For my final sound piece, I recorded lots of my small circuits together, processed them with only a digital delay, printed them straight to tape and then dubbed some wholly absurd bepop jazz guitar and bass over the top.

The electronics were purely of my own construction, and they consisted of a couple of oscillators and a tremolo. I printed some of the oscillators running as LFOs, then clocked my tremolo with other LFOs, sending audio rate oscillators through the input of the trem. Then, on another pass, through the send of my mixer I was retriggering my tremolo using the combined output of many LFOs which was processing more oscillators. These ended up (through a bit of ping-ponging) onto three channels of tape, with the guitar and bass sum ending up on the fourth. Plenty of analogue drive was used, even some select-band feedback was used to alter the guitar and bass as they were summed, by re-sending the summed signal into the bus that was being summed from (with some drastic EQ in between).

Conceptually, it borrows from ideas from Makoto Oshiro, other artists I like like Madalyn Merkey, and combines it with the bombastic tendencies of the most silly bebop jazz to create a composition that represents how I feel about this assignment.

Lack of organisation on my part, too much changing my mind, fluctuating degrees of interest in academic writing, coupled with a spontaneous trip to Paris in the middle of trying to write the essay all joined together to make a hectic and stressful experience. The past two weeks have sounded not dissimilar to my piece “Mommy, I think I broke the radio ._.” because I’ve been tinkering with horrendously unstable and sometimes ear-splittingly loud circuitry, and then taking breaks from that and essay writing to blast out some highspeed jazz lines on my guitar as a form of comfort and stress relief. It helps me think.

Overall – I’m incredibly happy with how the piece turned out. And I think I’ll make some more in the same style very soon.