Obviously anything from 2020–2022 with a title like “Quarantined” is about life with covid-19 as fact or metaphor. This is not the case. My composition, the “poem” written years ago, has nothing to do with infectious diseases. I would say it’s something of a random, haphazard examination of self-loathing. (The text will be toward the end of the post.)
There’s really not much to the piece. A few samples. A little puttering with synths. Words. Almost no structure. It’s simple and was quickly constructed.
Maybe 2002 or 2003 I was cleaning out an abandoned industrial site and found an interesting bit of hose (at least this is where and when I remember finding it). It looked cool. A layer of rubbery plastic wrapped in crisscrossed threads encased in another rubbery layer, this one transparent. Its sonic qualities were uninspiring. But that never stops me. I brought it home, set up a microphone, and played around with it.…The first sample I use here, a clicking sound, could easily be created hundreds of ways—pencils, twigs, chopsticks, drumsticks, et cetera (listening now, before posting this, I hear it as a metallic scratching, which I find equally perplexing). But how I made such a sound with that dull hose is long forgotten. Maybe it was some other object that was nearby during that session that I momentarily picked up.…The second sample, that loops almost the whole length of the piece, was, I think, made by rubbing the hose on itself. What can mainly be heard of it is a beat (caused by the thread reinforcing?), of sorts, but what I found attractive about it was sort of a rumble of rubber on rubber between those beats.…The two samples didn’t really work together, so the clicking is an intro and outro sound, kind of quoting the main body.
Then I started running through a folder of samples I recorded with a racket toy, sort of a tennis game, called Sonic Smash. Instead of a mesh striking surface it has a plastic membrane that resonates in a very pleasing way (like x-ray film being used for a drumhead, for instance), reminding me of timbales or a high-pitched snare. Yet I didn’t use any of those samples. I chose one that is, maybe, made by scratching or dragging a finger across the membrane—the track is copied, jogged slightly out of time, then the two are panned hard right and left. (It seems to me I have already used this sample, maybe 10–15 years ago, though I can’t recall on which composition.) The other sample from that session used here is a vocalization.
That was probably the end of day one—March 11, 2022—just choosing a few samples, deciding which were to loop and which as one shot, and what effects might work.
A segment of reinforced hose I found in an abandoned factory many years ago. It doesn’t sound like much but it looked interesting. A resonator of some kind would have helped. 
Sonic Smash is a racket sort of toy that sounds cool when you hit the ball, reminding me of timbales or a high-pitched snare. And yet that’s not the sound I used here…maybe just some random vocalization while recording the toy…and maybe some rubbing or finger taps on the membrane, a sound I may have used on another composition. 
A large rubber band, about a foot long when relaxed and at least a quarter inch wide. Without a resonator it has little recordable sonic signature, not much more than a dull rumble.
Then I wanted a bass of some sort, as I reopened the file about a week later. An obvious place to look is in a collection of samples I made many years ago with a large rubber band. There’s really nothing musical about it, not even staying on beat. In fact, without a resonator of some kind it was barely audible until I applied compression to the file, toning down the plunks and bringing up the rubbery rumble of it. Perfect.
I wanted something a little musical but not really tuneful or even properly harmonic. I did a sequence of two-note chords (technically not chords, are they) that had not-so-pleasing intervals—using Arturia’s Wurli V2. Normally a beautiful sounding instrument. Then I copied the MIDI clips to another track, displaced them slightly, and changed the instrument—Arturia’s Mellotron V.
I like drones and other annoying sounds, so I needed something of the sort before it all became too pretty.…I found a nice patch in Arturia’s OB-XA V. This is kind of a crawling three note interval, where my finger or fingers just kind of roll around on a couple of nearby notes. To muddy and whine it a little more I added a reverb with a really long tail, something like a half minute (this is why there’s a sample way at the end of the piece, muted, to prevent the reverb tail from being clipped off when rendering to wav file).…To keep the synth parts from glitching on playback, because of all the effects used as well as synths, I’ve been rendering the MIDI tracks to stereo audio stems. Despite computers becoming faster and more powerful the software keeps demanding more processing power. It’s become good practice to do it this way.
Up to this point there was no structure. Until I knew how long the vocal part was there couldn’t really be one.
There were several dream narratives that I thought of using. I found something else I liked. Written 5–10 years ago? As mentioned, sort of an examination of self-loathing. It’s kind of my security blanket, the loathing. The rest is a lot like obsessively picking at a scab (expecting it to bleed again?).…It took me three or four tries at reading it, maybe 15 minutes—I’ve been trying to make the process as easy and as unobtrusive as possible. Actually, rumor was that dinner was almost ready. The voice recording was done just before dinner was served.…More time was required after dinner to clean up the recording in RX8.
I can never remember how you opened my eyes. A sound? A movement? A slight change in the temperature or electrical charge of the day? Nothing has been the same.
There is some blight, both without and within, like a malignant fungus turning its host into dark slime, that makes me repellent—yet nothing so obvious. It’s more like a subliminal warning, like the smallest hint of decay that eludes you until, one day, quite by accident while looking for an onion, you open the cupboard to discover that the potatoes have turned to mush.
Quarantined until final disposal, I can only watch. Even before I know of you, perhaps even before birth, some obscure law of nature or act of legislation has made my isolation a necessity. Is it any wonder that my mind enters the void when I think of you? I try to imagine what might happen should you find me and, filled with delight, come to me overflowing with love, your arms opening to engulf me…Nothing. All I see is the great expanse of impossibility.
Now I could finish the piece. Move a few things around. Copy and paste a few loops for sonic recurrence and punctuation. Done. March 22, 2022. Or earlier? (Almost completed 3/17/22. Tweaked, rendered, and posted 3/23/22.) I think I let it sit a few days before I gave it another listen, rendered the files, added metadata, and posted to SoundCloud.
Prattle and Din 