2 Hollow Blown Egg
“Materially she is interested in fragments, fringes and collisions of song and noise; artefacts of pop and fan culture, histories and archives; experimental turntablism and expanded usage of playback, samples and loops; and everyday action as/in performative gesture”
Lisabusby.com. (2018). About | Lisa Busby. [online] Available at: http://www.lisabusby.com/about.html?LMCL=aK6lJc [Accessed 28 Oct. 2020].
‘2 hollow blown egg’ has an incredibly unique aura to it, Busby does not provide any explanation of her intentions for this song so I can really only talk about my own experiences listening to it.
I find this song to be so enthralling, the ominous and slightly playful pings in the intro that play over what seems to be just regular chatting in the background are wonderfully eerie, it gives the feel of the artist tuning up before the song begins and brings you into a certain expectation for how the rest of the song will be and then all of a sudden this very gritty bass comes in with these two repeating notes that kind of bleed into each other. The contrast, then, between this siren-like drone and the soft vocals from (I assume) Busby herself adds to the slightly ethereal nature of the song, and as the song progresses it goes from creepy and unsettling to ominous as the synth begins to get harsher and more aggressive, there is also a chorus of some kind on the vocals which makes it feel ever so slightly inhuman. The song ends with a thrum of a harsh bassy tone that abruptly ends and leaves us with a few seconds of room tone. You can really see Busby exploring the “collisions of song and noise” as the vocals (more or less) remain consistent whilst the drone that plays over them gets less musical and more like noise, harsher and corrupted, there’s this sense of a corruption over time that can be gained from 2 hollow blown egg.
Attempting a Response
Since I did the response to Jessica Ekomane I have been ruminating on my disappointment on how it went, or rather how it didn’t, and given that this week we are focusing on another music based practitioner I have had the feeling that I will fail in my attempt once again unless I try something new. My main problem is that (As I will often remind people) I am not a musician, I do not play an instrument and I work almost exclusively in the realm of sound design and sound effects, and so I feel that it is important to do a response to Lisa Busby’s work from that standpoint, and so the challenge for me then is to take a collection of works that are primarily musical and respond to them in a non-musical way, I have no idea is this will work. I believe it to be possible however I am not certain I have the necessary skills to pull it off.
I was absolutely enamoured with 2 Hollow Blown egg and so I initially tried to create something reminiscent of the harsh drone that plays through the majority of the piece and so I opened up MPC essentials and went to work putting together a synth using the Hybrid plugin. I developed a gravely harsh sounding bass which, after a small amount of experimentation I found that placing the notes in quick succession created a nice pattern, a sort of build up and release. With this I created a countdown of sorts, the ‘preparation before the main event’ reminiscent of the beginning of hollow blown egg which I was heavily inspired by. I also think it would be foolish to say that I have not been influenced in some part by Jessica Ekomane, in that her reasoning for Multivocal she talks about the phenomenon of listening all the way through and not feeling the change so drastically as if one were to leave the room and come back, missing the gradation, one would find the difference to be rather jarring. I feel that this ‘countdown’ does this to a certain extent but perhaps in not such an impressive or mesmerising way as Ekomane does. For this piece I essentially copied the structure of Hollow Blown Egg, said structure being, field/slightly domestic recording with a slow synth sequence, with a transition into a drone accompanied by some kind of vocal. The domestic recording in question was a field recording I did when I was 15/16 at an allotment, I had just got my zoom h1 and I brought it with me everywhere. The drone was relatively simple it was just a tone generated with audition which I added a tremolo to and then used Hysteresis by Glitchmachines (who you will find make some of my favourite plugins), the plugin slowly makes the 45 second sound clip become more and more chaotic which worked well in trying to emulate the gradual ‘corruption’ in hollow blow egg. I later found that the ‘countdown’ didn’t have a satisfying feeling to it and so I decided to reverse and add another glitchmachines plugin, this added to the feeling of buildup a lot more and generally sounded a lot better.
For the vocals I did a bit of digging around on the internet and found a recording of a philosopher I am a big fan of called Joseph Fletcher, in it he talks on the ethics of sexual freedom, he makes a point of how the victorians we’re extremely hypocritical in their attitudes and that we incorrectly assign the prudish nature of society of the puritans when in reality it is the victorians who should be blamed. I really enjoyed this part of his lecture and so I decided to incorporate that into the piece
Overall I feel that this piece came off well, I feel a lot better having made this then when I attempted to respond to Jessica Ekomane, the feeling from this emulates the original a lot more effectively I feel, I would say though that I am not sure that I can fully do a sound design response to a music piece, and while the structure and themes of a Busby piece were there, there is a certain emotional element that comes with music that I haven’t really emulated