Covered///Winter - Life

 

    A couple years ago, when the Harsh Noise Wall memes were at their peak, Chris Marteny and myself played our first show as Covered///Winter. The show was four or five tape recorders with multiple layers of Boyz II Men songs recorded on to each cassette which we counted down and played simultaneously (Harsh Boyz Wall, get it?). We let them play and stood in Brandon (Black Ring Rituals, Monowolf, Support Unit, etc etc) Wald's basement in HNW stoic poses, occasionally drinking from Olde English 40s and at a predetermined time pouring a little out onto the floor. Fun was had by all, I'm sure. 

    I've had a publicly low opinion of HNW for a while, although I do listen to it every now and again. It seems kind of low effort, although I am just as tempted as anyone who makes noise to just step away and let the sound unfold itself into seeming infinity. As a protest (or something) I wanted to try to make wall noise the hard way, layer by layer or even completely by hand, for instance by turning an amplified milling wheel for hours at a time, but most of these never got beyond the idea stage. Our next performance, which I had to do solo, was another variation on harsh boys wall but using the Geto Boys, taking all the original samples used in their album "We Can't Be Stopped" and playing them all at once, layered over each other, with the Bastl Kastle mini-modular synth accompanying.

    Eventually, prompted by Mr Wald, I started to think of what a Covered///Winter album would sound like (or could at least sound like) and I conceived of a noisier version of the Delia Derbyshire/Barry Bermange "Inventions for Radio" recordings, where interviews conducted by Bermange where cut up and processed by Derbyshire. My goal was to have a bunch of recordings of people talking about life, which begin sparsely but then overlap and lose individuality as they multiply, kind of like real life, right? I put out a call for recordings just before the beginning of the 2020 pandemic and then renewed it after most everyone began quarantining, ending up with a little over thirty submissions, which was not as many as I hoped to receive, but life finds a way I guess. Chris Martney composed the main synth line and I extrapolated from that and arranged everything. The full album was release by Black Ring Rituals on August 21st, 2020.