What Got Lost

''Shuffle Through Life'' is another recording planned during a long night at work, but this time it wasn't born out of an idea that popped up and was roughly translated into gear and timings. This one is more of an amalgamation of influences after heavily listening to other people's music during a 4-day break from work. In a nutshell, I was listening to stuff and thinking ''this is so cool I gotta try that'' multiple times. The tracks were :

- Aaron Dilloway - Medicine Stunts - Lal Lal Lal – 2014

- The Prunes - Cantona Style from Headz 2 - Mo' Wax – 1996

I don't mind telling you, because I think the resulting track has little to do with these two and is really ''mine'' in all its glorious imperfection, as music journalists would say.

I guess everybody does that, but it made me think : Where to draw the line between inspiration and plagiarism ? I often heard that when you want to copy something you like you're bound to fail and it inevitably becomes something personal. I like that idea because it replaces the concept of sublimation with failure. You don't add your own touch, you just fail as a copist.

The question gets even more tricky with HNW because it doesn't necessarily value having your own sound. However you deal with it, the idea of similarity or uniformity is inherent to static noise. I mean, most wallers when they make something that could be mistaken for The Rita aren't going to think : ''I can't release this, it's too much like McKinlay''

Yes, HNW takes craft. It takes craft to create a continuous texture that gives the impression of moving and remains engulfing, hypnotic or whatever you call it for 30 minutes or more. However, one can be a good ''craftsman'' but not really care about being an ''artist'' who puts his personality or even ''soul'' in his/her work. After all, a lot of talk in HNW is about some form of depersonalisation, being nothing or being a brick in the wall of course.

At this point I realize I should warn you that ''Shuffle Through Life'' is not a HNW track at all haha !

Here's what I used for this track :

Bass drone = white noise + Earth Quaker Dream Crusher + Fairfield 4 Eyes + Boss Harmonist + Boss EQ

Mids Drone = white noise + Earth Quaker Dream Crusher + Fairfield 4 Eyes + Boss Harmonist + Boss Metal Zone (only mids obviously, slight distortion) + Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy + Boss Reverb + Boss EQ

Scraping = FWF System piezo mic + Zvex Fuzz Factory + Fairfield 4 Eyes + Boss Harmonist + Proco Rat + Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy + Boss Reverb + Boss EQ

The beat is obviously inspired by the Headz track. Just a kick drum and a snare with a very light closed hat later in the track following a slightly altered Boom-Bap pattern. The samples come from Ghostface Killah's Iron Man album. But I processed them more than usual.

I played 3 notes of melodica on top of it all, on two octaves, through the Memory Boy and the Reverb.

''Give Up The Ghost'' is a totally different beast (I love that expression). It is the remastered version of a digital composition I made back in 2009. At the time I was still toying with long stretches of silence. The idea was to see how silence colours each sound event by unconsciously forcing you to memorize and hold on to the preceding one. Pretty deep stuff, eh ? Or so I thought at the time anyway. This track was the last one of a long string of releases following these guidelines and you'll see that by then the silences were not that long anymore.

''Give Up The Ghost'' was released, with a different title, by a nice French electronic music label ran by a close friend of mine. It was a very special moment in my life, probably the culminating point of all that I had been going for in my life. I have vivid memories of when I made this music, paradoxically because I'm amazed at how much I've changed in the interval. These times, places and faces have all disappeared today and for various reasons I know they can never come back.

The only thing left is the music. I guess that's why I'm doing something I had never done before : go back to something I made a long time ago. I'm not only being sentimental here. Beyond the fact that where I was at in 2008/2009 greatly inspired the whole Static Park project I do believe the music itself is coherent with it.

The idea was to deconstruct a simple hip-hop beat using common studio FX tricks, to the extent that the FX takes the lead on the original sound. I made a very basic Boom-Bap beat and then cut into it with silence, added reverb, delay, echo, played with reversing, etc but the only source is the skeletton beat I made.

I like this track very much for all the things I already told you and also because it sounds somewhat diseased, as if the hip-hop beat had caught some diseases that had eaten it from the inside, so much that you can only get glimpses of its former self.

Listen / Download HERE