St Patrick's Park - an oral reproduction
Christian Hagelskjaer From tackles the sound of St. Patrick's Park as part of our Oblique Strategies project. He writes:
"My two Oblique Strategy Cards:
- Put in earplugs
- Discover your formulas and abandon them
Why, thank you, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Thankfully, I already know what my formulas are: Mangle things with effects-plugins until something emerges. Then do it again. So I wouldn't do that.
Being a student of design processes and a fan of Donald Schon's ideas of "the reflective practitioner", I decided to give myself something to reflect upon, iterate and evolve with. I came up with a couple of elaborate ideas (even committed one of them to s written script), knowing I wouldn't go with either of them. The plan was simply to get them out of my system; to accept them as first thoughts - and then abandon them.
This is where I decided to put in the earplugs, in a manner of speaking. Following this instruction, it made sense to take the original recording almost completely out of the mix. After all; I wasn't there, I didn't hear those sounds with my own ears. Before portable recording equipment, neither would anyone else, had they not been there themselves.
So I recorded a single track, listening to the original, commenting on what I heard. After that, I didn't listen to the original again, but built everything on top of the commentary (and looking at the waveform of the original. Earplugs - not blindfold).
I tried voice-acting some of the atmosphere, added more comments (some of which were inspired by reviews of St Patrick's Park found online) and thought a lot of early Frank Zappa montages while doing it. The frequency response was constrained as a result of using only an old Tandberg dynamic mic and some dis-enhancing eq. I considered mixing the whole thing to mono, but decided it would make things too dense after all.
All in all, a sort of oral reproduction/recollection of the original sound."