Proposal (Written in a warm swimming pool in France)
For the final major project module I plan to have several different outputs or conclusions. First I will seek to create or compile an artefact type product of music, visuals and a documentation of a live performance. The music will be mainly of new compositions composed in the style and through the techniques I have been experimenting with over the previous two modules. Whereby I have recorded pieces of audio visual content many times, highlighting the recording noise and obscuring the original content. The images and sounds begin to break down and turn from banal representations of the world into interesting, abstract analogies for it.
I will look to create a long Ep or short album length of music of around forty minutes, spread over several compositions in the ambient, down tempo sort of styles, which I am used to producing work in. I have begun the compositions for this work and will be looking to finish the production work over the summer period so that it can be mixed and mastered once I am back at university, and will probably seek some assistance in doing so from peers. The compositions are of a fairly long length around eight minutes each, and will probably be created to run consecutively to be movements of one long piece. Once the mastering process has finished I will then try to garner opinions of the resultant mix from people in the hope of improving and tightening it. Since my music tends to have very little progression and is fairly minimal in it’s nature the final mix of the individual tones present in it tend to be very important to how the piece is consumed. Once this has been done I will look to have the pieces reconsidered with some feedback in mind.
There will also be bundled with the music a couple of DVD’s, one containing a documentation of a live performance of the music, for which I will create visuals using the techniques I have been experimenting with in previous modules. As I am planning to do a solo performance of the material, I will rehearse and create the visual content in tandem with the musical composition. I plan on using a number of projectors both showing video and static pictures along with the music, which I will interact with and manipulate live, layering video and stills amongst stage lighting on several screens. As well as performing live instrumentation along with pre-recorded computer based samples, I will be using much of the visual orientated equipment to sample and output manipulated audio. The resulting performance will be shot live using several cameras, both static and moving ones for which I will find willing volunteers from amongst my group of friends to crew, and for conveyance and practical reasons will most likely be undertaken and shot at a location in Bristol. I will edit the resulting material myself and cut in sections of the live visual elements to give the viewer a sense of what I seek to create live, a hypnotic relaxed environment of contemplation. A nostalgic warmth pervades my work, and I will seek to show this through the video editing and the colour palette of stage lighting.
There will also be a second DVD of the pieces preceding the ones included on the music CD and the live performance DVD of very minimal audio works cut to the initial visuals I made when first experimenting. This will be included as a sort of intent at ambient visual production, an idea of filling the huge blank rectangle of the television most people have in there living rooms, though tend to have turned off when listening to music. The pieces themselves have either already been made or can easily be compiled from the back catalogue of work I have built up while on this course through all the experimentation I have done using a reoccurring recording process. A series of digital wallpapers for people to put on and ignore for incidental viewing and listening, while they do something else such as read a book or cook.
The three discs will be packaged in an artefact type book of pictures and words. The pictures will be of places where I have recorded, or objects I have used to create either sounds or visuals. Before they have then been rerecorded and processed to create the resultant final AV pieces. Though the photos will not be directly occurant with the music as it is listened to, or the visuals as they are watched, I will write some words representative of these fairly banal places and seek to tell a story of them. The photos have been taken at each location as I have been filming or recording sounds and I have quite a number to choose from, as well as a lot of screen captures of decent quality as I have put video pieces through the rerecording process. I hope to create a fairly substantial book, which can be browsed and read while my music is playing, lending itself to the ambient, atmospheric nature of my musical output. Though I have only just begun to look into it, I believe that I can create a few of these books at a reasonable cost to myself, though do not intend to sell them. I will create two for my end of module hand in, as well as a couple more to be used as promotional material, and one to keep for myself for photographs and documentation for my website.
The second element of my final project will be to finally create a professional looking website for my music and myself tailored specifically toward my assumed musical alias of Smoo. I plan on creating this website using the word press system of creation tools, and hosting it on a bought domain page. I have enlisted the help of a design friend who is familiar with web creation, in order to help with the design and layout of the site, as I am not to familiar with creating online content myself. On the finished site I will have information relating to my current project, and an online digital scrape book of the projects progress. I will also have a achieve of my work, with the appropriate photos, music and visuals compiled together for people to browse. I would also like to sell a couple of music CD’s from my website, which I have made over the past few years of education, which have already been finished to a decent standard and have artwork and words written for each one, and can be reproduced and sold fairly cheaply on a one to one basis. I would create a sales page for this, showing clips from the three different CD/Ep’s and the front covers and photos that are in them. I have one collection of material of around album length, as well as another Ep length CD, and the long Ep short album length of material, which will be packaged with my final hand in. There will also be available free downloads of the minimal music and visuals intended as ambient living room wallpaper. My intention is for the site to resemble that of the ghost box labels in it’s aesthetic and in that it is an archive of material to be explored by the user, in which new interesting hidden sounds or pictures can be found each time it is visited.
