This piece was inspired in part by Phill Niblock's drone music, and Alvin Lucier's work. It follows a simple system the relies on bouncing tape at half speed, and uses the "nail violin" described in "Of Metal and Wood".
It starts with 15 seconds of long tones performed on the nail violin, followed by 15 seconds of short percussive sounds performed on it.
I bounced these 30 seconds from the Scully 4 track to 1/4" stereo mix, then played that back at half speed, recording it back to the Scully. As you know, playing it at half speed doubles the duration and drops the frequencies an octave, so now I had 30 seconds of long tones and 30 second of short sounds on the Scully, dropped an octave. I overdubbed 30 seconds of additional long tones and 30 seconds of additional percussive material on top of that, generating a real-time layer of audio over the half-speed layer. I bounced down to stereo again, then re-recording back to Scully at half speed again, repeating this process that doubled the duration, dropped an octave, and added a new layer every time. I appended these on to each other, repeating the process until the final iteration which generated 4 minutes of densely layered long tones and 4 minutes of percussive texture, for a total of 15:30. Note the final iteration has the first 15 seconds transposed down 4 octaves and stretched to 4 minutes.
Silesian Winter didn't survive well on the 1/4" master tape, so this version was transferred from virgin vinyl, just like Buoyant Saint Vesa Block Party was, with pops and clicks removed by Ben Shapiro using RX7.
A killer live experimental rock LP from Chris Forsyth with the rhythm section of Sunwatchers, full of blistering energy. Bandcamp New & Notable Mar 30, 2021