Disquiet Junto Project 0334: Mass Branca
Record a massive multi-layered tribute to the legendary guitarist-composer.
Step 1: This project is a tribute to the late avant-garde composer and guitarist Glenn Branca, who died earlier this month. Among Branca’s many musical systems was to have a vast number of musicians, say 100 guitarists for example, perform together. We’re going to explore that mass of sound to produce a mass in Branca’s memory. It will be a Mass Mass.
Step 2: Pick a single sound source, an instrument perhaps, but really anything that makes a specific sound. One thing to aim for is a sound source that is rich in overtones.
Step 3: Use multiple layers (with “multiple” being defined as you see fit — 100 layers would be awesome, but so too would 10, 30, 50, etc.) of this sound source to record a piece of music..
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the audio is composed with 42 layers taken from a single acoustic guitar tone. Those 42 layers were edited with a number of different effects, and then recorded onto a small tape recorder as I walked around my studio. The recorder was placed inside a fishbowl shaped glass vase, and recorded with binaural microphones. The binaural fishbowl and the digital file were then combined. The resultant audio is a 4:44 densely layered drone track that you can listen to here:
i used max/msp/jitter for the video, using a single image from the recording process. the image was converted into a halftone screen emulator, which takes the input matrix of the original image and splits it into a grid. each element of the grid is then replaced by regions of a second matrix based on the mean value of each slot in the grid. I captured the peak amplitude values from a 20 second audio clip, multiplied those values, and routed them to one of the grid coordinates. I then layered multiple recordings of the video and edited those videos in Premier.
learn more about this week’s project and the disquiet junto at disquiet.com
