NQN, details part 2

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Most of the tracks on ne quid nimis were recorded for various compilations, or just for the heck of it. In January of 1996 I recorded three entries specifically intended to finish up and round out this album.

By ’96 I had scraped together enough money for a couple of additions to my instrumentation; an Alesis SR-16 drum machine and a Trigon Incantor (there’s a photo of one (not mine) at the top of this page) built by Qubais Reed Ghazala.

I had bought the drum machine for a live band I was playing with. It was pretty important to the band, since we didn’t have a drummer, and no one in our small town was available or willing to play with us.

One day I switched the machine on and something short circuited, the LED display became all garbled and unreadable, and although the pads still played drum noises, they were not the drum noises that came with the machine! They were new and wonderful!

I recorded two tracks with the new sounds, “Breathes in Mists” and “the Poisoned Lambs 2”.

I remember being upset that I couldn’t capture the beauty of some of the little crackling, hissing, wheezing noises of the malfunctioning SR-16 on tape, due to the poor recording quality of my 4-track which obscured these sounds with tape hiss.

The other guy in the band I was playing in, (whom I was still paying back for lending me the money to buy the drum machine in the first place,) wanted the equipment fixed so that we could continue to practice with it. With deep reluctance I sent the machine back to the manufacturer and got back a drum machine in good working order with normal sounds. I really regret ever having had the thing repaired.

The first song on ne quid nimis, “Breathes in Mists” has a kind of rhythm based on those ‘wrong’ sounds from the SR-16, and a little drone-guitar. The chiming sounds are from a music-box from which I’d removed the spring-motor. I spun the keyed cylinder with my finger fast enough that you couldn’t tell what song was on the music-box (I don’t remember what song it was). The other sound, which comes in toward the end, is the Trigon Incantor mentioned above.


Comments

  1. Listening to it now. Quite a terrific collection of sound art. It’s definitely a
    keeper.

    Posted by CP McDill | February 17, 2009 10:18 pm
  2. Thank you!

    Posted by C. Reider | February 18, 2009 5:36 pm
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