Recorded as the title suggests on the voice memo iPhone function, this project was performed as a live improvisation at my house on March 23, 2015. The "Voice Memo" project will continue as an indefinite series of one-off performances to highlight the importance of improvisation as not only part of the creative process but also an end in itself.
I believe that with digital recording and software production methods, more music is becoming meticulously calculated, departing from raw emotional happenstance. My "Voice Memo" project deliberately defies that approach to recording and production that is so currently prevalent by doing almost the exact opposite: improvising a full performance, using a hardware mixer to adjust amplitude of various parts live, and simply hitting "RECORD" on the iPhone's voice memo app and "STOP" when it felt done. [NOTE: the mixer was for live adjustment. There was no actual direct input involved in the recording. The iPhone was perched next to my Roland Cube Street amp out of which all equipment was routed.] With "Voice Memo", I would like to emphasize the importance of intuition and trust of one's own instincts in the act of creation.
"Oversexed" is a three-movement improvisation meant to be listened to in its entirety in one sitting. Someone oversexed usually has life-disturbing problems with intimacy. To me the piece progresses from the speaker's mournful fantasy of love--demonstrating feelings of intense attachment to the lover--to the "trigger" moment wherein chaos is introduced, hypnotizing the speaker away from verbal communication into the final movement, itself representing a symbolic or literal intoxication in which the speaker finds some kind of palliation.
For the sake of convenience re bandcamp's formatting, these three movements have been split into separate tracks, but please know that there will be no individual track download available. Again this is meant to be experienced in full.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
It's become very difficult at this stage to reverse engineer some of my own sounds, since my process heavily involves long improvisational sessions that result in me capturing loops with my sampler from whatever sounds I end up creating. What makes things more difficult is the ephemerality of recordings like this; this performance as is would be impossible to recreate--I've become more interested in never playing the same version of a song twice, allowing a song to be a living thing that changes with each visit.
Still, generally speaking, the sounds you hear in this performance originated in my sampler, from loops that I created through improvisation, totally from scratch, some from guitars, some from my keyboard, some from small sounds uploaded from my iPhone--it's become impossible for me to trace at this point. I mix things together until I start to hear, shall we say, "invisible" music that I then channel through my vocals. Since my sampler is routed through a variety of effects pedals, the sound has potential to evolve very quickly and become modulated live to a point of transformation far removed from its origin. This is really the best way I can describe the process of this performance.
credits
released March 24, 2015
Alaric López: all vocals, guitar, sampler, and pedals.
Cover art and logo design by Alaric López.
All songs (music and lyrics) written, performed, and recorded by Alaric López in his bedroom in El Paso, TX on March 23, 2015.
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