It’s not often my brother and I are able to work on a creative project together. We both live on opposite ends of the country, carrying out our individual lives, and we both have our personal creative investments. But if there is that rare opportunity to set aside some time, even just a couple days, and visit each other, the results are something only two highly critical experimentalists can achieve.

At the time of John planning to visit Washington, I had completed recording all the material for OUT FROM THE FOG I, but was too worn out to begin mixing and mastering it. With the request from John to set aside all sense of drone/melodic ambiance to embrace noise layering and electro-acoustic sound design, I was completely onboard to put some of my recently practiced techniques to use on a significantly smaller project. The caveat was that while I would be heavily involved in producing the project, I wanted John mostly behind the wheel in designing the sounds with my eurorack case. While modular synthesis isn’t foreign to John, it’s not in his personal arsenal of tools to use for composition. Because of this, I saw an opportunity to 1) make full use of his “beginner’s mind” to my effect-heavy eurorack collection and 2) observe how John may uniquely abuse these modules in ways I hadn’t thought of yet.

The biggest point of thematic direction came from John. He had a vision to make something industrial, likely from field recordings in industrial locations. For the sake of limitation for both creative purposes and to keep us reined in for only two provided days of work, I suggested we continue the “three” theme practiced in our 2022 EP Three Orchards– three tracks, “Three” somethings as the title.

With our conceptual map drawn out to prompt us to create something worth the rare opportunity, we waited for his arrival to Washington.

Of the two days we were allotted, we designated the first to accomplish two things: visiting book stores and sourcing field recordings. The first item on that itinerary was successful in that I managed to acquire a couple unique reads that piqued my interest. One was Language City by Ross Perlin, a 400-odd page read about endangered languages in New York. The other was La raza cósmica (or The Cosmic Race) by José Vasconcelos, a shorter book on the concept of a predicted “aesthetic era” that comes from “the natural selection of love.” Out of appreciation for the first installment in the Ender’s Game series, I also picked up a copy of Orson Scott Card’s Speaker for the Dead. Without a doubt, however, the highlight of our bookstore meandering was getting to pet a cat.

But then the final assignment came around. If we didn’t get a diverse array of field recordings, our chance to make something worth our limited time would be gone. So we parked my van near a marina in the Port of Tacoma, grabbed our gear, and began walking. John brought his Zoom H2n and borrowed my Sony MDR-7506 headphones for monitoring. I kept to my tried and true “shoot from the hip” method using my Zoom F3 on my belt and a Shure SM57 for some directional recording. I set the sample rate to an outrageous 192k so that I could potentially abuse the audio with some heavy speed reduction. I opted to record blind without monitoring so that 1) I could use the material later with minimal preconceptions on how it could be used, and 2) I could focus more on photographing for potential visual inspiration for the project. With that second intention in mind, I brought my trusty Canon Rebel T7 with the Super-Takumar 1:1.8/55 lens.

While the walk itself was enjoyable, it was already dusk on a Sunday, so there wasn’t much human or machine activity in the area. This forced us to find more sounds in the mundane, like the occasional voice from a warehouse, a storm drain, or the fan on a refrigerated semi-trailer (or a reefer as they are called in trucking.) Probably the three most interesting locations were under a major bridge where the passing traffic caused thunderous tones to resonate overhead, a moment where the wind cutting through the sails in the marina sounded like screams from masses of people on the other side of the harbor, and, of course, the distant call of a Electro-Motive Diesel train. With this material collected, we knew we’d be heavily relying on hardware manipulation to create more exciting textures to layer.

The second day was sitting indoors making full use of the recorded material. We got started by simply recording one of the files into the Instruō Lúbadh and began tearing everything apart.

Shrive was an exceptionally heavy beginning to the project. At first, both of us felt it may be too long and concentrated to work in the context of the album. Two contributions that I felt really made the track have complete realization were the rushing air sounds giving animation and the name of the track itself. While everything was sourced acoustically, after using so many vacuum tubes, analog filters, and radio noise to time-shift, mangle, and bristle the edges of these recordings to oblivion, it becomes almost refreshing to hear something real again. I used an old trick of mine by breathing into a vintage bugle to get a brassy resonance that felt contextually appropriate.

