Hey guyzzz and galzzz... I have been doing tape stuff again, I think it happens like clock work every Spring and Fall... My idea is that I take my field recorder out with a mic and record 30 minutes of the same spot, or if I'm at home I record on either the Tascam 4 Track or on whichever shitty tape deck I'm using at the time... I try to get recordings that are even and calmish and are generally just about as fall asleep boring as possible... I use these for secret and mystical tape lab experiments where we test the limits of nonsense that person can listen to... Most recordings are of traffic noise, or the front yard, or the tub or ac or refrigerator or fan or ... running, or the cat sleeping, or an empty closet, or in a tree, or on a cliff, or stuff like that...
What I wanted to ask was WHAT WOULD YOU RECORD FOR 30 MINUTES STRAIGHT??? I want some ideas... The quieter the place the better, I like to think that more than capturing sounds I am capturing the Space like an analog tape version of convolution verb... I have 20 tapes of this stuff to use but I need to make more so input is welcome and appreciated...
Night recordings are the best but I've left several cheap recorders in trees and lost them... I have one of those heavy metal sonys that field reporters used in the 90's so now I won't leave it behind, it has light up vu's...
A dirt road crossroads in the middle of the night. The history or government document section of your library. Seldom used elevators. Stairwells at night.
A train going by, and blowing its whistle now and then, but really far away, so it's just some distant murmur. I hear this daily - it seems like it reverberates off of the atmosphere itself. Pretty quiet, but more massive than pure silence. At dawn or dusk.
I forgot about trains! I grew up a little over a mile away from the rail-road tracks with no neighbors. Whenever a train came 'round I could hear it for a good half hour or more. It was awesome and terrifying!
I've wanted to go into any Library in the middle of a Tuesday and just set up the tape deck and lil tri pod and SM57, point it at the ceiling and just record... Recording with tape is real conspicuous...
I hear a train right now as you say that... I hear it every night and it's far off but sometimes it ruins the silence at 4 am... Conversely my friend's apartment's basketball court is track side and they basically created an amplifier by placing the garbage cans surrounded by concrete next to an open court with parking walls on the other side... It creates a VORTEX OF TRAIN aimed right at the complex... People never design around sound until after the fact... It sounds hella scary and demonically loud and I need to go record it...
I love the concept of recording everyday droning sounds that you hear, placing it in a new context, and it becomes this completely new entity. Then add various other drones and you have a unique sonic experience. Slap a shit ton of reverb on that track - see ya later buddddddyyyyy!!!
One of my friends band, during their recordings and live set there is a power drill buzzing away. It creates a gnarly, gross, disgusting drone behind a wall of thrash.
I'd love to hear the sounds you ultimately capture. Experiment!!!!!! Don't limit yourself to a little box. I have faith you'll do something real cool.
Yes right on Fungaltane... I have been making these for a long time and only limit what I'm doing to the idea I'm running with at the time, this time it's quiet...
I have some awesome rain recordings, I used to set up the tapes and mics in the window and push record and go to sleep... I have stuff I've never heard yet...
Keep the ideas coming yall, I like where this is going... Also I record like 30 minutes of traffic on track 1 and 30 minutes of my ceiling fan on track three and leave two and four open for playing over or mixing with...
I've left recordings going at night in my house before. We live less than a quarter of a mile from train tracks, and trains come through twice a night, so that's always on there. Then I've also captured my cats having a random fight at like 4am. And then one time I captured this really fucking awful screaming fight between my neighbors. I made it about halfway through the fight and I turned it off and erased the recording, because it was really personal fucked up shit that I didn't want to know about my neighbors.
I'd probably record a bunch of quiet drones from everyday experiences - trains, rain, highway sounds, woods, hallways, street traffic, etc and than loop them and layer them with different eq-ing or maybe just as is.
