Endless moments in a Bremen backyard

Bremen, Germany, and a piece from long-standing Cities and Memory contributor Martin Kristopher (AKA 3dtorus), who also played a part in our #HamburgSounds project last year. We dealt him the cards Go to an extreme, come part way back and Discard an axiom, and set him loose.

“When I decided to join in for this project I was looking forward to my new sound recorder, a Zoom H2N and already knew what I would record with it first and that I would use this as the foundation for my contribution: The soundscape of my apartment block’s backyard on a lazy and boring friday afternoon.”

“Why? Easily said; it´s the soundscape I hear every day when I’m working in the studio, cooking, eating, sleeping, cheering, worrying, put shortly it’s the soundtrack for most of my life at the moment (if you subtract the music I produce and listen to…). So when the recorder arrived on a Thursday, I had both a plan and an idea of what to do with it.”

“But then there were the cards. They were fascinating me from the moment on when I received them:
1. Go to an extreme, come part way back
2. Discard an axiom”

“I used the second card first, my kind-of-axiom in producing music is that I love beats and therefore have to create beats. Using the card here means: No beats.”
“To bring the order of the other card to life I made use of 2 Tape Delay VST´s on return channels, fed them the field recording from my backyard, pushed the feedback control to extreme and returned to normal. I did this over and over again, also modifying other controls like filter values and delay time. You can also hear the original recording in a big reverb space and a simple polysynth theme patched in Audulus. The track was recorded in one take. Enjoy!”

City version:

Memory version: