This is a wonderful interview with Fred again about the creative process involved in turning digital fragments (including voice notes from his friends) into electronic music, which James Waide pointed out to me could be seen as part of the transition of Musique Concrete:
It took me so long to try and find the way in which I could expose the beauty in these moments without it distorting the person’s soul or having some fundamental dissonance with what they were originally doing. Still feeling like you were being respectful. Keeping the life of both them and you.
This immediately reminded me of a line from Les Back about the challenge of finding “ways of writing about the social world that don’t assassinate the life that’s in it”.
Long drones are different ways of framing the emotion of what the person is saying. In the same way that drone, if I were to now play it with this drone… in this landscape it’s like he’s saying different words now. Generally with samples I’ll make five or six different drones it will live in and the harmonic landscape of these drones will affect the emotion of the song.
Around 42 mins
Mark Carrigan 