I will use a selection of photos I have taken while creating my project to design my website around, most of which have been taken of old abandoned buildings and concrete structures. As well as abandoned steel structures located near the Thames marshes, and washed out rain scenes of disused industrial areas. I would also like to find through archived resources any old pictures that may exist of the areas I have filmed or recorded, which I would be able to use as further material for the website possibly with any written material if any can be found. All my own pictures have been taken on old photographic equipment lending to the nostalgic, analogue feeling of warmth that I have always found exists in my music. A theme of old defunct buildings and equipment continues through my music by the use and sampling of old photographic equipment during my performances, such as a 8mm camera and a 35mm projector. I would also like to continue to devise new ways of interacting with objects such as these for my performances, using both audio and visual means of live manipulation. I would like to find some more old equipment to use in my performances, such as further projectors to both produce visuals and to be sampled and layered onto each other and used as the basis of soundscape like material. A further idea I am currently exploring would be the use of old televisions for performance use, which may or may not become a separate possibly installation type piece where video and audio signals are displayed and repeated through various other televisions. Though I believe that this piece could also become a screening piece where the process of rerecording would become much more exemplified then any of the material I have thus far.
The themes I have begun to realise in my work relate to certain ideas and aesthetics, which exist in the realms of art and mainstream music, such as retro futurism, the love of what the past assumed the future to be like. A sort of pining after a future utopia which the sixties and seventies promised us that never materialised, where minimal concrete houses would be safe and efficient, nuclear power would save not destroy us, and all our cars would hover with the flick of a switch. My work contains elements of retro Science fiction type sounds and visual aesthetics, which come through every now and then. As well as Illbience, a term coined to denote a specific kind of urban ambient music, which although my work does not strictly sound like, does have a certain degree of similarity to in it’s approach. It also contains references to music concrete, the recording and cutting up of samples from the world around us, popular with the rise in use of the first tape recorders. It also contains elements of dub, as I utilise a lot of slow processed rhythms, very long open delays and reverbs as well as distortions and bit crushed beats. The visual sections of my work also contain many similar aspects concurrent with early Avant Garde video and film. I use lots of slow motion and expanded views of the rerecorded material to highlight the smallest elements of movement or objects, as well as digital degradation and noise to implicate the process of the machine in the recording and perceptual consumption of the piece.
I will also have a section on the website, which I will use to refer any interested event or festival organisers to in order to promote myself, where I will upload videos of my live performances and music, as well as short screening pieces which I intend to use as short adverts for my work and ideas. I would also like to be able to use some of the screening pieces for show reels in video or Art festivals, and am looking into making more with collaborations from peers, I have met at university and exteriorly to education once I have finished the module. As well as a list of events or gigs, which I will be playing at, I will be to seek to play live shows wherever possible at appropriate venues and events coming up over the next year. I will be applying to play at as many arts orientated events and festivals as possible, though I will have missed many this year I will seek to create a calendar of events, as well as the deadlines for applications, and tailor my application specifically to each one. There will also be an archived list of previous gig’s and events, which can be referred to by any interested parties, to see the type and style of the previous events I have played.
As well as the purely musical content and information relating to my live performances, I will also include a section for potential ideas and conceptual performances, which I have designs for and intend to create once I have finished the module. Such as a performance involving the techniques I have been using to create AV works over this and the previous modules, whereby vocal and instrumental performances are broadcast live across a room to a set of pickup microphones and repeated through more speakers to another set of microphones and so on. The amount of repetitions would be based on the both the number of times it would take for the signals to break down, as well as the amount of available equipment available for me to use and the area of space open to me, as feedback would certainly be a large issue with such a piece. This portion of the website would also be an area for which collaborations that I am attempting to organise once I have finished the MA, and for which I am currently looking for partners for discussions of ideas and the creation of content. I am looking for people to work with for original content creation as well as remix opportunities, and the possibility of live performances with one or more individuals. Most of whom I am already in touch with or are seeking through groups of like minded individuals from around Bristol and south Wales.
