Once each month there’s an “art event” in the club ”Stengade 30” in Copenhagen called “Processen” (like Kafka’s novel) which some of my friends arrange. Artists working in different media are making pieces of art throughout a normal club evening (DJ, lots of crack and so on). The creative “process” of each artist is transmitted on TV-screens on location so every one can see art in the making – though of cause most people have more interesting things to do. When a work is finished the DJ-music stops and the work is presented to the crowd.
About two months ago I were one of these artists along with two painters, two authors and another musician. I collaborated with my cousin, Jon, who’s currently involved in many interesting projects. We have been tracking together since a copy of OctaMed was on an old Amiga Format coverdisk, back in 1991 or something. This night we used renoise (1.5b2, I think), sitting besides one another working on our computers (it didn’t take an argument to rule out his suggestion that we should use Madtracker). He had never tried renoise before and was pretty impressed – lots of spontaneous “Hurrah! – you can really do this… and that…!”. It took him 15 minutes to adapt to this new wonder.
From 22 to 05 we made two songs from scratch (apart from predefined instrument banks). First we worked on one song each not knowing what the other was up to. Then, after three hours we transferred the data to the other who then were to finish what the other’s sick mind had initially produced. We used headphones for obvious reasons. There were additional headphones that people could put on so that they could hear the thang at any stage of the process.
At last we applied some Korg MS-20 and Theremin and singing (it’s Jon’s voice on “finkefar3”), putting it all together in Cubase. He used a tiny microphone holding his hands tight around it to block out the “background” noise. That didn’t eliminate distortion though.
Though a lot of things in the songs could be improved quite dramatically with little effort (removing some synths and adjusting a little volume and so on) I’ve chosen not to do any postproduction. The songs uploaded is what was created and presented that night.
finkefar (meaning “finch farther” - don’t ask me why)
It only works with “save target as…”
Enjoy