Cecilia, Connor & Peter

1.
During our first meeting, we got together to jam just to see what kinds of sounds we liked and didn't like. We agreed that we wanted to stay away from ambient music because it was too easy and too boring. We also agreed that we wanted everybody to switch between the three roles of harmony, melody, and bass, because at one point, Connor was stuck doing the bass for 20+ minutes when he actually wanted either Peter or me to take over so he could have a chance to create the melodic line.

2.
During our second meeting, we just listened to songs that we liked/envisioned our group playing and just discussed what we liked about each song.

3.
We experimented with slightly different sounds - cello was looped in ableton and Connor played vocoder. This turned out to help us sound 100% like beach house! pretty fun, but we think we want to move in a different direction entirely.

4.
Today we tried two drastically different strategies. First, as the minimalist movement is a very real intersection of classical tradition and PAT stuff, we read down Riley's In C. From a performance quality stand point, we sounded rough (In C is meant for 30 people). I think it was a good way to get our brains and fingers moving and we'll return back to it in the future.

Then we went a little back to the silliness of last week, but we switched instruments and tried to let go of hang ups. The music that resulted reminded me (Peter) of the Japanese micro sound movement (also Sinebag) and so we checked that out as a group.


Nov. 20

The past couple of weeks have just been a lot of collecting and editing sounds/scenes. Peter has also been working on creating fake bird sounds and Connor has been creating small, texturally interesting sound bytes (?) and tonal Sinebag-like patches (??). Just yesterday, we tried to put all the layers together (the "scenes" + the artificial nature sounds + my cello & Peter's electric guitar) and our first attempt was a little rough because it sounded really jumbled but our second time around was a lot smoother because we started listening to each other more and just getting into the hang of playing together again. We still need to work on making all the sounds sound more cohesive but I think we've got a great start.