We Keep Pigeons

Part of our Dada Sound project (February 2016) - see more at http://www.citiesandmemory.com/dadasounds By Hearn Gadbois.

I used a mess of Dada techniques to produce this work. In working on it, the first thing that struck me was the extent to which techniques that were once exclusively the domain of DADA have become the canon, or Standard Operating Procedure for artists, producers, designers, musicians, writers, filmmakers, (the list goes endlessly on). It would be a real challenge to find anything from an advertisement to a piece of pop music that doesn't employ some Dada technique, whether knowingly or not. One wonders what the pioneers of the movement would make of the ubiquity of their once-outlandish ways of working.

What I did was take a field recording of gulls and geese being fed along a strand and chop it up, rearrange, and process the sounds into what sounds a bit like a demented brass band.

Dada-wise, it contains Montage (in this case audiomontage) as its components have been reassembled out of sequence. The same applies for collage, sound poetry, assemblage. That bits of the field recording have been cut up, repositioned, re-proportioned, and re-juxtaposed as well as multiplied, and that the geese were slowed to half-speed to create a different tuning and sonic function not identifiably present in the original- these meet such criteria, at least technically. The original audio has a stereo field that is a bit asymmetrical which I preserved mostly by being uncompelled to correct or balance it- however, I did add some very abstracted spatiality by applying reverbs to fragments and passages. There is an entirely divorced-from-reality dimensionality as a result.

I refrained from adding anything in the way of instruments except for a few effects: reverbs, eqs and amplitude modulation to shift tonalities, tweak noise levels and draw the ear along. I felt that the basic audio should be native to itself.