Planet Of The Red-Masked Wallers on B/C

So as I told you in a previous post I'm reading a kind of encyclopedia of exploitation movies. I must say I've already seen a good part of these movies but it's always nice to read about something you love. Anyway, the book inspired me for this release again, more specifically old-school SF/Horror  movies such as Mario Bava's Terrore Nello Spazio. 

 

However, the titles are also a reference to The Masque Of The Red Death by Roger Corman. I made my own little mix here...

 

Anyway, here's the gear I used:

Ghost Star Ship=

 

Bass-boosted, pitch-shifted white noise + 4 Eyes + Harmonise + Death Metal + Boss Reverb + EQ

Exploring Planet Z= 

 

White noise + Dream Crusher + Harmonise + Grunge + Octave + Memory Boy + EQ

 

Encounter With The Space Vampires= 

 

Pitch-shifted (very high) white noise + Fuzz Factory + Grunge + Memory Boy + Reverb (Hall setting, max resonnance) + EQ

 

Total Mutation= 

 

Piezo mic + Dream Crusher + 4 Eyes + Rat + Octave + Memory Boy + Reverb + EQ

 

Take-Off Before Explosion= White noise + 4 Eyes + Harmonise + Grunge + Octave + EQ

One more thing, for ''Exploring Planet Z'' and ''Total Mutation'' the bass is actually the sound of a malfunctioning cable I plugged in the line-in of the computer, recorded a minute and then time-streched.

 

Thanks to Jux for the inspiration for the cover !

Listen / Download HERE

Static Park / Wram - Color Balance split on T.R.U.P. Rec

Static Park & Wram - Color Balance - T.R.U.P. Rec - 2014

New split with Wram (check out his questionnaire here). There will be a ltd CDr release eventually but for the moment you can hear it / DL it for pay-what-you-want on B/C.

 

We both provide textural, minimal tracks that let the noise move of itself within the setting.

I used a high-pitched sinewave as source, then put it through=

Dream Crusher + Harmonise + Super Crunch Box + Octave + Memory Boy + Boss EQ

Listen / Download HERE and check out some of the other releases while you're there...

Tropical Skeleton on Bandcamp

Almost straight-forward HNW, until the last track that is. The tracks were built from long stretches of improvisation between the 1st and the 5th of July 2014. For the most part I didn't do any fancy editing, just cut off parts I didn't like or hazardous transitions between textures (one has to manage moving the piezo mic around and pushing pedals at the same time ha!) I did a little more sequencing on "La Mano De Un Hombre Muerto", layering some feedback with the wall parts. Obviously "Osirus Fi" is a montage, the beat is sampled from some Black Flag drums if I remember correctly, on top of which I added a sample of Ol' Dirty Bastard and two layers of noise: one wallish part made with the Rat pedal and some feedback I obtained via piezo + super crunch box with the gain up.

So, the basic set-up remains the same for the 4 tracks:

Piezo mic => Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Harmonize + Distortion + Octave + Memory Boy + Boss Reverb & Delay

Distortions are:

"Thug" = Metal Zone

"Frankenstein's Hacienda" = Super Crunch Box

"La Mano De Un Hombre Muerto" = Metal Muff nano

"Osirus Fi" = Rat

Most of the titles and the atmosphere of the release are inspired by this book I'm reading:

 Les Classiques Du Cinéma Bis - Laurent Aknin - Nouveau Monde Editions - 2014

The title could be translated as "The classic exploitation movies". I'm really enjoying this, especially the numerous parts about Mario Bava and Jess Franco, two of my favorite directors. It's in chronological order, so so far I've had to read many descriptions of Italian westerns or stories about Heracles but I'm getting to the part where the Giallo is being born and Franco is really starting to make crazy stuff so the best is yet to come.

Listen / Download Tropical Skeleton H

Harsh Head Burial

Lately I've been digging into my 90's NYC boom-bap collection A LOT, but I'm also craving for raw unchanging walls. I guess the connection bewteen the two is that they can both be referred to as "old-school" today.

I wanted to do something that would keep the HNW form, but aiming at the grit of 90's NY rap in spirit.

Fo the intros I sampled the interludes of an album that came to be considered as a crowning achievement of this gritty hip-hop sound: Enter The Wu by the Wu-Tang Clan. I put them through the same set-up I used to make the walls:

White noise => 4 Eyes + Harmonise + Bass Big Muff + Octave + Memory Boy + Boss Reverb and EQ.

