OccupySound
Soundtrack for a New Global Mythology
New Myth #58
Vision | The Score | Listen to the Sountrack | Production Notes | Bios


Vision

"Hi Geoff - I will document the stages of the project fully in order to evaluate and share it with my network
This work is an initiation for you and me as creatives
I only have an open-ended score and invite your interpretation
A written story - or images in a video - may or may not be desired (TBD)
Building and experiencing sound as symbolic information (or alchemy or archetypes or new myths) is the central focus" - Willi

The Score



Listen to the Sountrack


Production Notes from Composer Geoff Maddock:


For the 1st of the four subtracks of Occupy Sound I started by finding sounds of war, children and fighting and recording street noises from my window. I edited these sounds and arranged them in a rough collage. The idea was for the found and recorded sounds to provide the punctuation within the music. I used low throbbing notes to give a propulsive and dark bass. I used similar sounds combined with white noise to make helicopters, gunshots, churning static and drum beats. The music was starting to form but there was a disconnect between it and the hard noises of conflict. Until the sound could be wound up in intensity and right notes chosen, it tended to soften the sounds of conflict. I learnt here that the combining of music and found sounds is a careful balance, something that was important once again in the 3rd of the subtracks.

For part 2 I started by recording some percussion, tambourine, maracas, pots and pans, a small set of toms, claps, clicks and other shakers. I ended up eliminating all sounds from this first layering except the toms and a pot. They alone had what I felt was the right tone. I used the toms sounds as a guide for vocals. I wanted to build up a mantra like sound of voices, to reach a meditation through repetition, like prayer. I added the sound of more voice in the background and tried to give it a choir like feel, or the feeling of endless notes reverberating through some sacred space. But the music was to repetitive; it needed some thread of harmonic development to give it tension. I added some plucks and an internal melody and used an old shaky sound from a keyboard to provide a hint of bass. The final result seemed somewhere between a small community jamming on a hymn to a more formal almost eastern prayer session. I felt that this was appropriate as the music needed to be a new religious feeling, hand hewn, and not by acolytes of some current and established religion, but of a tradition born of an awakening to something more of the earth.

Part 3 was mysterious to me as to what it was expressing initially, so I just had to start and find it through the music. I began by collecting sounds again, and placing them around each other. This provided me with no form and it seemed very arbitrary, I was none the wiser. I turned to sounds and started on keyboards, building up a threading tune in ¾ time. I added to that with other melodies doing rapid motion on the chords between notes, spacing the same melody at intervals and in different pitches, something akin to a fugal arrangement, melodies at counterpoint. This did have a restless busy energy but became too full of content; it said too much and was closing down the feeling. I began to use a sequencer to trigger other notes of the scale of the ones I had chosen, and to give the rhythm a spontaneous explosive search instead of the very deliberate almost baroque sounding development I had built up. It started to work and be like a new universe of different pathways. I initially had many different tones, but restricting it to just one gave it a more cohesive feeling. I used the rises and falls in this new music to give me a sense of where the found sounds might work, and I cut them into sections and experimented. I feel the final result has the sense that the earthly noises are seen through the refraction of the glass globe like notes that fall around them. This seemed right to go with the search for meaning in this section

Working with the guiding words of part 4 also had me mystified. I started by constructing industrial noises using keyboards, rapid sequences and mutating white noise. I made the sound of warning alarms and the hum of trucks and machinery, fading into a train like disappearance. Into nature. I experimented with ocean and pastoral sound, wind and gentle rain, but in the end it was the sound of water in a forest, which seemed to express the most peace. The final feeling was to be something like jazz, and this was very difficult and seemed incongruent with the previous sounds. I made up a few different pieces and they all were much the same in feeling out of place. I edited one back to a barer texture. It was better, but I was still finding it all a bit comic. Then as I listened over and laughed at what seemed crazy to me I realized it was right. I was smiling and laughing at it each time wasn’t I? Maybe that was exactly the point.

Bios



Willi Paul

Willi is active in the sustainability, permaculture, transition, sacred Nature, new alchemy and mythology space since the launch of PlanetShifter.com Magazine on EarthDay 2009, Willi’s network now includes four web sites, a LinkedIn group, 3 tweeter accounts, a G+ site, multiple blog sites, and multiple list serves. In 1996 Mr. Paul was instrumental in the design of the emerging online community space in his Master’s Thesis: “The Electronic Charrette..” He was active in many small town design visits with the Minnesota Design Team. Mr. Paul has released 16 eBooks, 2197 + posts on PlanetShifter.com Magazine, and over 380 interviews with global leaders. He has created 56 New Myths to date and has been interviewed over 30 times in blogs and journals. Willi earned his permaculture design certification in August 2011 at the Urban Permaculture Institute, SF. Please see his cutting-edge article at the Joseph Campbell Foundation and his pioneering videos on YouTube. His current focus is Myth Lab - a project that Willi presented at his third Northwest Permaculture Convergence in Portland, OR. Willi’s consulting work is at NewMythologist.com

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Geoff Maddock

Geoff is a music composer, born in New Zealand and now living and working in Los Angeles. He started firstly as a songwriter and musician in the independent music scene in Auckland, NZ with the band Bressa Creeting Cake, and then had greater success in the 2000’s with his second band Goldenhorse. Goldenhorse released three successful albums in NZ, one of which achieved 3 x platinum level of sales, and toured through Europe, Australia and Canada having released music there as well. They played with the Auckland Philharmonia and the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, for which is Geoff arranged the orchestral score. The band broke up in 2009 and since then Geoff has been working as a composer for film, television, theatre, and as a producer and engineer, recording albums for many bands. He moved to L.A in 2011 and has been working primarily as a session musician, recording engineer and writer, most notably with UK artists, the Wedding Present, Natasha Beddingfield, Daniel Beddingfield, and for L.A acts the McMains Brothers, Imaginary Persons and Reem Tamimi. He is recording a new album of original material. Please see his SoundCloud portfolio.

Contact Mr. Paul