Short Hallways & Back To Basic Principles

 

These two albums kind of like a call and response set, with Short Hallways (an anagram for Harsh Toys Wall) being a reaction to HNW as a genre and Back To Basic Principles as a response to that reaction. Short Hallways is the two first "HNW the hard way" recordings I made, with "Silver Hallway" being made up of 12 hours of recordings of a slinky attached to an oscillating fan stretched out across a room and "Red Hallway" being 8 hours of circuit bent Speak & Spell. Both recordings were made on a Tascam 414 four track tape recorder and layered using mixdowns, so three channels would be mixed down to the fourth channel, over and over until it was as dense as I wanted it. Instead of rewinding to the beginning of the tape each time the tape was flipped over so that the next channel would be recorded in reverse. The Speak & Spell was modified with a 'hold' switch (as noted on the CasperElectronics Speak & Spell circuit bending page) that would freeze the sound so it would continually play a drone, it would do this for about five minutes before crashing so I had to be more vigilant than during the slinky recording, which is why there's only 8 hours instead of 12.

Back To Basic Principles is 19 short songs, each based on an improvised recording with one instrument or one instrument processed through a vocoder. These improvisations were recorded using CoolEdit96 onto an old laptop running Windows 98 and then edited into about 30 short loops for each instrument. The loops were imported into BackToBasics 9, which assigns sounds to each key on a keyboard, and then improvisations were made using the loops, which were recorded onto a Fostex MR-8 through a SoundCraft mixer using the built in delay effects. Besides being a response to the pseudo-HNW of Short Hallways this album was born from a desire to get back to the type of sound that I had when I was recording as D-503 in the early 2000s, and also an attempt at times to capture the feeling of the self titled album by Basic Principles. So it's an attempt to return to back to basic principles, as influenced by Basic Principles, using BackToBasics!