The name Shrive came about by stumbling across the word while trying to find a something that properly expressed how this track felt. To me, the enormous density of the track felt akin to absolution or singularity- but none of those words really captured the violent side of it. We also wanted to somehow convey that aggression in a fugue-like perspective, almost dissociative or as though it were erasing something. We found the word “shrive”, which means “(of a priest) hear the confession of, assign penance to, and absolve (someone).” In taking an otherwise peaceful word that brings about closure to someone and associating it with a track with such insurmountable turbulence, the result puts in mind the image of repeat spiritual cleansing by means of intrusion or abrasion.

After the shredding cut that concludes Shrive (which I’m pretty sure was accomplished by just switching off the Biamp Eq/210), we wanted no time wasted flowing into the next composition. After constructing our primary loop using a squeaky, rattling security gate with some beeping, we began the track called The TV Greenshift by flicking the BBE 462 Sonic Maximizer on for a sonic knock that really brings the odd tranquility of the track in on a percussive note. The loop was designed to be randomly shortened/lengthened to throw off a perfect sequence, and was also played in reverse so that modulating end of the loop served as the beginning of the loop- always starting in a new spot, always ending with that wavering pitch. That loop eventually falls away to give room to two gorgeous layers.

The first layer was a short loop of the train horn in the distance. John tuned it to compliment the initial tone at the beginning of the track, and then I disobeyed the rules of the project and threw it into the Mutable Instruments Clouds for some granular traversing and heavy reverb. We still managed to keep it from sounding like a pad, and that may be from the rest of the project being so atonal, but the horn sounded more environmental and less musical. The second layer is a very slowed down loop where one of us speak momentarily. The sample was taken from my F3 so we had very intricate details to hone in on- like the literal croak from the vocal cords. With some heavy feedback chaining between the mixer and the BBE 462, we made a very performable patch that easily got to the edge of self-oscillation. By keeping it away from that point of chaos, we made a gravelly vocal clip take on such harmonic body between both overtones and undertones that it nearly became sentient.

The title was heavily pushed by me to get some kind of color reference into one of our titles- especially something that doesn’t exist to evoke some mysterious element to it. After lots of discussing light measurement of redshifting, physical media, and overall wonderment, we landed on The TV Greenshift.

Breaker Sickness is just us appreciating sonic depths we didn’t expect to reach in this project. By taking the fan recorded while walking past a reefer, and slowing it down to incredibly low speeds, we achieved a pulsing rumble that reminded me of the marching of Miraz’s army in the 2008 film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. To curb the continuous barrage of low frequencies, we modulated the overall filtering overtime to allow for some dynamic range before the recording itself began to fade away. Just before it ends, the recording also had a light jingle of someone locking a metal gate- this became the tolling of some bizarre bell to signal the end of the marching.

To compliment the very well established foundation of the track, we brought in a loop of those imagined screams across the harbor. We did very little to manipulate this layer as it was already so haunting. We did, however, link it up to the Mutable Instruments Clouds specifically for its end when the grains would wisp upwards and begin to feedback in time to shut it down by powering the BBE 426 off.

The track made us feel sick- it is just weird and throbbing. Shredding wind that sounds like screaming people too far away to do anything about, unforgiving pulsing like a rhythmic earthquake… it’s just unnatural. By implementing some nautical feel to the collage of tracks, we referred to breakers after some discussion of dolos and piers jutting out into the sea, but also confusing the context by using breakers potentially in reference to the main circuit to a building’s power supply.

The end result really set a new standard for me in ambient production. Dating all the way back to Nature Would Ventilate, I’ve valued having complex backdrops to my ambient projects. In more recent years, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from radio noise floors- so much so, most of my latest projects feature an intentional noise floor from one of my radios throughout the length of the whole project. Three Pools is no exception with the Collins 75A-3 resting humbly just below everything else.

This project also established a new maturity in collaborations between John and I. While there is a lot to enjoy from our Three Orchards project, we were very much throwing compositional ideas at a wall and seeing what stuck- which works for a more collage-like ambient project. Three Pools accomplishes noise compositions that feel as structured as brutalist architecture. This was without question a result of better understanding what we individually bring to the table, and what we like to get out creative projects. I felt more in tune with where my headspace was by taking more of a producer role throughout and watching, pondering on how best to proceed with the patches John made on the eurorack case. I feel John leaned more into intuition for this endeavor than I’ve seen him before, which opened up better opportunities to make an open-ended patch enough to create a dynamic performance with.

Three Pools will undoubtedly impact how future installments of Wasp Nest Brain Transplant or OUT FROM THE FOG will be approached.