Éclat Part 120
eclatcrew | July 30, 2024
There's a bit of a personal essay coming with this week's challenge. If you prefer to skip my long-winded diatribe, you can download the samples here, a pack made by the artist Max Alper aka La Meme Young, called "422 samples of me hitting shit in my backyard with sticks like a child" (find it on Bandcamp here). The challenge is to make a ± 2 minute long track in two hours using ONLY the sounds from this pack. These sounds are all pretty percussive, so you might have to stretch, warp, or use wavetable synthesis to get more sustained sounds out of them, but there's 422 individual sounds, so you can't say we haven't given you variety. Try adding a really long reverb and sampling the tail, or reversing and looping some of the sounds; you could also add some resonators to add some tonality, or use stacked EQs to pull a resonant frequency out of an individual hit. If you need guidance, feel free to jump into the zoom call and we can figure it out together!
Please upload your track to this Google Drive by 20:30 Berlin time, and then rejoin the Zoom call at 21:00 for our celebratory listening session!
You can listen to what we made here! Meandering diatribe from Ivy follows...
Image credit: Max Alper
I've been thinking a lot about community lately. Looking at the slowly (or not-so-slowly) rising tides of fascism around us, I've been thinking about the ways in which we show up for each other, and the effects that the act of showing-up has on the bonds of our communities.
There are all kinds of ways that we show up for each other. The ways we show up for ourselves; self work and therapy, creative practice and music-making, self care and eating and sleeping well, setting boundaries and being accountable for ourselves. With family, friends, lovers, colleagues; the ways we show up not just to celebrate and enjoy the good parts of life, but also the ways we show up to to mourn, to grieve, to account for our actions, to repair. There's a lot of trust in showing up for our people during the bad times as well as the good times.
Then there's the ways we show up for our wider community. Direct political action, charity, volunteering, voting, hosting events, organising. Every action we take beyond ourselves has the potential to create worlds, homes, communities for others.
Today's sample pack came from a blog piece I read a little while ago, which I keep coming back to because it continues to move me deeply. The subject matter might seem to be only tangentially related to what I'm talking about, but maybe I'm just a softie, cause it truly moved me AND feels connected to where my head's been at lately. "Sample Packing As Social Practice" by Max Alper (aka La Meme Young) is a beautiful piece about the benefits that making something entirely for others within our community can have for our own creative practice and our community bonds. In this case, he advocates for getting out of our studios, recording the sounds around us, and carefully and meticulously crafting them into sample packs for other musicians to enjoy and use - not for commercial benefit, but simply for the joy of sharing something with others.
In his blog piece, he writes (alternatively you can listen to the piece as a half hour podcast included within the sample pack)...
Personally, I really couldn’t give a fuck what style or aesthetic I’m working with on any given day in my solitary practice. I treat my harsh found sounds and electroacoustic timbres the same way I treat my piano and vocal chops. Meaning, I take it all pretty damn seriously and by the book, but my own book, mind you. And the only reason I’m telling you any of this is because none of this usually lonely, meditative thought process was remotely on my radar when I started producing this sample pack out back. Throw the goddamn book out the window because we’re gonna follow our uninhibited gut. We’re gonna make something for others to enjoy.
Every hit I tracked of one stick colliding with another, my hand slapping a banister to achieve some sustained metallic resonance, the crunching of dead leaves under my sandals; these were made with some imaginary sampling musician in mind, someone who is not me. “Damn that could be a cool drum, someone should do something with this.”
What I’m touching upon is commonly referred to under its umbrella term: social practice... [ ]
To create a collection of sounds without the primary intention of using them in your own work, but rather to share them as building blocks for others to use at little to no cost is as much a social practice as it is a personal creative one. Yes, to some extent my sonic aesthetic has informed the sound pack. But what I seek to record is yours to bend and twist and cut to your heart’s content.
And so, my sharing this particular sample pack, in this moment when I'm musing on the ways that we show up for ourselves and each other, is to possibly inspire you not just to make something for yourself, today, at this workshop, but to go out and make something, for others, tomorrow. I truly believe that the more we share, the more likely we are to co-create the world in which we want to live. Granted, simply sharing sample packs isn't going to stop fascism, but I do think practices like this can be small gestures towards a world of co-creation and collaboration detached from capitalist incentives.
Not sure how to do it? As Alper says further along in his blog piece...
But it doesn't matter if you’re ages 5, 30, or 60, we all know how to use a smartphone now. Nothing is stopping us from taking on this playful sound-hunter role in our daily lives. No real intentions are necessary beyond simply keeping an ear out and having 30 seconds to play around with a found sound in front of your phone before you go on your way.
So, if you've read ALL THE WAY to the bottom of this meandering, rambling piece, I give you an alternative option for today's challenge: to walk around your apartment, your block, your hof, with a stick and your phone or a recorder, and gather some sounds. Spend the next two hours chopping, tweaking and trimming those sounds and package them all up into a sample pack to share with the world. You don't have to do this, of course, you can stick with the regular challenge and make a piece from the sample pack provided, and that's 100% fine. But if you do feel inspired to make a sample pack for your fellow musicians, then today is your chance to do so. Just compress the folder containing the sounds into a .zip file, and upload it to the same Google Drive as usual (above), and it'll be shared with everyone during today's listening session. (NB: There's a 100MB file size restriction, so if you want to send a pack that's bigger than that, use WeTransfer to send it to the Éclat email address). ♥️ If you want, bounce down a track featuring all the samples back to back, like Alper has done in his own pack, so we can listen to that as well.
Also, if you would like to purchase the sample pack from Max Alper / La Meme Young directly, you can do so at his bandcamp. He's given me permission to share this pack with all the participants here today, and is excited to hear what we make.