The main difference, apart from the EQ, is that the Big Muff is set on low tone / min sustain for "Burial" and high tone / max sustain for "Battle".

Listen / Download HERE

True & a reflexion on HNW purity

I made a trade with Alksandar from Dead Body Collection last week and among other things he sent me the latest issue of his mag Pure Nothing Worship.

The mag deals with all kinds of "dark" music, doom, sludge and noise. There are lots of interviews and reviews and although the content is quite varied it doesn't depart from this "dark" line and it gives a sense of purity of intent as you read through.

There has been a bit of discussion going on in HNW circles over the last couple of years concerning what is "acceptable" or not within the genre, specifically what themes are OK.

Basically, back in, say, 2010, it was all grim. Not really though since people like Richard Ramirez or Sam McKinlay were influenced by stuff that was not obviously grim, like silly 70s movies. But most of the HNW themes were grim. However projects like Love Katy, Pooh, Cory Strand have changed that with themes that range from Katy Perry to Winnie the Pooh and Harry Potter.

As usual, some like that and some don't. Personally I don't mind at all the expansion of themes because I don't really see static noise as a genre anymore but more as a building block (a brick ?) you use in your sound construction.

This way of thinking is what brought me to Static Park, where I use static noise in various contexts. As you know if you're reading this, I've been experimenting with this project for a little while now, doing harsh noise, adding guitars, mixing static noise with beats and so on...

All that being said, I'll be a HNW guy forever and still listen to Vomir or Dead Body Collection on a daily basis. The Pure Nothing Worship mag brought me the urge to make something "pure" again, both sound-wise and visually within the scene I feel I belong to nonetheless, Harsh Noise Wall.

I called it True as a nod to how people used to talk about Trve noise or black-metal... As for the cover, well you can see the obvious Vomir inspiration.

Here's the set-up=

White noise => Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Harmonist + Super Crunch Box + Super Octave + Memory Boy + Reverb + EQ

Listen / Download HERE

Rhe Bum Days EP

Rhe Bum Days consists in 4 experiments around static noise.

 

"The Bat Must Rest"

 

After "Bat Radar" and "Make The Bat Drink" here's a new one in my bat series... What can I do ? The sound of delays makes me think of bats... 

 

The set-up for this one was=

 

White noise => Dream Crusher + 4 Eyes + Harmonise + Memory Boy + Reverb + EQ

 

The little "trick" is that the 4 eyes is set at maximum compression to create this tense bassline, the rest is up to the memory boy.

 

"Crunch The Skank"

 

The idea was to mix a minimal dub drum track with some crunch.

 

As usual the beat is made out of processed samples. I used a lot of phasing FX on the drums to create the sounds.

 

The crunch is made with this set-up:

 

White noise => Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Super Crunch Box + Harmonise + Memory Boy + EQ

"Chunks Of Dirt"

Another noise-hop track. The vocal sample is from Ol' Dirty Bastard's track "Rollin' Wit You" (album is Nigga Please, Elektra, 1999). I love ODB and this album is very nice but it's difficult for me to listen to it because he sometimes sounds like he's suffering and I get the feeling that the people who put him in the studio at this moment were exploiting him. Is it wrong to listen to someone who is not playing with madness anymore but surely loosing it completely, live ? It's ironic considering the amount of exploitation movies I've watched, but in this case I think ODB was not acting.

Anyways, the rest of the beat was made by pitch-shifting most of the drums - 1 octave and doubling that with the original sample I love the snare sound I got that way.

The high pitched sound is actually me breathing against the piezo mic.

There is also some electric guitar in there (the 2 distorted notes)

For both of these the set-up is=

Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Super Crunch Box + Harmonise + Memory Boy + Reverb + EQ

 

When I did the breathing thing the gain of the Crunch Box was obviously way high as to make some noise and the reverb was set on hall at maximum level because, well, I have limited breathe.

"Weird Machine"

This one is a room recording with some reverb added. I did a lot of noise reduction on it to get rid of the hiss and then did a low pass filter on the reverb to get that muffled sound. The bassy sound is the same source pitched-down + hard limiter + reverb.

The feedback is

Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Super Crunch Box + Reverb + EQ, pitched down a little to fit the bass.

Listen / Download HERE

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crack Concrete

This release is the result of little ''experiments'' I made this week.

''Noisy Neighbor'' is a ''noise-hop'' track that samples the track ''Oh Brian Dibb'' by the Nihilist Spasm Band (album No Record, released on Allied Record Corporation in 1968). The noise part is piezo mic => Fuzz Factory + Super Crunch Box + Octave One + Memory Boy + EQ.

''Touch A Bird'' (because I was reading an interview by Hüsker Dü in which they mentioned Birds Of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra so I was listening to that just before making this track) is a drone made with this set-up=

White noise => Fuzz Factory + Super Crunch Box + Grunge pedal + Memory Boy + EQ

on top of which I play a contact-mic'd Tibetan bowl through the Super Crunch Box with quite a bit of reverb and delay added.

''Grit'' is a completely different thing. Recently I made a hip-hop instrumental sampling AMM, this time I wanted to make a funky, gritty boom-bap beat by sampling some European free improv thing.

I chose a quite emblematic one, Topography Of The Lungs by the trio of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey and Han Bennink, released on Incus Records in 1970. All the sounds on ''Grit'' (except the scratching) were sampled from the 1^st track on this album, namely ''Titan Moon''.

With ''Soaked'' I wanted to see what happens when a harsh noise wall is done with ''too much'' FX. I have already talked at length here about my opinion on effects like reverb and delay in HNW on this blog so I won't start again... All I'll say is that with this track I wanted to see what happens when you overdo it haha.

The set-up for this track is :

Radio (not tuned to static, just random short-wave radio talk) => Dream Crusher + 4 Eyes + Harmonise + Super Crunch Box + Metal Muff (nano) + Memory Boy + Boss Reverb + EQ

I used the fuzz pedals with ''light'' settings as to let some of the radio's mid and high frequencies bleed into the track because I thought it would be more interesting with the FX treatment.

The Metal Muff is set on minimal distortion.

Everything on the Memory Boy is at a maximum, except the feedback knob because if it were all hell would break loose (I mean a short and fixed feedback loop...)

The Reverb is on ''Hall'' with time at 75%. That's a lot of reverb...

I tried to keep a crunch going on and not smoothe it out completely with the fx. The result sounds like it was recorded with a mic from a different room, almost like an old-school bootleg, which I like a lot. The fx makes lot of harmonics come out of the wall, which is more or less what I had in mind when I made this track.

Listen / Download HERE

Wall Watching available from 4 Eyes

Static Park - Wall Watching - 4 Eyes

I'm really happy to have a new release on Scott P. Soles' fantastic netlabel 4 Eyes (I had already released something on his netlabel as Butch Bag, a wall called Hoodies Full Of Blood) because I'm a big fan of Scott's HNW project Unusual Affairs, which is a duo with Quentin Ques (here's their Bandcamp) and because 4 Eyes has some killer releases by some of my favorite artists including:

Martyr Of Sores

Glasgow Smile

Revelation Of The Dead Girl

She Walks Crooked

An Innocent Young Throat-Cutter

Black Leather Jesus

Black Matter Phantasm

Velfaerd

and lots more...

This release is Static Park in HNW mode for two walls. 

Set-Up:

Radio => Fuzz Factory + Harmonise + Super Crunch Box (on ''Paint Of Dawn'')
+ Rat Distortion + Octave One + Memory Boy + Boss EQ 

Listen / Download from 4 Eyes

PS: Scott also runs the "physical" label Petite Soles, which is also a great label with a focus on hnw and noise. Check out some of PS's stuff here.

Fumes EP on Bandcamp

Two experimental tracks inspired by graffiti, I actually got the ideas for these while hunting for street-art with my wife Carlotta (did I tell you we have a street-art project called Mental Links ? You can see some of our work here)

"Not That Subway" (a reference to the Subway Art book by Martha Cooper & Henry Chalfant that helped spread graffiti from the streets of 70s New York) is noise-hop I guess.

 I wasn't aware that noise-hop was a genre, or rather I thought I had invented it but a couple days ago I saw a thread on the Maniacs Only forum mentioning Clipping, Death Grips and others as part of a "scene" so I guess it's a genre after all...

