Noise & Shattered Realities
Image by Daniel Reche from Pixabay
I currently have a head like a meatgrinder combined with a washing machine on the spin cycle.
It’s quite hard to deal with. The not switching off, the constant circular destructive thoughts with no end. Sleep is not great and waking hours are full of noise. Concentration is difficult. Positivity impossible or at least seemingly so.
However, I forced myself (gently) to sit down at the workstation to try and compose something. Something different to the recent pieces I have been putting together for my Sci-fi based ambient series. I wanted to put down something that reflected my current state. That was a mistake only causing more frustration as idea after idea fizzled out leaving me just staring at the keyboards. I gave up, resigned to returning to the maelstrom of negative thoughts.
But then I returned to the workstation and carried on with the currently familiar – the Sci-fi ambient series of pieces. This proved to be the right decision, and I disappeared into that world for a good three hours, finally producing a track that I wasn’t a hundred percent happy with, but that was more or less there.
I had set myself a challenge. I wanted to use a new sample instrument release from Venus Theory and a couple of sampled instruments from The Crow Hill Company. I also wanted to limit the amount of time and the complexity of the number of instruments used to create that track. It worked out and the next morning I spent maybe another hour or so (after actually releasing it on Soundcloud and the website) adding a couple of ambient layers of sound and using a pitch and frequency shifter on one of the instruments (the Lyre) which was sitting a little out of the mix.
Time to upload again with the ‘new and improved’ version. Also, time to let it go and move on!
This organically led onto writing about the creation of the track and about the creators of the instruments. More time spent on something that for me had value and some modicum of self-worth attached to it. Article published my mind had now been focused for some hours.
The writeup can be found here New Frontiers - A Challenge
One thing leads to another they say, and this was true. Later the same day I returned to the Shattered Realities project. With only one episode created it was sitting there somewhat isolated and looking like a failed series than something in the works. I started writing.
My original intention for the series was total rewrites of H.P. Lovecraft short stories and the first The Prop based on the short story The Book had been easy to decide on and to write. A subsequent story had been proving harder to find. Casual scans of stories brough nothing to mind that I wanted to write. However, on this particular day I realised that the series did not have to be based only around rewrites of Lovecraft short stories. Shattered realities could be about Cosmic Horror, but it could also be about feeling out of place, about the discrepancy between perception and reality and about well, just life.
And this is exactly what I did, I sat down and wrote an original two and a half thousand-word short story about disconnection and the reality of living a life against what is seen. It is a dark piece, maybe it came from a dark place, but it wasn’t depressing to write. It was rather the opposite.
Of course, once written and as I had not originally intended to write this kind of piece for Shattered Realities there came of the moment of uncertainty. Was the story good, did it fit in with the theme, would anyone like it. I sat on this for a little while before thinking ‘sod it’ and sending it to a friend to read and to see if they would like to record the piece for the series. The time between that contact and the reply is always an awkward one as the creator. You want honest feedback, but at the same time you don’t want to realise that maybe it isn’t good enough. It’s a conundrum.
The answer when it came after only a short time was positives on many fronts, and further more that it felt very Lovecraftian with its subject matter. There were some positive suggestions, and I found myself in the edit and at eleven pm sending out what I think is the finished story to be recorded.
What had started out as somewhat of a black hole of a day with presumably only my maelstrom of thoughts to deal with turned into an extremely productive and validating experience, and one that I am extremely thankful for.
Of course, I have now also written this…
Until next time...
If you are interest in talking about sound design and music requirement for a project, please contact me at blackcreekpodcasts@gmail.com
Free to use music and soundbeds can be found on my SoundCloud Artistspage.
