Amusement Park Phases

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 2007-06-08

Label: At Sea Records

Inspired by Steve Reich's late 60's tape works, "Come Out", and "It's Gonna' Rain", I wondered what Reich might have done if he had access to modern technology at the time. I had also been thinking about constructing something abstract from the sounds of old fairground organs, whirrs, clicks and occasionally strange tuning included. So, I digitised a bunch of recordings of fairground organs and other musical automata, then set about arranging each recording in layers up to 10,000 deep, coming up with three basic patterns (A, B and C) which I felt teased out interesting aspects of the original sound.

The end effect of this in some of these pieces, is that the listener is able to hear every moment of a recording at once. After a few days of this, working feverishly but not stopping to listen to the results, I realised I had made a couple of mistakes right at the at the start in how I had arranged the patterns. In a way my modern technology was mimicing the imperfections of the original instruments, so I left the "mistakes" intact.