After establishing my initial goals and inspirations for my project, I started developing the beginning of my piece. Firstly, I focused on manipulating my samples from the last post so they could be used as a range of instruments and layers in the track.
Listening back through all my recordings, I decided the ‘drone’ recordings of the bus could be very effective when used as low bass layers, and another could be used as a high frequency ambient layer. By running each sample through resonators, I gave them a melodic component, and used these as the starting point to create my sound study.
Whilst doing this, I was conscious to keep in mind the sense of ‘place’ that needed to be captured through the music, which meant only choosing sounds that reflected my personal experience of moving to London. When given a melodic tone through the resonators, the ‘bland’ and ‘depressing’ drones of engine noise became ethereal. I found that this reflected my experience of the city that I held when first moving here; they picture the idealistic, dreamy version of London I experienced when I first moved here, as I was mostly focused on the past- memories from the city- and the future- possibilities to come.
At this point, the track was mostly ambience, and although I found this successful, I decided to develop the track and give it a dance style groove inspired by my past productions, as well as many of the DJs and performances I had experienced since moving. This included vocal chops, which I took from field recordings of the Underground’s speaker announcements. I combined the edited vocal with a more ambient vocal recording from the bus to create movement in the intro of the track. Some final additions in this stage of the process were a synth arp, jungle break, and bassline. Although at this point I was happy with the basics of the track, its arrangement was basic due to its length, and it lacked a recording of a voice reading a text.
My next focuses from this point were on developing the track’s arrangement by introducing more instrumental variation and field recordings, and researching for texts that resonated with my experience of London that could be recorded and added to the track.