reworking music from three netlabel releases, for the 48th disquiet junto, fraternité, dérivé.
a last-minute contribution to this junto. i was in a car wreck a couple days ago, so abruptly my planned participation time was reduced to just a day and a half. i could only spend a little while per session sitting at the DAW. the track’s title is a reference to that event.
everything was sequenced with renoise, as seen in the screenshot.
the three source tracks were very hard to work with; this was easily the hardest junto i’ve attempted. i had to make several passes through the tracks, pulling out tiny sub-one-second sections here and there, building up percussion, or finding a droney passages that would work for background material.
for the percussion, i zoomed in and grabbed pieces of non-tonal audio, gated them to remove incidental noise, and checked playback at other speeds for useful sounds. some of the samples were doubly useful with different filter and speed settings. most of the percussion sounds were created after isolating one channel or mixing down to mono; this gave a sharper, clickier sound. occasionally, some of the hits/sticks were left in stereo for a slightly fuller sound.
the melody/drone passages were all pulled from the “unloop” track. i chopped out a short section of mostly percussion-free sound at the beginning of the song, isolated one channel, and ran this higher-pitched drone into paulstretch, stretched to 50x. i played with the bandwidth and noise/tone sliders to get the distinctive crystalline sound, rendering it a few more times. by playing this tone at different speeds using renoise’s basic sample editor, i was able to layer octaves, fading different copies of the sample in and out for some evolving harmonics as desired.
a signal follower attached to the low-passed kick drum flexed the drone’s volume on the beat, adding some liveliness, resulting in a pleasant low-key “bloom pads” effect. i don’t go for huge sidechain compression; just a touch is all that’s needed to reinforce the rhythm. a slow LFO set to “random” mode, attached to a bitcrusher, downgraded the clap sounds with some pleasant crunch.
calf reverb and vintage tape delay plugins rounded out the FX, with the percussion patterns treated liberally, resulting in some complex sounds despite simple arrangement. the only other effect was a tape warmth plugin on the master channel; everything was kept quite minimal, for aesthetic and time reasons. given that i only had a day or so to work on the track, i knew i couldn’t try for too many complicated tricks or melodies.