Droziness
By BurnedOutSun on March 1, 2026 11:59 pm
This week I took the following records to listen to:
Burning Witch: Towers...
Sunn O))): Life Metal
Sunn O))): Pyroclasts
They correlate with the previous week, but the reason for this specific choice was the discovery that all three records were recorded and mixed by Steve Albini, and I wanted to give a bit more attention and research to the mixing process this week, so it felt like a good idea.
Can’t say I was able to distill any insights on the mixing part from the albums themselves, but I’ve watched some useful tutorials, and now I feel like I can orient myself better, even if only a bit.
I can recommend The Art of Mixing by David Gibson if you have a spare evening:
https://youtu.be/TEjOdqZFvhY
But more on the track:
Shoutout and thanks to @dreat for recording drum samples, which I crudely cut and placed in semi-random spots in the track — those almost cinematic cymbals fit nicely.
I enjoyed working in a more experimental format, where you think more in terms of a soundscape than composition. I tried playing with some dissonance on the main guitar. I wanted to introduce a noise component, so for that I had some fun recording a third guitar (panned to the right) through a toy Marshall amp into a portable microcassette recorder, which I later piped into the DAW via line-in. Not sure if it was worth it, but it was fun to fool around. 
Ironically, if on my first submission I felt like I was trying to make something that sounded like a specific genre, and the result wasn’t really close to what I was expecting, this week I feel like it might fall closer than I wanted to simply copying — despite me trying to come up with something more distinct.
P.S. This week was hard.
The initial awe and euphoria are starting to shift toward self-doubt and self-pity, and exhaustion is catching up. Modern phones, with all their distractions, don’t help much either.
But it is called a challenge for a reason — I learned some lessons and I’m looking forward to the next week.
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)
