Margate, Kent – a field recording of our favourite spot in the town, the bucolic beauty of Botany Bay, waves rolling in gently to the shore. I passed the recording over to Andy Lyon and his collaborator Kim Rueger for World Listening Day, and they came up with a new piece titled ‘Our Lady Is Also The Moon’, as they explain here:

“‘Our Lady is Also The Moon’ started as an idea to use the Cities and Memory Botany Bay Margate sample as the backdrop for a reading from ‘The Sea Priestess’ by Dion Fortune.”

“I thought that the reading would be more suited to a female voice and Kim sprung to mind straightaway because she had been interested in participating [in Cities and Memory] but previously hadn’t had time and collaboration seemed a good way to get involved if possible. Kim was very keen on the idea and the song developed from there.”
“Kim said that she had two recordings that she had made of rain / storms ‘morerainstorm’ and ‘stereomoderaterain’ and these fitted perfectly with the theme of ‘The Sea Priestess’.”

“The basis of the song uses VSTs from Glitchmachines as follows:
Polygon VST: 4 instances of Botany Bay Margate sample
1 instance raw sample played loop forward; 3 instances raw sample granulated with different settings and loop lengths through a LP filter with stutter effect and LFO modulation on filter cut-off / resonance and stutter effect settings.

Polygon VST: 4 instances of morerainstorm
1 instance raw sample played loop forward; 3 instances raw sample granulated with different settings and loop lengths through a LP filter with stutter effect and LFO modulation on filter cut-off / resonance and stutter effect settings. (These settings are different to the above.)
Subvert VST: Morerainstorm played through NY_HammerHit preset to create a drone
Convex VST: Stereomoderate rain played through IL_DissonantPads preset to create delayed effects

“Kim then improvised a one-take piano piece using camel crusher and TAL Dub III with a long feedback playing chords based on the overtones whilst listening to the background track and only edited one chord afterwards to make it more harmonic as it was based on unison notes.”

“The track was then reversed and shifted back to sync it a little better.”
“The vocals were provided by Kim and these were chopped and edited in Audacity to shorter vocal sections and then layered against the clean vocals using 2 different delay effects – TAL Dub III and Fusion Delay.Ferric TDS, Density MkIII and TDL Feedback Compressor II were used on master channel.”

“We are both really pleased with how the song has turned out, it was great fun to produce and the process went very smoothly despite the fact that we are on both sides of the Atlantic and both using different DAWs – just goes to show that music knows no boundaries.”

City version:

 

Memory version: