Yan White: Sound

Loop:recycle ~ 2009

In the UK, we produce 434 million tonnes of solid waste every year. As a nation, we only recycle 17.7% of it – one of the worst rates in Europe. Due to the aggressive marketing of new technology and a throw away lifestyle, the amount of electrical waste we throw away is increasing by around 5% each year, making it the fastest growing waste stream in the UK. The UK produces 3 million tonnes of plastic waste each year. Approximately 85% is landfilled, 8% incinerated and 7% recycled. Over 75% of waste electrical goods end up in landfill, where lead and other toxins contained in the electrical goods can cause soil and water contamination.

These loudspeakers were collected over the last 2 months from locations across London.

Using freecycle.org, a site designed to allow any useful item to be collected and re-used for free, and a civic amenity site that sorts re-usable goods, I visited these various locations and recorded my journeys… announcements on the underground, birdsong alongside rail platforms, my own musings and comments on newspaper articles or things I have seen along the way, visits to the dump and freecyclers’ houses.

The collection of 192 sound files is played back randomly through 50 of the collected loudspeaker drivers which are arranged in 8 channels/clusters of varying sizes.

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Feedbacking pedal chain

I had been interested in feedback loops for a while and decided to record some experiments.

Using a guitar pedal chain routed back to itself via a mixer I was able to obtain surprisingly versatile results by tweaking settings, changing the placing of pedals in the chain or by varying the level of aux send from the mixer (the amount of feedback)

These sessions were edited and mixed (no treatment other than some fades and panning) to produce a 25-minute piece. Dim the lights and Enjoy!

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Bavarian Concert Zither

I picked up this lovely Bavarian Concert Zither on ebay for about £40.

This is the instrument used on the soundtrack for the movie “The Third Man”. It features 5 fretted strings and 27 open strings which are usually tuned in a cycle of fifths. I used my own unison tuning.

One thing that is really interesting about these instruments is that almost every country and culture has some kind of version of the zither, and it’s basically an ancestor of the guitar.

Combined with a fairly crude homemade contact microphone and my standard effect chain (2 DL4’s, Boss PS-2, Blues Driver, Verbzilla, Alesis portable mixer) I was using this setup for the first Unknown Devices sessions with David Toop. The case acts as a resonant chamber/amplifier and picks up lots of great creaks and friction.

I later edited together this quite dark loop-based composition..

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Bay 66 Skate Park ~ Soundscape

The soundscape

The brief was to record and mix a one-minute soundscape..

I find acoustic ecology’s faithfulness to the location appealing and so my aim was to represent a specific place or idea, in this case BaySixty6 skate park in Ladbroke Grove.

BaySixty6 is situated beneath a flyover and is next to the metropolitan line. As such it has a lot of ambient noise. The semi-open acoustic produces an interesting sense of space in the recordings.

This was mixed on Pro Tools and I used an Izotope Ozone mastering plugin (maximisation and stereo width for cd setting). I used minimal eq, some volume boost and fast panning (with ramp-shaped U-curves) to enhance the realism of ramp sounds. I aimed to cram the minute with lots of information about the space, to represent it as fully as possible.

A couple of difficulties recording at a skate park:

It can be a dangerous place with lots of loose boards flying around

Trying to close-mic a very fast moving target is a challenge and again, could be dangerous to us, the riders and the equipment!

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ghOst produced a couple of 6-minute tracks for Otaku magazine’s ‘Kaidan’ issue. These are entitled ‘jitenshi-kaze’ (bicycle/wind) and ‘amatsu-kaidan’ (celestial ghost).

Otaku magazine is really beautifully presented and researched, and follows a different theme for each issue, in this case ‘kaidan’, japanese traditional ghost stories. Otaku manages a great balance between genre history, artist contributions and manga comic book content (not to mention the awesome cover cd). I recommend getting hold of a copy quick!

Listen to ghOst here

ghOst

ghOst is a vehicle for experimental electronic music in the ambient/drone/noise/subsonic field. Influenced by themes of the celestial and ethereal, other-worldly soundscapes are explored within a narrative framework.

The dvd was produced for use as a projection backdrop at ghOst laptop sets I was doing at The Pool Bar and for a slot at Immersion experimental electronica festival at The Flea Pit.

Most of the video was shot on a 2mp camera phone (at 320×240) and edited in Premiere. The footage is closeups of various random tv programmes with scanlines and interference forming part of the final image.

Listen to ghOst here

Here are a series of still images from the dvd.