Author: Alfie Wall
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The Recording Session
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…
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Future Goals
For the research project proposal I’ve chosen Route B, the Audio Paper, mainly because I personally find it a more interesting format to work in than a written dissertation, as well as to consume. Making the critical argument through sound rather than just writing about it feels reflective of what the practice actually is. That…
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Influences for composition
Merzbow is probably the most direct influence on what I’m planning to make. I’ve been familiar with his work for a while, Pulse Demon was the entry point for me as is probably the case for most people. Something that interests me about Merzbow’s work is how it resists being consumed passively, It’s not exactly…
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Exploring Texts
I’ve been reading bits from Capitalist realism and The burnout society. Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism argues that attention difficulties like ADHD are systemic products of a culture built around constant stimulation. He describes the “privatisation of stress” as the way collective problems get returned to the individual to manage alone, usually through medication or self-management.…
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‘Scrolling’ noise piece
Today I made the piece for the submission: a harsh noise composition built entirely from sampled audio of Instagram Reels. I aimed to convey the overwhelming and draining experience of doomscrolling to make the listener feel something of what it actually does to you. I started by using a chrome extension to sample audio directly…
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Collaborative B2B set
In February I started working on a back to back DJ mix with my friend Max. We began by making a mindmap of the kind of textural palette we wanted, listing out keywords such as ‘glassy’ and ‘glitch’. We then created a timeline together outlining the flow of the set, starting with more ambient, ‘alien’…
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Primary research in Discord
I wanted to collect primary research from the community around ping music. I posted in the Mumdance Discord, explaining that I was researching ping music as a compositional framework, and asked two questions: what do people think ping music is, and what role did they play in its development? Posting felt intimidating because the server…
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Boing Music Reflections
Working on a track attempting to follow my ‘boing’ framework taught me that the sound I was aiming for emerges more from experimentation than from a fixed plan. When I manipulated parameters in the synthesiser operator without trying to control the outcome, I started finding timbres that matched the “boing” aesthetic. This was the main…
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Boing Music
und, called ‘boing music’ The “boing music” framework is elastic sounds in a spacious void, focusig on timbre, exponential rhythms, pitch modulation, and single instances of synthesis playing multiple compositional roles (e.g. drums being composed of one instance of operator, heavily modulated and processed) I’m inspired by Mumdance and Logos’ Ping and Weightless frameworks and…
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Key insights from the articles
Audio Paper Plan Learn about Audio Papers: https://seismograf.org/fokus/fluid-sounds/audio_paper_manifesto https://intransition.openlibhums.org/issue/934/info Structure/script plan Introduction I am going to explore xyz Pose question Why is discord a necessary space for post genre musicians? What is post genre? A theme that I’ve noticed when digging into the origins of music I’m a fan of (Ping Music, Iglooghost, pc music)…