Listen to the track: “Home Bar Set Break“
I was thinking of Williams S. Burroughs and his “cut up technique” as related to writing when constructing this short piece. Burroughs was a sort of cult of figure that was integral to the beat movement along with Kerouac and Ginsberg.
William S. Burroughs
He wrote the famous autobiographically tinged work “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs obtained the cut up technique from his friend Brion Gysin, a painter and performance artist. The cut up technique involves writing a complete work then cutting it up and rearranging it to introduce spontaneity. The result was usually a surreal experience, like a Dali painting.
Burroughs stated: “The cut-up is actually closer to the facts of perception than representational painting. Take a walk down a city street and put down what you have just seen on canvas. You have seen a person cut in two by a car, bits and pieces of street signs and advertisements, reflections from shop windows – a montage of fragments. Writing is still confined to the representational straitjacket of the novel … consciousness is a cut up. Every time you walk down the street or look out of the window, your stream of consciousness is cut by random factors.”
He was a complicated person, few people could say they really knew him. I recently viewed a documentary entitled, “William Burroughs: A Man Within, which I found sad and disturbing as Burroughs seemed to be very isolated and depressed for much of his life.
OK.Back to the track. “Home Bar Set Break” was not created in a normal way as I literally “cut up” chunks of audio and pasted them throughout the song.This track was recorded out of a multitude of samples I had lying around from previously recorded compositions. I took random chunks of audio and cut them out of other my other songs. The drum beats were sampled so that, in most cases, they instantly repeat in stereo. Underneath the barrage of percussive intensity, I played a warm pad synth that I had sampled and tweaked within another song.
Swarming around the drum beats, and synth are various samples that I recorded. For instance, at the end of the song you hear a “popping sound” in the left speaker which is a wine bottle I sampled as I pulled the cork out.
At the same time, in the right speaker, you hear a higher frequency sample which is actually me shaking ice in a glass, then speeding up that sound.
This is a very short tune and got the title because it was recorded after I left HOME went to a BAR and came back home after the SET BREAK of a local band I frequented on Wednesday nights at the Brewery in State College, PA. Hope you enjoy this little experiment.
Listen to the track: “Home Bar Set Break“
