Pierre Schaeffer recorded sounds such as trains and used tape manipulations and various other techniques to make new sounds. This kind of treatment of real life noises to make music is the essence of musique concrète.
While the technology of the 1940s was limited in what could be done in terms of sound manipulation, there has been a continuous stream of advances in sound manipulation techniques. In our current time, all or most of these effects are available as software which we can use in robust music-making programs called DAWs or “Digital Audio Workstations”.
Noise musicians from the late 1970s and the early 1980s developed a technique of using a feedback loop which was fed through many effects in sequence which were being constantly manipulated to create different sounds. This “playing the effects as instruments” turns the studio itself into an instrument, with various knobs, sliders, and switches creating Noise Music. Many people, who could not afford a full-fledged studio, found other means of creating this kind of music using, for instance, guitar effect pedals and recorded it to audio-cassette. Through the tape trading scene of the 1980s, an underground form of noise music was born.
Instead of creating a feedback loop, I feed actual, recorded sounds into a stream of effects and use a MIDI controller attached to a computer running a DAW to manipulate the sounds in real time. This is not a new technique, but it is the one which I have chosen for Dry Eyes’ Noise Improvisations, as I think it provides one with the ability to playback recorded sounds on the one hand, and if one creates a wall of sound by playing many sounds at once, this undulating, multi-rhythmic layer of noise can be fed into a chain of effects which offers many possibilities for interesting sounds.
My noise music uses sounds that are easily produced in the universe. It is a music of real life, and to me the effects are like different perspectives on life. This brings me to the other aspect of Dry Eyes, which is photography.
Photography has some similarities to musique concrète. All of my photos are black and white, so if the photo is the “sample” of real life, black and white is the “tape manipulation” or “effect” that has been applied to it. While I do not usually create the things that I photograph, the way that I capture them is my own.
My photography is black and white because this to me strips objects down to a more primitive, less vibrant essence. It shows the object as it is, but in a different way. I think that black and white can be used to show power relations and contrasts between different dualities in life if one is clever in what they show in a photograph.
Photography more directly shows the real world than musique concrète, but as artforms they both use the raw material of the universe more directly than say, traditional music or painting. My music and photography as Dry Eyes, aims to show the beauty in the mundane, and to work with it to create interesting things.
Dry Eyes’ music and photography at: https://dryeyes.bandcamp.com/
Also, many more photographs on Twitter at http://twitter.com/DryEyes4096/