Industrial metalwork beats

Today we’re exploring molten hot metal, in the form of a field recording from the metalworks at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, recorded by Seth Guy.

Here you can hear warning alarms, then slag falling from a conveyor belt from the works into the deck of a tug boat on the river below, with the occasional sound of children at play in the background – an unusual mix due to the location of the metalworks.

For the reimagined sound, everything except for kick, snare and hat is derived from the original recording.

Some of the conveyor belt and slag noises have been turned into extra percussion, while the overall recording of the conveyor belt has been passed through a vocoder to produce the shifting synth pad sound, and through a bass generation setup to create the bottom end from the field recording.

City version:

Memory version: