|
Already-enigmatic (spoken and sung) snippets (such as "Think what glories God can make from the fertilizer of sinning...", "Don't be polite when owls are out by day...", "Hair loss and many other disturbing complaints", "the facial equivalent of a wall" and many, many more) are subjected to a plethora of sonic mutations... including (but definitely not limited to) pitch shifting, doubling, reverbing, vocoding, panning, slicing, dicing and a host of other multiple transformative effects. Many of the longer samples have been rendered into quite interesting soundscapes, only vaguely humanistic after a deluge of shapeshifting audiomagic.
Various "categories" add some degree of order to the multitudinous samples;
those from Old Time include singalongs and spoken bits which are all topped by extra doses vinyl-like static, and Vocoder Voices specialize in flowingly robotic transformations, often chimingly musical renditions of obtuse statements.
Unintelligibly fragmentized but still obviously of human origin, New World Phrases are stirred, stretched and tonalized into drifting entities.
Monstrously deep intonations bark from Shaman Signs, while
Machine Man tends toward more-metallic reverberations.
Looping phraselets become Voice Rhythms and even-further-deconstructed particles are strewn throughout the Beatland section. Disc Two categories include the elongated coughs and breaths of Body Reactions, the human-spawned (then electronically warped) mimicry of
Cats and Other Animals or the hyper-rippling sounds from Clipper Chop.
Alien Worlds, Granulation
and Transformations pull all distortive stops... producing utterly inhuman noises and spacy new lifeforms.
Toward disc two's end (with Ambient Textures, Alien Textures and Bottom/Low Ambience), the pieces grow longer and more radically altered into virtually unrecognizable shapes, tones and textures. The longest continual piece is number 58 "plasticlook" (2:25) in which a basically unidentifiable repeated phrase self-rhythmically rises from (then back into) a slurry, rippling morass.
The tracks (each disc has 95 "tracks" containing from one to more-than-twenty individual samples) are presented in normal audio CD format, which makes for convenient listening... When it comes time to work though, you'll have to take the easy-but-extra steps of converting them to sound files (for instance, .aiff files for Macs and .wav files for PCs).
It seems to me if a creative artist were going radically whack out some spoken word, they may want to personally do the disfiguring and deconstructing. (It's almost like being served pre-chewed food... where's the self-satisfaction?) Additionally, many of these samples have their own tonality built into them that would have to be worked with/accomodated.
|
