Emptying the Haunted Air

Jourmedian – a delightful coalescence of the words journalist and comedian – refers to the twats who present the new ABC TV show, Hungry Beast, while also indicating its structure and tone. It combines didactic (albeit occasionally informative) journalism, lame sketch humour, ill-conceived blog-style rants and general wankery into half an hour of incomprehensible television. This evening, viewers were treated to a sketch about discrimination against vampires in Sydney. At least, that’s what I thought it was – I stopped watching at this stage. Perhaps it was hilarious.

Harmony in Ultraviolet - Tim Hecker

Instead, I went and played around a little in AudioMulch. Then I stopped, and watched John Safran’s splendid Race Relations. Looking at the site for the first time, I see that’s it’s been designed in HTML to resemble Facebook. Not quite sure why they did that, besides it being a bit of a laugh. Like everything done in Safran’s inimitable style, it dances around serious issues, then retreats from making a coherent argument, preferring to succumb to its own twisted, internal logic. It’s wickedly funny stuff – there’s nobody else quite like him.

After this, I went back to Mulch – again. I was thinking about what I wrote yesterday. Of the middle ground between drones and breakbeats for which I’m searching. There are, of course, many who already compose in this sort of territory. Autechre have always enthralled me with their music, but sometimes I have felt their music is always beats with drones, or beats then drones, or drones then beats, rather than a weaving together of the two. Quaristice was their strongest album in this regard. However, what it lacked for me was the drama of a track like Eutow, from Tri Repetae – drama that Eutow loses after three minutes of a propulsive industrial beat. (It’s probably the best example of a song that I only listen to for a minute before stopping.) Tim Hecker is a master at lacing music with such drama. Sometimes I get frustrated – angry even – that he hasn’t ever composed for film.

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So, all that being said, here’s what I came up with. It’s based around the Amen break. I wanted to imply rhythm, but have it threaten to fall apart at any given moment. If nothing else, it’s reminded me of the need to get into a more traditional, timeline-based DAW, so I can edit more easily after I have recorded the Mulch performance.