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Prompts

by Polypores Subscription

subscriber exclusive
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Grace Jones 06:11
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about

A few weeks ago I asked you, the subscribers, to give me a series of prompts, around which I would write some music. it was an interesting exercise and took me to some unexpected places. Here's a brief rundown of my thinking behind each track:

1. Claude Buettner (who I've collaborated with on a number of audio-visual projects) asked me to spend 15 minutes closely examining 1 square meter of my back garden. Well I don;'t have a garden I have a yard. But there's some planters in there, and it's spring, so there's a nice little selection of insect and bird life to study. I wanted this track to be quite "small" and cute, and brittle, to reflect the various bugs I saw going about their evening.

2. "When Objects Are Sad" was suggested by Jason, and for this I got some recordings I'd made of me tapping/scraping various household objects, then put them into a module called Morphagene to make those very dry, object-y sound. Then I had a sad melody going into Rings via a ton of reverb, to demonstrate the profound sadness of these poor objects.

3.cbellevie suggested "Skinny Puppy Cha Cha Cha". I bought a Skinny Puppy CD in 1998 but took it back and got a refund because i didn't like it. Anyway, for this I made a sort of bastardised version of a cha-cha-cha rhythm using modular, then played the Lyra over the top of that to get some weird noisy sounds that were more in-line with the "Skinny Puppy" side of things. I'm not sure it's really industrial enough, but I still think it sounds great and that's all that matters here. It's a prompt, not a homework assignment, right?

4. biscuitgecko suggested "Electric Sugar". This is a nice coincidence because many years ago this was the name I gave to my freelance band recording/production business. I got it from a line in a Tom Waits song - "and the music was like ...ELECTRIC SUGARRR". So anyway, here I just wanted to make something that sounded sweet and full of energy, but not necessarily very robust or fulfilling.

5. "A Synth Dying Because It's Circuits Are Clogged With Mustache Hair" was suggested by Infinite Tapes. For this track I simply clipped several hairs from my mustache and placed them inside a synthesizer, then waited for nature to take it's course.

6. Quiet Jon suggested "Primeval Sex Shops". This was a tough one because my music is (IMO) pretty far from sexy. I went for a sort of mystical angle on this, it almost sounds like something off "I Am The Centre". I had a recording of me tapping a lamp in morphagene, which when slowed down sounded like some kind of temple bell. I tuned my oscillators to that, then built the track from there. I figured primeval sex shops would actually be temples of sorts, so this fits. Sort of. Bit of a stretch but hey.

7. "Aedh Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven" - This was one of a few suggestions by Gerrit Wessendorf. I took the original poem, put it into speech to text software, then put the recording of that into Morphagene, which chopped it up and spat it out into something completely different, which i then built a track around. I wanted something sad and thick and slow here.

8. Phil Dodds suggested "Grace Jones". I had no idea what to do with this, as I don't posses the talent to recreate a Grace Jones track. I tried to think of what I associated with her music (angular repetition, slightly robotic/uncomfortable) and make a track like that. Does it sound like Grace Jones? No. Does it sound like something I wouldn't have created had I not been given this prompt? Yes. So that's good enough for me.

9. Brad Brandhorst suggested that I was a producer in the year 2300 who'd recently become obsessed with 90's hiphop. This was the hardest one to to I think, because my music is pretty far removed from 90's hiphop. And also by the year 2300 the Earth will most likely be a charred husk, with no producers or means to play back 90's hiphop. But that's overthinking it really. So I just went with my gut. I sampled a short section of The Ahmad Jamal Trio's "I Love Music", which was originally sampled in Nas' "The World Is Yours". I mangled it in Morphagene then built a sort of twisted dance track around that. i figured that if the human race still existed by that point then their music would be pretty incomprehensible, so I made it really glitched out and did some weird stuff like automating reverb - stuff that I'd not normally do just to make it unusual. I actually really like the outcome, even though it was something I thought I'd fall short on, so thanks Brad!

10. Gavin aka The Metamorph suggested "Crunchy, Then Creamy Smooth". I often explore the juxtaposition between different textures in my music, so this was very much within my wheelhouse. Starts out snappy and taught and dry, then transitions into some lush reverbs and sonic soup, with tiny fragments of the first part still bleeding through occasionally.

11. Mr R0b0t suggested "A Couple Of Robots Having a Little Dance". I went for something really playful and kinetic, but still kind of rigid and angular. I almost wanted each of the two oscillators I used to represent a different robot, and the interplay between the two is a conversation, or a dance. I imagine these robots to be fairly small and quite flexible, not lumbering chunky robots.

12. "Imagine Sisyphus Breathing" was suggested by Ka8ong. So I imagine ol' Sis is pretty fit from all that stone rolling up hills, but also very stressed out from the sheer frustration of his predicament, so his breathing would be erratic and all over the place - much like this track. I wanted something that felt almost frustrating, like stopping and starting but not really progressing as such. But I also wanted it to be a good track, so it needed to have SOME progression. And this is how it turned out.

13. Simon said "Give Me A Spiritual Experience". For this one I had to go with the Lyra as it's really suited to long sustained tone and drones. It's inbuilt distortion and the ton of reverb I played it through really can sound angelic at times. Ideally this would be about 30 minutes long to have full effect, but I had a lot to fit on here so figured it had to be relatively short. I hope it gives you the answers you are looking for, Simon.

14. My man Thomas Ragsdale asked me to re-interpret the sounds from Spaceship Nostromo sounds from Alien. Now being asked to create a spooky ambient soundscape by a guy who literally makes spooky ambient soundscapes for a living is pretty intimidating, but i gave it my best shot. There's more pitched down samples in Morphagene here, a feedback loop on Rings which makes a weird howl, lots of random voltages skipping around and making things happen unexpectedly. I basically spent an hour or two making the patch, then left it recording for an hour or so, doing it's thing. This was my favourite section.

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released April 24, 2022

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Polypores Subscription Preston, UK

A subscription-only collection, offering a deep dive into the Polypores universe. Updated regularly with new music and sonic experimentation. For main releases go to polypores.bandcamp.com

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