All the samples, including the drums, were taken from AMM's AMMusic album (Elektra, 1967). AMM was an imrovised electro-acoustic band formed by Eddie Prevost (drums), Keith Rowe (guitar) and John Tilbury (piano) and it greatly influenced the more minimal side of improvised music in the following year, Keith Rowe in particular being pretty active alongside people from the onkyo scene like Toshimaru Nakamura, Sachiko M and Otomo Yoshihide.

So I sampled that and added a layer of noise, the set-up being=

Piezo + Dreamcrusher + 4 Eyes + Super Crunch Box (with the gain open about 25%) + Memory Boy

I must say I may have been influenced by a recommendation in the aforementioned thread: the album was=

 FRKSE - Guilt Surveillance - Divergent Series - 2012 and you can listen/download it here. Very good stuff.

"Bombing Fumes" is an ambient room recordings compressed to the max as to make a pulsating bass sound appear in places, with another layer of noise with the same set-up as the 1st track, only the Boss Harmonist is in and set at the lowest.

Listen / Download the Fume EP HERE

Greg Gorlen & Static Park - Split - Tumeric Magnitudes

Greg Gorlen & Static Park - Split - Tumeric Magnitudes

My split with Greg Gorlen is available from Tumeric Magnitudes. You can either get the tape for 5$ from the label, download the release for pay-what-you-want from Bandcamp or wait until I get my artist copies and trade with me..

Here's the label Bandcamp. Nice isn't it ?

The set-up for my part is Fuzz Factory + 4 Eyes + Bass Big Muff + Octave One + Memory Boy (and EQ, but it's so obvious from the sound I forget to mention it most of the time) and this time it's HNW with a little movement within the wall.

Bacterial (HNW) + a word about Dead Body Collection

I thought it was time for a HNW release after all those beats... As a matter of fact I was working on another release, a harsh noise collab I'll tell you about later, when I stumbled upon a sound I'd like to hear on and on, so I thought, hey, let's do just that and let it flow for 10 minutes.

The set-up for this is=

Radio static as source + Fuzz Factory (gate wide open) + Harmonise (just high enough to "electronize" the sound a little, something I used to avoid like the plague but was influenced to do by some Werewolf Jerusalem releases like Carnal Violence from 2011 on Robert & Leopold or Just Before Dawn from 2012 on Burial Recordings, you can check this last one out here) + Super Crunch Box (with the gain open) Bass Big Muff (set on Low, with tone and sustain at minimum as not to cover up the bass and drone completely with crackling) + Memory Boy + Reverb + EQ.

I have been listening to Dead Body Collection a lot recently. Aleksandar Nenad, the man behind DBC and also Creation Through Destruction, is a fine noisemaker who has more than a hundred releases behind him already. They are always solid, and among them are many gems. I am proud to have collaborated with him on the Ghost /DBC Whore Of Babylon split as well as releasing his split Somnolence / L'Homme En Noir with Ekunhaashaastaack on Slow Death back in 2010.

Although he has slightly changed this over the last couple of years, DBC has long focused on diseases and such for his themes and visuals. The title of this wall is of course a reference to him. Also, this wall is more flowing and straight-forward than my usual stuff these days, perhaps because I was influenced by all the DBC I've been listening to.

Check out DBC's fantastic Bandcamp HERE and please support the artist by buying releases, in physical or digital format. Here are 10 of my favorite ones, apart from the 2 releases I'm involved with obviously =

Incomplete Fracture - Bored Bear Recordings - 2010
Living Dead - Smell The Stench - 2011
Trypanophobia - Self-Released - 2011
Untitled - Inactivist - 2011
I'd Fallen Before But It Never Hurt Like This - VNA - 2012 
Nosocomephobia - Self-Released - 2012
Recycled Music - RRRecords - 2012
Zvala Si Se Svetlost - Vagary - 2012

Collezione Dei Corpi Morti - Total Black - 2013
Deep Into The Halls (with J. Adolphe) - Geräuschmanufaktur - 2014

Now, this should not prevent you from listening / downloading Bacterial HERE

Static Storm

I read a comment yesterday from Sleep Of Ages (a mighty waller, if you're not familiar with him do yourself a favour and check out some of his stuff from his B/C) on the HNW Forum saying how he missed people using sources other than static for their HNW. I kind of agree, as other sources offer, if not unpredictability as long as they are recorded, a loss of control over the resulting wall which can be interesting, as well as a variety of textures. Using non-static sources can force you to deal with sounds you wouldn't have considered with the comfort of a white noise generator.

