the geography of sound
found a sample last month. can't tell you where it's from — not because it's secret, because i genuinely don't know. it was in a pack i bought years ago, unlabeled, and i've been sitting with it ever since trying to figure out what it is.
it sounds like a room. not a recording of a room — a room that has been compressed into a sound. there's reverb in it that doesn't match any space i've been in. it's too long for a small room and too intimate for a large one. it sounds like somewhere that doesn't exist.
what you do with a sound like that
you don't process it. that's the first instinct — to EQ it, to compress it, to make it fit. but the thing that makes it interesting is exactly the thing that makes it not fit. if you process it into something that works with everything else, you've destroyed the reason you wanted it.
so you build around it instead. you find the key it wants to be in — not the key you're working in, the key it wants. you find the tempo that makes it breathe. you find the other sounds that can exist in the same space without competing with it.
this is the opposite of how most production works. usually you have a framework and you find sounds that fit it. this is: you have a sound and you build the framework around it. it's slower. it's less predictable. it produces things you couldn't have planned.
there's a whole approach to this in experimental music communities — building from the anomaly rather than from the structure. i've been reading about it at places that cover sound design and it's changed how i think about starting a track.
the track it became
i built something around the sample. it's not done. it might not be done for a while. but the shape of it is there — this thing that sounds like it's from somewhere i've never been, surrounded by sounds that are trying to figure out where that is.
that's the track. the search. not the answer.
more on this kind of process at the endof8 blog and in writing about experimental production.