Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends (John 15.13).
WFM: DAY 10. 8.30 am: A communion. 9.00 am: The remainder of yesterday’s Post-it list provided the agenda for today. I fired up the engines. First: (4) Jones’s texts for fractured reality accounts. Having completed (a term that I’ll use in a provisional sense until the whole Noisome Spirits suite is finalised) the composition entitled ‘Such a Noise as if All About Was Going to Pieces’, I gathered together other texts from Jones’ books that described cognate accounts of frighteningly loud noises. Originally, I’d planned to make field recordings of sounds in the countryside around Aberystwyth, and at the sites in South Wales associated with witnesses’ experiences. In the light of the present restrictions, I’ll need to draw the circle of my activities around my garden and its immediate environs. As professional field recorders have discovered, in the absence of traffic and constant footfall, we’re hearing a world that’s acoustically unpolluted. Bird song is now audible in places where, formerly, it was either absent or occluded by our own noises. The sonic landscape is more like that which Jones and his generation had heard.
11.45 am: Job done! Back to the list and (5) Presonus mixer > QSC PA system. The QSC units are my own means of creating a frighteningly loud noise. At 1000 watts and full throttle, they could probably take out the walls of my studio. Out came the instruction manuals. There was a 50MHz ‘hum’ in the system which, I suspected, was caused by a mismatch between balanced and unbalanced cables. (A future purchase was in order.) The hypothesis was proven to be true when I inserted a pair of overlong balanced TRS to XLR cables between the mixer and subwoofer.
After lunch: (6) Ableton Live installation > Push 2 > RME Babyface. For the latter device, several on-line tutorials were required.
And, finally: (6) REM Babyface Pro > laptop 2. On Monday, I want to make something small and simple using the equipment that I’ve set up over the past few days. There’s no better way of learning to use gear than to use it.
5.00 pm: ‘Toggle “off”!’