The Black Lake choir, Montenegro

An early morning trip to the Black Lake in Montenegro today, as Mark Wilden was lucky enough to capture the sound of a choir singing on the shore of the lake – as an added bonus, here’s a brief video clip of what he recorded:

City version:

For the reimagined sound, I tried several routes into this reimagined piece, focusing on bringing out and highlighting elements of the lovely vocal lines in this bright, open-sounding recording – but everything sounded too, well, obvious with vocal-focused approaches.

So the approach was shifted to making the piece something more aggressive-sounding, in opposition to the positivity of the recording.

Vocal snippets were cut up and heavily effected to be used as instrumentation, rhythmic effects and sonic decoration around the stereo field to complement what’s going on elsewhere – there are actually six tracks of the original vocal in here, but there’s barely a discernible word, as the vocals are used as a sound source and an instrument to build out the mix.

The result is a sound more focused on bringing out something to evoke the foreboding silhouette of Mount Durmitor, looming above the choir in the accompanying images and video.

Memory version: