One of the projects that I’ve long imagined doing involves going room to room in a house, and creating a piece of music using only things found in that room. For example, in the bathroom we might use the sink like a steel drum, hammer on the tub, use the sound of the toilet or the sink faucets, shake bottles of medicine, drop things into water, suspend the toilet tank cover and hit it with a mallet, turn the ventilation fan on and off, snap towels, blow across the top of shampoo bottles, and so forth.
Whenever I’ve imagined this project, I’ve pictured doing it live to tape using a talented group of improvisers. However, it occurred to me that this would be a terrific project for DJ Essey and myself. So, we took advantage of my family being out of town to give it a try. We started in possibly the easiest room of the house – the kitchen.
I prepped by tuning some wine glasses and scribbling down some quick notes for the beginning of the piece, featuring a glass harmonica (the wine glasses) and percussion courtesy of a sushi knife sharpened on a butcher’s steel (while I have a very nice collection of a variety of knives, the thin flexible blade of the sushi knife provided just the clean, sharp, high-pitched white noise sound I was looking for).
When Ed arrived, we jumped into action, recording the opening of the tune just as I’d imagined it. Essey threw some of his own ideas into the mix, taking a very “warbly” sample of me overvibrating a glass until it produced complex harmonics, and processing it together with several detuned glass samples to provide a ghostly chorus effect. We then recorded a frying pan full of hot oil as I first crushed garlic, and finally dropped a ladleful of water, into the oil as “tape” rolled.
Ed played with this sample for a few minutes, finally hitting on the magic combination –a grain delay – which made the frying garlic sound like unearthly bubbling lava, or like somebody finally succeeded at boiling the ocean. We instantly knew we’d found the right sound, and “boiling the ocean” was born.
The hardest thing to get to work was the “washtub bass” I created by typing a piece of butcher’s twine to the handle of a teakettle, and wrapping the other end around the mic for optimal sound capture. We wound up sampling a couple of “twangs” and pitch-shifting them in software to get the rubbery bass sound that comes in from the middle to the end of the tune.
In the end, there were a number of samples we captured that were never used. As with everything we do, the door is always open to add, extend, alter, and remix later. For now we’re happy with today’s construction.
To hear the final tune, check out “boiling the ocean” on the media page of the catscradlerobbers.com website.
-Snake
