Handing over the mic to artists/musicians who break down their new albums track by track/share the thought process behind the creation. Today we’ll hear from Broken Chip, an Australian one-man project that put out releases on Feral Media, Flaming Pines and 3BS labels.
Most of the time when I set out to make music it usually starts early morning and will end late in the evening. These types of days are usually rare considering the amount of time invested which can be 16 straight hours (production, mixing and mastering). I like the continuity that this method of working brings, if I let the process extend for days or weeks I lose perspective with the overall direction.
With making Inside // Outside it was no different – One early May morning my room was flooded with bright morning sunlight which was the catalyst for me to get into the studio and start making sounds. I have no plan on how it’ll sound since my work method is based on improvisations. All I know is that I need to act quickly or I lose the spark.
I have a folder filled with various field recordings which I’ve collected for some years. The files contained in this folder are from old cassettes, modern day digital recordings and occasionally pulled from the web – it’s a big mix of sounds.
I laid the foundation of this track using a lengthy outdoor recording dominated by bird calls into a track in Ableton Live. From this point I started playing my OP-1 into a looper via a delay/reverb pedal. Once I had the right sounds and melodies on the looper I recorded the audio onto a Sony portable cassette recorder and from there
it’s recorded into Live and mixed with the field recording.
Moss is rather similar in the way Golden was created except I played the OP-1 through a pedal called a Blooper which is a looper with a few great tricks built in such as pitch control, slicing of audio, filter and a stability feature that gives the sound a warped wow and flutter effect when dialed up.
Another field recording was used from my collection and laid onto a track in Live. I recorded the output of the blooper onto another looper and repeated this process a number of times until I was happy with the sounds . Again, I recorded the final loop onto tape and then recorded it into Live to mix with the field recording.
For this one I used an AIWA micro cassette recorder (1990’s dictaphone style recorder) and recorded the ambient sound of my backyard (which backs onto a vast forest of Eucalyptus trees). The OP-1 went into my delay/reverb pedal then into a Montreal Assembly Count to Five pedal for looping and layering. This pedal is an amazing device for audio manipulation and produces some wonderfully unexpected results which aligns nicely to my improvised process. The field recording and loops were then combined and mixed together in Live.
The AIWA micro-cassette was used again, however, I recorded indoors which mostly gave me the mechanical sounds of the tape motor which can be heard from start to finish in this track. I played the OP-1 into my delay/reverb pedal then into the Count to Five pedal for some weird looping outcomes. I then recorded these sounds into another basic looper and built up a long master loop which was recorded onto the Sony then transferred over to Live for mixing.
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