In this work, Electric Indigo creates complex sonic structures composed of very small acoustic entities. These structures live on friction, cohesion and constant movement.
SoundCloud. (2015). 109.47 degrees – excerpt. [online] Available at: https://soundcloud.com/indigo/10947-degrees-excerpt [Accessed 12 Nov. 2020].
Upon my first listen through of 109.47 degrees I had initially registered it as quite a simple composition, something that wouldn’t be too difficult to emulate in some form. The transition between different segments of the song could be done easily with a fade and with the right plugins I could recreate some of the effects I had heard, particularly the wet clicking and tapping at around the 46 second mark, I had come across sounds like that when using delay plugins like Hysteresis. However, upon listening even more closely there is an almost cinematic quality in the scope of the environment created by Electric Indigo, and while there is a musical quality to some elements it feels as if that is not the point, these are soundscapes for an environment that doesn’t and could not feasibly exist, there are no clearly recognisable sound sources, there are moments where the mind will link a sound to something it knows, for example as the piece fades out from 2:40 onwards there is what I interpreted as the beating of helicopter blades, not that I think that’s what they are or are meant to be but that is how I initially registered them in my subconscious, without even considering at first. I imagine that would be the sonic equivalent of seeing faces in gnarled trees or burnt toast, we seek out patterns and the recognisable in that which is chaotic and unrecognisable. I think, then, that is why this piece is so interesting, by its nature it fosters input from the listener, they will bring themselves into it, and while this is true for all art it is the quality of possibility and the fact that there are no concrete sound sources but only suggestions of sources that really encourages that kind of speculation.
Attempting a response
I did quite a few things for this response, I used a plugin called Palindrome, which is a “granular morph sampler” by glitchmachines which will take four samples and cycle between them with lots of options for morphing the sound and such. I took some sounds of birds and large cats and used them as the base, I then shuffled through a few patterns and morph settings until I got what I was happy with. I also used a synth which I added some reverb to for a sense of extra atmosphere. I used Trash 2 and Hysteresis on the sounds of some water, working essentially in the opposite direction of the watery sounds in 109.47 degrees by taking these sounds and making them less like water instead of making sounds more like water. Overall I think it worked quite well, there is a certain element of closeness that 109.47 degrees has that I feel this response does not however overall the qualities of the sounds besides that are quite similar, especially when done in (what I assume to be) such a different way