Underneath Blackfriars Bridge

Underneath Blackfriars Bridge in London, courtesy of a field recording and remix from London artist Matthew Lambert today. As part of our Oblique Strategies project, we dealt him the cards What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain? and Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame. Here, Matthew explains his creative approach.

“Card 1: What to increase? What to reduce? What to maintain?

“I took the words “increase” and “reduce” quite literally, often thinking back to them when applying EQ to the initial source or filtering to the resulting loops. I also used a fair bit of blank tape between cuts to create more space/silence than I usually have.”

“The suggestion of “maintaining” something was used more fortuitously. I decided to pre make some loops before dubbing the audio onto them, however, one had some existing audio from another set of experiments; an odd timed synth line. I opted to keep the old audio and run it at a slower speed, creating the center sound that is pretty bass heavy in the first few minutes.”

“Card 2: Make a blank valuable by putting it in an exquisite frame”
“This arguably had a greater effect on the final piece. The idea of a framed blank or silence informs the composition. The near silence occurs almost in the middle time wise and is preceded and followed by two relatively similar passages of sound. I was already pretty certain that I was going to have to focus on the cello, as it runs throughout the majority of the source recording, but the term exquisite led me to use more layers than I initially intended.”

City version:

Memory version: