Si/No/Oblique - a new look at Venice

By Acoustic Mirror:

"My two Oblique Strategy cards for this project were the following: «Abandon normal instructions.» «Convert a melodic element into a rhytmic one.»

The second instruction was reasonably easy. The simplest way to turn a melodic element into a rhythmic one is through repetition. I latched onto the phrase «Si… No?» spoken by a woman in the original field recording. Despite the apparent contradiction, «Si… No?» is a common way of asking for confirmation in Romance languages, and is often used as a kind of question tag, similar to the English «…right?». A loop of the phrase, accompanied by the cadence of the waves on the Canale, helped me hold that together.

Nevertheless, the first card, «Abandon normal instructions.», is much trickier. In a sense, it could be interpreted as a way of cancelling the second card, or of interpreting it as freely as I wished. Confused about how to proceed, I decided to interpret the second instruction in reverse: to try to convert a rhythmic element into a melodic one. So, in the second half of the piece, the soundscape is dominated by extended sheets of granular decompositions of the «Si… No?» phrase that punctuates the cadence in the first part.

Luckily, I didn't get the «Would anyone want it?» oblique strategy card."