It happens that there was a big storm over Paris yesterday night, so I jumped out of my bed to record it (with my faithful Sony MRZ Hi-MD). The only problem I ever had with it is that Windows 7 doesn't seem to support Sonic Stage, the software used to extract ATRAC files, anymore. So I just use an old PC... Of course this morning I ran the recordings through my set-up. I had recorded 4 sections of the storm, so I used 4 different main distortions to treat each one of them.

The main set-up is:

Minidisc => Dream Crusher => 4 Eyes => Harmonist => Distortion => Octave One => Memory Boy => EQ

Distortions are:

"In The Air" = Super Crunch Box

"Shower" = Rat

"Clap" = Grunge

"Hard Rain" = Super Crunch Box

Listen/Download HERE

U.S. Eyes

Not a conspirationist reference to big brother spying on everyone (although I've been getting revelatory ads from Facebook these days) but rather a tribute to mid-2000 American noise. Labels like American Tapes obviously, Gods Of Tundra... The guys from Wolf Eyes, Aaron Dilloway especially but also people like C Spencer Yeh and of course Richard Ramirez (yes I'm aware these people are not exactly from the same scene, but it's still "American noise" especially seen from Europe I guess)

So we've got 3 tracks here:

"Private Sphere" is pitch-shifted voice (2 layers, one low and one high) plus the piezo going through the Fuzz Factory with the gate barely opened + Super Crunch Box + Memory Boy

"Shelter" is a white noise + 4 Eyes + Metal Zone (I heavily processed the drone after recording) + the piezo with the exact same set-up as "Private Sphere" only this time it's taped to the gorund and I'm throwing and moving stuff around. Title is the same as a split tape I shared with Werewolf Jerusalem on Dead Audio Tapes in 2013:

"Slow Master" is white noise + 4 Eyes + Grunge (lots of EQ on that one). I played guitar through the set-up, replacing the Grunge with the Super Crunch Box, and added more pitch-shifted vocals on top, whith a hard limiter to make it glitch a little.

LISTEN / DOWNLOAD HERE

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

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

Skulls

Download / Listen from Bandcamp

Here is another ANW release in the vein of the Paranormal Incativity release. Guess I hadn't had enough of this sound eh. 

Both are 1 bass drone using white noise as source + some piezo mic action.

"All In Your Head" 's drone is Fuzz Factory + Death Metal.

"Hole In Your Head' 's is 4 Eyes + Grunge.

Additional contact mic noise is piezo + Fuzz Factory + Super Crunch Box + Memory Boy (+ some reverb for track 2)

The Stuff on B/C + a word about reverb and delay in HNW

 Listen / Download from the Static Park Bandcamp

I don't know if you've noticed, but I've been going for a different sound these last weeks. I've experimented with different settings but most importantly I've decided to really introducde FX like reverb and delay. I used to think that these were a big no-no in wall-making. I mean, of course you can use them, but it seems they shouldn't be heard. It's a bit like plastic surgery...

If you hear the delay or the reverb too much, it is sometimes perceived as "too electronic sounding" or even "plastic" which in my mind is a nicer way to say "fake". I talked about the auditory illusion that should be inherent in HNW in a previous post, and of course using delays an reverb can detract from this illusion of movmeent within the wall by "forcing it"..

So why use these FX today ? Well for one thing I started Static Park to experiment with the limits of the genre and do whatever thing I used to think was not allowed within the genre. That's what genres are for, they allow you to know what something is going to sound like before you even heard it, like "90's NYC Boom-Bap" or "Junk Metal Noise Assault"

The thing is I don't really mind anymore. When I started making walls in 2010/2011 I didn't really know what I was doing.. Of course I'd heard some HNW and it had really fascinated me to the point of wanting to make my own but I came from a different background (mostly electro-acoustic music) so I did lots of weird shit that I probably wasn't supposed to do, like using a computer, putting the sound of running water in the background with The Sandman Wears A Mask project, (of which you can DL two or three albums for free from the HNW Graveyard) and it felt good.

