Myself and Dean, the group dubbing engineers, wanted to create a composition that was not just surreal and absurd in its individual components, but also in its overarching arrangement. We strove to create conceptual contradictions, and also to constantly surprise our listeners. This meant crafting a journey from start to finish that was entertaining, interesting and relentless. We wanted the piece to grab the attention and then twist the mind of the listener beyond comprehension, and I feel that we managed to do that very well. Listening to the piece is a very strange experience, and certainly one that feels unique and creatively charged. We wanted juxtaposition and contradiction, and harsh mood changes. This, we achieved. I feel that we did the most we could’ve with the given time, although maybe a few more minutes would’ve been appreciated to let each piece shine. There was lot of ‘gash’ as it were, and much of the work that Group D managed to produce didn’t make the final cut. This is the only thing that I feel we compromised on, and was a necessary evil that I’m happy to say we couldn’t have circumvented in a million years. The alternative is overlapping pieces, which fixes the issue but also means that each piece doesn’t sit in the composition alone, doesn’t find time to shine as much. I feel we arranged very well, and compromised very little. I’m definitely satisfied with the final piece.

I’ve been thinking a lot, since a lecture with Dawn and Ed from earlier this month, about how little radio as a medium is used to its full potential. The ‘War of the Worlds’ radio series stands out as a prime example for me. It’s life-like presentation in the style of a real life broadcast was phenomenally effective, with much of the public actually believing that there were aliens landing on our shores. Another example given by our tutors was an aired interaction between blind people and zoo animals, which I feel is perfectly suited to radio as one becomes empathetic with the individuals in the situation. All sight is lost, and one shares a strange moment of bonding with the people featured in this show, about how difficult communication becomes once sight is no longer an option.

We couldn’t find a way to do this in our own 14minutes set, but not for lack of trying. We thought at first that we could arrange for the entire 14 minutes to feel like a radio show, with adverts and interviews and a live performance or two. This fell short of the mark. There were plenty of other ideas thrown around, but eventually we felt that we didn’t have enough time to create something as conceptual as we could’ve otherwise. We thus settled on the absurdist bombardment.

The first segment of our 14minute radio broadcast is intended to be distinctly low fidelity. I had the perfect device to achieve this – my Tascam Portastudio. Slamming onto tape would both create saturation and also compress the audio to remove peaks. I also had a trick up my sleeve; the 414 MKII Portastudio comes with in-build dynamic DBX noise reduction. Recording with this turned on encodes your audio with the features of the noise reduction – notably, a dynamic boost of the high frequencies onto tape, which, when played back with the exact opposite settings, results in the same clean recording with distinctly less noise. However, if played back without the noise reduction turned on, the audio is audibly thinner, brighter and weaker, with strange compression artifacts. Cutting the high frequencies as well as all of this gives a weird, hollow sound that I utilised along with the distortion to create the low fidelity effect for section A.

In the process of mixing this project together I realised that it lacked a certain human touch, it didn’t feel completely compositional in its abstract nature. I pondered on how to make it feel like it had human intentionality to it, which was a problem that fellow group D inmate Travis turned me on to. Myself and Dean eventually settled on the two sections approach, the first being very Lo-Fi, encouraging tension and perhaps annoyance, which makes the moment that the second section arrives herald bliss, full frequency range and clear mixing intentionality. It’s one of my favourite techniques within music – tension and release, and I’m glad that it came to my rescue once again.

There were plenty of issues with organising 11 people to create a single project over the internet. Communication was not the greatest, and I felt that many people were reluctant to share their opinions or viewpoints on the way things were being done. In extension of that, getting hold of such people meant messaging them privately. I ended up having to privately message almost 80% of the group, who had not been keeping up to date with the (admittedly overflowing) groupchat, just so that they were clear on what to do, when the deadline was, what the options of themes were and where to vote for their preferred option. UAL did not provide us with much in the way of resources to assist in organisation, and by the time this was vocalised to our tutors we had already found our feet and managed to set up a semi-functioning system. It would have been nice to have some sort of process that assisted in our organisation from the start, although I am hesitant to suggest one now without proper thought. Collaborating online with just one person is difficult, but 11 different people seemed almost an impossible task. And at the end, I only felt like I had collaborated with three or four of the group members, one of whom was my fellow dubbing mixer, Dean. The others, I felt I had just received files from, and the whole situation felt more transactional that collaborative, unfortunately. I do not know how to avoid this, but I suspect that smaller groups might help.