room tones by Ross Birdwise

This EP gathers three tracks made in the same period of time, all made in a deliberately off the cuff kind of way.

The track 'room tone' began with me triggering some samples and effects in real time as I was trying to come up with new ideas for another piece of music. My laptop computer and DAW were having CPU and memory issues as I was doing this, causing unintended glitches. Instead of quitting I grabbed my Zoom recorder and held it in one hand and recorded the sounds of the room (including my speakers, some impromptu vocals and me pressing on the keyboard and trackpad of my laptop with my other hand), creating and recording a loose and un-quantized collage. I then restarted my computer, and loaded the recording into the DAW and improvised on it some more, in a very loose fashion, this time making use of some other room recorded sounds I had already made before starting the project, including the sound of electronic tones literally vibrating my windows and causing a buzzing sound alongside the low bass frequencies.

'cancerous growth and efficiency' and 'its getting worse' don't make use of any 'room tones', but further explore the idea of recording things in several passes without quantization (and are mostly improvised and unrehearsed), and approaching rhythm in a non-groove way, where the 'percussive noises' are more like passing events and responses to one another than any kind of 'rhythmic cycle' or directly repeated pattern. Elements of these recordings were also filtered in haphazard ways 'by hand' and also bounced around via various software and processes that further degraded and randomized some of the timbres, spatial elements as well as the durations within and between events.

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