After we had built a vocabulary to describe what we wanted to do, we decided to make some sounds that reflected that vocabulary and the scientific ideas that we had been thinking about. We also decided to do this independently of each other because it would speed up the creative process and give us double the material to work with, along with reducing some of the technical burdens that we had already been dealing with. And to make things a little more challenging, we set some restrictions on the kind of sounds we could make, not only to stay within the scope of the project, but also to push our own boundaries a little further and make the new project even more distinct from our individual work.
Restriction #1) Every sound that we made had to start from an organic “real” sound. No sine or saw waves, no synth arpeggios, or classic analog gear, it all had to start with something “real”, some sort of naturally occurring sound or an actual instrument. We agreed that everything could be processed or warped or changed by cutting it up into a million little pieces, but we had to start from somewhere “real”, and if there was any question about the processed/warped/changed/cut up result, we had to be able to provide the original “real” sound for inspection to confirm that, yes, the processed/warped/changed/cut up result was in keeping with our rules.
Restriction #2) No beats or percussion. We wanted big “Expansive”, “Xenomorphic”, “Kubrickian”, and “Glacial” sounds that could fill up the soundscape, and if we were doing things right there wouldn’t be any room left for beats and percussion, but we both agreed that pulses were alright, and even welcomed. It should be noted that we’ve relaxed a little bit on this restriction on percussion in recent history, and we’ve been known to lay down some phat beats from time to time, but ten years ago we were adamant about the “No beats” rule.
Restriction #3) Everything had to be new. We wanted to make sure that everything we were doing was in keeping with the ideas we’d been talking about, so we both committed to the idea that we wouldn’t recycle any old sounds that either of us had made for our individual projects. Everything had to be new and fresh and inspired by the vocabulary we’d created or the theories we’d been discussing.
With those rules in mind, we each took a couple of weeks and started to make sounds. Deane recorded a cat hissing and Rik sampled creaky floorboards, and we both had a lot of fun coming up with new stuff that met all of the criteria that we had set for ourselves. And when we got together again to listen back to everything, we were both really surprised by how well it all meshed together. Listening back to what we had done we found a consistency in all of it that clearly demonstrated that we were both on the same track about what we were doing and how we wanted our new project to sound.
So we started grouping all of our sounds together with the idea of creating big expansive spaces to explore, glacial soundscapes, all those things we’d been talking about. And when we were satisfied that our groupings all worked together, we started loading the sounds into Live where we manipulated them even further, bending and reshaping and tweaking them even more, mixing them all up and adjusting sound levels and warping them to the point where you’d never be able to tell what they had been originally. And after another few weeks, we had some songs that fully represented what we wanted our new project to sound like.
We’d like to point out that because we did all of this ten years ago, we burned all of our sounds onto compact disc because that’s what you did in 2008 when you were trading sounds. It was really quite natural to do so, but it seems rather quaint now, doesn’t it? You may be interested to know that those are some of the actual discs we used for our first album in the picture at the top of this post, we still have them all and they’re carefully stored and protected in a hermetically sealed vault for later inclusion in our planned museum retrospective “50 years of Kalte” in 2048.
Join us tomorrow and we’ll tell you a little bit about recording life…
For the entire month of October while we celebrate #10yearsofKalte, if you buy a copy of “The Lanthanide Series” through Bandcamp you can send us your email at info@kaltemusic.com and we’ll send you a free copy of our latest release, “Covalencies“!