Following the Twin Peaks-isms of last month (May), for June I'll be focusing exclusively on sampling some vinyl and recomposing/mixing in Ableton Live. As a big fan of Philip Jeck, Leyland Kirby and William Basinski, some of the first live performances I did back in the mid-noughts consisted of vinyl, tape loops and a whole lot of layering and manipulation. It's been a long while since I last worked with these materials, but it's feeling pretty fresh and open to a lot of possibilities!

Of course, it's also not without a bit of an ulterior motive. Later this year I'll be providing a score and sound design to a couple of theatre pieces for a friend of mine. The intial directive from him was: "make it sound like this > *link to Caretaker/Leyland Kirby". So I thought I'd make a start early on and have some fun before I buckle down with the project proper.

For the inaugural submission I've put together a track with a creeping groove and wobbly hauntology derived from bits of a Dire Straits record, an old 78, a sound library disc of harp samples and a bass intro from a mystery record. I couldn't help but think the end result sounds decidedly Portishead-ish.

Tags: groove, sampling, vinyl, week 21 2018, View by:Tristan Louth-Robins