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Christopher Schreck - Clearing

from Antihistamine 2023 (HT098) by Various Artists

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about

Living in Chicago, my access to rocks comes largely as a function of urban infrastructure: stray bits of gravel collected near the curb, chipped pieces of sidewalk and brick, and so on. So for this project, I walked a square block around my apartment and gathered whatever stone debris I could find. Along the way, I also took some field recordings on my phone: a neighbor’s wind chimes, a car horn at an intersection.

When I got home, I combined my street-foraged stones with a dash of culinary sea salt and a selection of pieces from my girlfriend’s rock collection (compiled over years of traveling) and started recording. First, I tried a series of rock-on-rock experiments, each closely mic’d: tumbling a group of them between my hands; swiping sharp corners across smooth surfaces; dropping pebbles onto small piles of rock; plopping stones into a plastic bowl of water. I also tried using rocks as percussive instruments by clinking against a drinking glass and tapping out a pattern on a toy xylophone.

With these source sounds in hand (along with the neighborhood field recordings I mentioned earlier), I began arranging and manipulating the sounds intuitively: using an old SP-404 sampler to loop and distort the hand-tumbled rocks into a phasing rhythmic foundation; applying a vocal effect in GarageBand to turn the wind chimes into abstract warbling; slowing and extending the sound of the car horn into a drone; bathing the percussive elements in webs of echo and delay. (Per your instructions, I also left some of the original clips as they were, so they remained legible as rocks.) Gradually, these elements were sculpted and collaged in GarageBand to produce the resulting track.

credits

from Antihistamine 2023 (HT098), released November 24, 2023
www.instagram.com/cdschreck

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Histamine Tapes East Montpelier, Vermont

Lofi Experimental Cassette label focusing on reuse.
Breathing new life into unwanted ephemera

Tapes that show their age

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