The starting point for the piece was recording a doomscrolling session on my laptop (I keep instagram off of my phone when I need to focus). The process was more interesting than I expected.
I was aware of how exposing it felt. Social media feeds are curated to the individual user, which means recording mine and knowing it would be shared as part of this project made me aware of what was in it. I tried not to let that influence how I scrolled, though I did skip past a few posts that were sonically just trending songs with nothing else going on, they didn’t feel like useful material, and my recording limit on my sampler extension was 5 minutes, so I didn’t want to waste time.
Some of what came up felt ironically relevant to the project, such as some noise/glitch art. There was a guy doing a recurring bit about top 20 things to do in different circumstances that kept appearing, which was funny in context to me. There was also content about stimulant addiction, which isn’t something I’ve experienced personally but have seen people close to me go through. I chose to include that in the piece.
The recording process made me much more attentive of the sound. Normally active listening isn’t a core part of a scrolling session. Isolating it and listening back made the sonic environment feel genuinely strange and hostile in a way that’s hard to notice when you’re scrolling normally. I also noticed how much experimental and electronic music content is in my feed, which was good material for the piece.
Listening back shaped the compositional decisions. The hostility and chaos was already there in the raw material. I used processing to emphasise that.
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