Creative Strategies solo work @ Brookes University
September 2009
An audio piece multilayering a week of recordings preparing breakfast.
[audio:http://www.alexallmont.com/files/breakfasts.mp3]
This initial presentation was our first ‘small act’ for creative strategies, devised over one week it experimenting with transformation through simple exercises. The challenge was to choose a verb and work with it to develop material into a piece. I was working with ‘layering’.
I wanted to work with the sound of objects but wasn’t sure how best to activate the sound, and whether that then actually related to the object, e.g. does putting a pepper pot down make the sound of a pepper pot or the surface it is rested on? The kitchen had a good range of items but what to do with them… any kind of action that I did would make it contrived.
In wanting to find events that would be more accidental and represent the objects themselves I stumbled on the idea of recording myself in the kitchen at the start of the day. I’m always hazy in the morning and I thought my fuzzy state would diffuse any element of performance. A condenser mic was left in the kitchen and I started recording onto my laptop each day before making breakfast.
The first recording was not particularly interesting, and neither was the next. The most obvious way of layering audio is simply to mix the tracks together, and in experimenting with this with the third I started to notice certain events synced up.
To keep myself out of it as much as possible I refrained from any polish. The tracks were started at roughly the same time with no effects or EQ apart from some random stereo separation to make it a little more spatial; I was keen to keep the cut as rough as possible, at the time this appeared more ‘honest’ to me as a process.