After that, the more I got immersed in the HNW scene, the more I developped an unconscious urge to conform to a certain way of doing things. Like making my walls sound "dry", meaning not over the top delay for instance...

ANYWAY, gear used in The Stuff is as follows:

"On"=

white noise => Dream Crusher => 4 Eyes => Pitch-Shifter (with the Harmonize function at -1) => Super Crunch Box in simple "boost" mode => Bass Big Muff => Octaver => Memory Boy => EQ (with 100, 200, 800 and 1600 hz at 0, 400 and 3200 at -5 and 6400 at -10, I wanted a crunch mostly in the mids, not too high because I initially planned on adding a layer of high-pitched contact-mic squeals but finally didn't)

"Low Substance"=

white noise => Dream Crusher => 4 Eyes => Pitch Shifter (with the Harmonize function at +2, which brings the sound into "electronic" territory, something I used to carefully avoid in the past) => Super Crunch Box in "boost" mode => Octaver => Reverb => EQ (with 100 and 800hz at +5, 1600 at +10 and all the rest cut out)

Paranormal Inactivity

This is an Ambient Noise Wall track I made right after watching the 5th Paranormal Activity movie (6th including the ''Tokyo Nights'' one maybe ? That one is my favorite btw). There is a recurring drone in the series' soundtrack used to illustrate moments when the ''evil force'' is felt.

I wanted to emulate that drone because I like it very much, it's mostly sub-bass with just a tonal hint. So, I used white noise as source fed into the Fairfield 4 Eyes fuzz with the lows at maximum, frequency at minimum and all the rest cut out. I added reverb and Equalized with the 100 hz at 10, 200 hz at -5 and all the rest at minimum.

I think I'm close to the drone in the movie but perhaps I put a little too much reverb on it, which makes it a tad more tonal than it should be.

I then added two layers of piezo mic into my brand new Memory Boy Delay to get more creepy sounds.

Listen / Download HERE

Tunnel Of Night, Glimpses Of Day

Static Park - Tunnel Of Night, Glimpses Of Day

WARNING= really long post, so if you want to go straight to the download link, it's HERE

So,

I'm working 12-hr nights again which means I have much time to think about noise tracks I could possibly make but very little time to actually make them. These tracks were kind of ''written down'' at night (main idea, gear, sequencing) and recorded during the small intervals when I'm awake before I have to go back to work. I wouldn't go as far as calling them ''compositions'' (although the term has been covering suprising things) but you get the idea...

''Death Compass''

I more or less already said that in a previous post... but I don't use the Death Metal pedal too much. That's probably because that was the first distortion I got (not very original, I know) and I used it all the time when I started making 'walls with gear back in 2010/2011 (before that I processed everything on the computer). There was that and the fact that of course everyone else was using it too, which means I hear A LOT of Death Metal pedal so I don't turn to it too often nowadays.

Another aspect of the Death Metal that bothers me is that I really need to push the lows to the max in order to get any kind of crunchy sound from it, otherwise it quickly veers into ''Fast-flowing Death-Metal mud'' (you know?) and I never really was into that.

With this said, I decided to make this track with the DM, resorting to ''extreme equalization'' = only sub-bass and highs... The source is the piezo, into the Earth Quaker Dream Crusher + Fairfield 4 Eyes + Super Crunch Box and obviously Boss EQ.

I switched textures during the track by switching the Pitch Shifter and Crunch Box on successively..

''Jenny Says Wassup''

For ''Jenny Says Wassup'' I took a scene from Larry Clark's 1995 movie Kids, extracted the audio and used it as source. Although I put the unprocessed sample at the start, the source is actually the scene that leads to it. It's an important scene in the movie because Larry Clark (or maybe rather Harmony Korine, the scenarist) really shows how a bunch of kids can be equally naive and cruel, bright and stupid.


The audio was fed into the Earth Quaker Dream Crusher and Fairfield 4 Eyes Pedals, but I tried not to mangle the dialogues too much. You can't really make out what they're saying, but it's clearly people talking.. I added a slight delay with the Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy and then straight into the Bass Big Muff.


I swithed distortion during the last segment of the track, opting for a Metal Zone with all the frequencies cut out except the highs, with Distortion at maximum. In the meantime, the delay goes into overload and creates a loop I decided to keep because I find it suits my relationship with this movie...


