Madonna and child

Daniel Williams reimagines our sound from May Morning in Oxford.

"This one started with me breaking the recording down into three "events". Bagpipes, bells/chatter and applause. Starting with the bells/chatter, I made three copies and pitched one down an octave or so and applied a hi-pass filter to the second and a low-pass to the third; These were then later layered in Cubase. One bagpipe recording is slowed right down and is present throughout most of the track. Whilst a pitched down bagpipe is present at the end, sounding quite woodwindish. The glassy fractured intro is a granulation of the original recording rendered at different pitches using variations in the buffer size and then layered in the DAW. The strings are from a sample library and mostly follow a three note motif with two sine waves layered underneath from a soft synth.

As I began to assemble the piece I was struck by how the individual is subsumed into the "walla" of the crowd. And how for every seemingly happy voice there is a world of drama and sadness, a life, rolling away in the background. So in the end the piece became an attempt to capture the melancholy of a crowd in the act of celebration. The "Madonna and child" woman (if that is what she's saying) has a very strange mix of emotion in her voice; I feel like she really makes this piece."