In getting started, the first thing I had to decide was how I wanted the drums to sound. I am certainly a fan of the slicker, newer production when it comes to drums: composite kick drums, snappy snares, crystal clear hats, crazy fun loud toms, and everything else. But most of my favourite albums don't have this. In fact, the slick "perfect" production is exactly why a lot of newer releases from some of my favourite bands just fail to stack up. Albums like Skinny Puppy's "Last Rights"or Nine Inch Nails' "The Downward Spiral" introduced colours and noise and soundscapes to me in a way I never knew possible in music, and in a way that I've rarely heard since. And obviously both of these bands made extensive use of sampling, in an era where storage space was ridiculously small and they had to do things like pitch stretch a sample up 200% and then play it back at half speed for storage space.
In relation to my music, it reminds me a bit of the tracker scene. I wrote some pretty crazy music, of which I could have nearly fit an entire album onto a 3.5" floppy disk. But holy moly was some of it dark and noisy. I suppose that's what happens when you are pitch shifting literally everything. As I moved onto better software, my music sounded a lot better, but in some ways things were sometimes a little too clean-feeling. So when it came to deciding upon techniques to use for ODD-SKY, the answer was obvious: fucking sample everything.
So that's what I spent today doing. Chopping and mangling, distorting and reversing, splicing and effecting some of my favourite parts of some of my favourite records. Some of it I hope to be blatant about, some of it I will try to be sneaky about. It's going to be a lot of work. But it's also really fun. And I feel I can use what I've learned about modern techniques to take a bunch of old stuff and make it sound new.
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