How we make music
We thought it might be interesting to let you know how the hell we actually produce our music! Here goes:
Once every two weeks, at times more often, we get together to make some music. Having done so for years we’ve gotten pretty well used to each other musically, if we may say so ourselves. Usually our improvisations start out pretty chaotic, it sort of has become a habit to cut out the first minute or so when we edit the stuff.
After the first minutes of chaos a direction emerges. By way of listening to eachother, being quiet when others are making a lot of noise, or maybe joining them in the noisy bit, we often get useful material.
We hardly ever use a certain concept or idea prior to improvising. We just sit and start playing. In our early days we though it was fun to come up with theme-words for every session (cauliflower, drill, bouncy ball and such) but we could never really trace these fun little themes back in our recordings, so we kind of dropped them.
On the first album we released however we did follow a concept. We all used headphones so we could only hear our own individual sounds. While recording all at the same time we only communicated by exchanging facial expressions. Surprisingly this crazy experiment worked, and the result can be heard on ‘Headphone Sessions’.
A request by Jan Kees Helms to make a track for an exhibition themed ‘Spiegelingen’ (‘Reflections’) triggered us into into wiring our equipment in a way so that the three of us could all receive, manipulate, and send back sounds made by each of the other, like an audio version of the reflection theme. Often close to feedback we succeeded in making a track, afterwards added to a beautiful video made by Jan Kees.
Instruments we use for performing and recording are often not the usual choices. Erik mainly tries to get freaky sounds by wiring weird patches for his Korg MS20 synthesizer, though some exotic Bugbrand devices sometimes find there way into our music too. Despite all this coolness, he might stick to his beloved piano from time to time.
Remco suprised us more than once with his choice of instrument. Calculators that send sounds through the pickups of a electric guitar, hacksaws and drills or a modified broken radio that goes ‘plop’ and ‘prr’. He may sometimes entertain himself with plain old guitar work, although usually the sounds coming from it are far from ‘plain’.
Roald has been creating his own software for making music since he started his study on the Utrecht School of Music and Technology. But he will explain some of that to you in the next episode!
Headphone Sessions and Spiegelingen can be downloaded here:
http://puinhoop.bandcamp.com/album/headphone-sessions
http://puinhoop.bandcamp.com/album/spiegelingen