Kids was very important for me at the timeit came out (I was 16, roughly the same age as the male characters) and a friend also gave me the soundtrack by Lou Barlow, including songs by his bands Sebadoh (with the poignant ''Spoiled » my favorite song of theirs with ''Magnet's Coil'') and The Folk Implosion, Slint (who's gig in Paris I'm going to miss because of my tinnitus) but also Daniel Johnston, of whom I was hearing for the first time and who turned out to be a big source of inspiration for me.

So yeah, New-York, slacker rock, skateboard, hip-hop, getting high... all this made a big impression at the time. I watched Kids again with my wife recently and it felt good. The kids are forever young on the screen, living in a state of constant danger, while I'm getting deeper into adulthood and the dangers are of a different nature I guess, but that's alright.

''Flesh-Eating Fuzz Heads''

As the title implies with this track I wanted to hear the (almost) unadulterated sound of fuzz in action. I used white noise as source, put it through the Earth Quaker Dream Crusher and the Fairfield 4 Eyes and that's it for the sound. Well, I must admit I added an octaver for a more meaty sound and a little delay on the Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy to get that flesh-eating sound I love so much.

''Husband & Wife'' (with The Girl With The Stanley Knife)

This is a collaboration with my wife, whose noise name is you guessed it, TGWTSK. We decided to make a new track together with voluntary constraints=

• each of us records on one channel of the stereo track (she's on the L, I'm on the R)
• each has to chose 1 FUZZ, 1 DISTO and 1 FX and work with these only

so this reads :

L = Earth Quaker Dream Crusher + Electro-Harmonix Bass Big Muff + Electro-Harmonix Memory Boy

R = Fairfield 4 Eyes + Proco Rat + Boss Reverb

Source is a piezo mic for both of us and of course there's a little EQ at the end of the chain.

I take this opportunity to remind you that I still have a couple copies of TGWTSK's Dark Feed 3'' Cdr on Ink Runs Recordings. We also have a minimal noise duo called FleshClocks whose 1^st release I reissued for a gig, and I still have copies of this one also.

''Pillow Of Sorrow''

This is another of my ''Noise-Hop'' experiments. The beat is made out of samples from various RZA productions I reprocessed a little. I played the electric bass and there are two layers of noise. The first layer is made with the Boss Metal Zone, the second, feedback-y one is the MI Audio Super Crunch Box with lots of reverb and delay (which seems to be the new trend around here)

 

Lay Delay Lay / Memory Boy by Electro-Harmonix

Static Park - Lay Delay Lay

1st of all sorry about the awful pun in the title of this one.. I'm a Dylan fan and this came up, usually once a bad pun comes up I know I'm gonna have to use it eventually.

There's a reason for this title though= I've got a Memory Boy by Electro-Harmonix !

I bought this because, well, I didn't have a delay pedal yet, and as I said in a previous post I've been listening to A LOT of harsh noise lately and I started really noticing the heavy use of delay. 

For my first session I wanted to try it out in a "wall" context but nevertheless decided to use the piezo mic as source to be able to make "short" sounds and see the delay's potential better.

I hesitated a second between the Memory Boy and its "nano" version, the Memory Toy, but the man who sold it to me told me I wouldn't be able to feed the delay into itself unto madness as I would with the big boy. With only a 15 euros difference, I took the latter.

I never really understood the point of delays in HNW as the idea of wall-making in my opinion is to create an auditory illusion of movement when there is none. Using a delay comes as a kind of contradiction because = 1) it would be cheating and 2) it would detract the mind from the illusion the wallmaker crafted by adding artificial, recognizable layers of hypnotic sound.. don't know if I'm clear here.. but I'm sure you get the idea.

With all this said, I still wanted a delay because Static Park is all about breaking the rules I made for myself with noise, and I plan on using the delay for harsh noise and drone. I'm sure It'll work wonders within those genres.

Of course, I'll try wall-making with it again, this time using an already static source ie white noise.

"Bat Radar" is an excerpt from my 1st recording session with the Memory Boy by Electro-Harmonix. Source is Piezo mic through Fairfield 4 Eyes and Proco Rat Distortion. "Toy" is sampled drums + piezo mic taped to acoustic guitar through MI Super Crunch Box + extra layer of noise with the Crunch Box gain all the way up.

Listen / DL from Bandcamp