Limited Edition

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

Review of "How Is The World Treating You" CDr in Demagnetization

What a nice surprise ! You can read a review by Greg Gorlen of Static Park's 1st trade-only CDr on this blog

The CDr is "traded-out" but you can still hear the individual tracks from Bandcamp

HNW Playlist + Links

01 The Cherry Point - Nightmare Centers - Bone Tooth Horn – 2006 CDr

02 Werewolf Jerusalem - Onibaba - Deadline Recordings – 2007 Bandcamp

03 An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter - Screams From The Black Museum - Deadline Recordings – 2008 - Bandcamp

04 Hard - Seminal Release - Instincto Records – 2011 - Bandcamp

05 Dead Body Collection - My Bones Are Cold - Serious Business – 2013 - Bandcamp

06 Extreme Chafing ‎– Desitin - Muzikaal Kabaal – 2013 - CDr

07 Angel Of Mercy - There Is No Mercy For The Condemned - Self-Released – 2014 Bandcamp

08 Belphegore - She's A Beast - Self-Released – 2014 Bandcamp

09 Concrete - Monument - VBP – 2014 CDr

10 Nightmare Castle, Fouke & Dead Body Collection - Mythos & Lore - Altar Of Waste – 2014 CDr

Slick / Slack EP

I have been working 12 hours night shifts these days so when I had a 4 days break I focused on recording tracks for releases on nice labels who offered to do Static Park releases.. However I came up with a couple short tracks for Bandcamp.

"Slick" is an instrumental hip-hop track made out of samples. The horns and drum rolls are from Max Roach's Parisian Sketches while most of the drum shots are from Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, one of my all-time favorite album. The vocal sample is from Craig G's "Dropping Science", an old-school joint produced by Marley Marl in 1988. I made it all out of these samples and just added live electric bass on top. 

Maybe you've noticed if you're into hip-hop, but I try to mix 90's gritty boom-bap drums with more old-school, 80's samples and general feeling in my instrumentals... 

''Slack'' is a noise track with two layers, some kind of lazy crunch with LOTS of delay + feedback. The set-up is piezo mic + Fairfield 4 Eyes + MI Super Crunch Box (only for the feedback layer, with gain pushed at max) + Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy + the usual slight reverb and EQ... 

Listen / DL HERE

Common Misconceptions

Until Then / What Net tape on Tumeric Magnitudes

Static Park - Until Then / What Net - Tumeric Magnitudes

First tape by my project  on the great Tumeric Magnitudes label, IF YOU HATE ACOUSTIC GUITARS fast forward a couple minutes, the harsh noise (walls) is coming haha

All the info (gear and stuff) is on the label's site. Tape is 5$, DL is pay-whay-you-like...