I have always been drawn to making noise and industrial sounds especially since moving into a city, the industrial sounds in this film reflect the intensity of urban soundscapes as well as time I’ve spent working with industrial equipment as a food production operative. I dislike the way harsh noise is used for long durations of time by artists such as Merzbow and Richard Ramirez. I think noise should be used hand in hand with melody, noise as a way to build stress and melody as the relief. For this reason I only used noise in two sections of the film, as a tool to reflect the character’s mental state, pure chaos in his brain.
I began the noise section by re-amping a recording made of some heavy breathing and plastic crinkling with some reverb, I then used digital processing on the re-amped track and removed the original track. I started by adding layers of different distortions, I used a combination of fuzz and bitcrusher effects. The bitcrusher helped to mask what the original sound was because the resolution was lowered, I added the fuzz after this in the effects chain to distort it further from the original sound artefact, I changed the parameters on these effects and adjusted them until I liked the sound. After this I added a flanger, this created a nauseating effect. It was still obvious what the original sound was, being slightly masked by the distortion and the whirr of the flanger. I then sent the signal from the channel the recording was into two long reverbs, one of them being reversed and added two delays as well, the result completely hid what the recording was. I liked it because it sounded like it could’ve been numerous things, machinery being moved, a geiger counter or monstrous screams.
Throbbing Gristle’s interdisciplinary work soundtracking films as a band is inspirational to me, in the future I would like to create an industrial soundtrack to a film, I did it in this film because it made sense for the project and because it excited me, I could use this as part of a portfolio in order to secure work on jobs in the future.