RTCD22 - Fergus Kelly: Vanishing Point

 

 

 

 

 

Vanishing Point comprises eleven tracks running to 47 minutes. It's a sister album with my previous album Natural History - it uses the same sources, minus the field recordings - a combination of found metals, plastics, glass, wood and processing (using Leafcutter John's Forester 2022 software). 

 

 

The work began by recording materials in a large resonant concrete interior. Metals in the form of saw blades, alarm bells, coiled springs, steel stands, metal conduit, wire mesh and Chinese cymbals were struck, swung and dragged in the space to capture the unique sound character of materials in motion. A variety of other metals were thrown and bounced about the space, and glass bottles were smashed. A small improvised horn with a flexible tube was played whilst whirling the tube. A long length of plastic cable was similarly whirled, as was a bull roarer. Large wooden laths were dropped and dragged in the space. 

 

   

Other recordings were made in large concrete walled, wooden floored interiors. This involved dragging steel frame plastic chairs and trestle tables to generate drones. Timpani mallets were used on floating inflated plastics. Metals were recorded in studio, struck and bowed. All recordings were edited and pitch-shifted to draw out latent harmonic content.

Leafcutter John's Forester multi-FX software was used as a kind of blender to throw random selections of edited recordings into and digitally whisk into new forms and textures. The most successful moments were then edited into loops and textured stretches which are used as the building blocks for the compositions. Strong rhythmic elements emerged from the process which gave some of the music a driving, motive force I really enjoyed. Forester is great fun to play with, but like anything of this nature, the ratio of useful material generated to not so useful can vary considerably. This is where the real job of work occurs: editing and fine tuning.

 

 

I wanted to keep things simple in the compositional process: sections would be multi-tracked together without any further processing or additional elements. It was a deliberate and useful discipline. Elements of the source material remain recognisable in places, emerging from denser textural landscapes, forming a tactile link to their origins and acoustic spaces.