I’ve been making noises again. I like that. I missed it. One of the most fun things in the world is to open up Pure Data or Logic (or both) and start pushing sounds around. There is wealth of captured audio on my computer from years and years of field recording. This one is from a more recent trip to Lake Superior. It’s the sound of the shore manipulated and pushed through whatever sounded good.

The Spirals as a concept are simple. They are all improvised. I use found sounds and whatever audio processing program I’m playing with at the moment. They are time boxed so most are kept at under 2 hours of total production. There are usually 3 or 4 passes of improvisation and manipulation and very little (or no) editing. Keeping it tight means focusing the energy on the sounds as they flow. I don’t want to be too precious with these. It’s about learning the tools, building improvisation muscles, and keeping the ear sharp.

The new covers that go with these audio files are something new for me. I got the idea to run an FFT on a FLAC file and then map that to color data and push it out to a PNG. The first few experiments (that weren’t just solid colors because I didn’t know what I was doing) ended up looking like Rothko. I don’t hate that. I’m going to play with that some more and make it a part of this project. I don’t know how to improvise with visual output derived from audio yet, but it seems like something worth putting some time into.