5.00 am – Inside a sex shop on the Reeperbahn
Our stay in the Reeperbahn district as a sonic tourist would unfortunately not be complete without a quick stop inside one of its many sex shops – our intrigue as to whether they might make interesting sonic environments led us into one late into the night, and sonically there’s little but disappointment. It’s banging 4/4 dance music, with precious little in the way of anything else (videos, audio, even conversation amongst shoppers!) – here it’s Sean Paul. How depressingly predictable that Sean Paul should be the music of choice. We escape before Robin Thicke makes an appearance.
Restive blended this track into his reworking of the Old Elbtunnel (see 1.00 am’s sound!) and had this to say about his composition:
On the tunnel recording one of the first things I noticed was quite a nice hum from the ventilation system at around 264Hz, which I isolated & tweaked (amplified, filtered, detuned, etc), duplicated this track with slightly different tweaking on each. The second thing was to isolate all the instances of the ‘calls’ in the recording which I sent through a delay effect to make them extra reverby & magnify the space even further. I duplicated this track and reversed it and did a whole lot of tweaking to it (it’s the ‘spooky’ backwards spectral thing that happens throughout). When I noticed that no one apparently had the balls to tackle the ‘sex shop’ recording (it was totally conspicuous by it’s unclaimed isolation on the list) I decided to use it also. I turned the volume on it way down and filtered it even further so that there was only some low throbbing and a hint of the vocals. A copy of this I passed through a tracker plugin (which is where the tinkly, bubbly bits come from). It ended up adding quite a bit of weird sonic interest which was none the less derived directly from the sound envelope of the original recording.”
City version:
Memory version:
