The trickster
Jul 15, 02:36 PM
"I gravitated towards this raven recording from Greenland for a few reasons. Personally, I love birds, have two pet parrots, and find ravens quite captivating. As someone who grew up and spent most of his time in the Pacific Northwest, I regularly see and hear ravens. I love hearing the strange repertoire of sounds they produce, and they can even mimic human speech. They're a remarkably intelligent species, but one that is often misunderstood. They're often mistaken for crows, and as scavengers have historically been associated with death or bad luck. They also feature heavily in many mythologies. Indigenous peoples such as the Haida here in the Paciific Northwest esteem the raven as the creator of the world, but also as a trickster god. On another personal note, I recently graduated from UBC's school of social work, and our logo features a raven.
"As I started playing around with the sound, I gravitated towards a faster pounding rhythm. This may have been because I had just finished classes and was ready to release some cathartic tension, but at some point I realized that techno had some interesting paralllels with ravens. Both have managed to successfully thrive all over the world, transplanting from one place to another and adapting to different environments. Furthermore, ravens and techno are subject to misunderstanding. To the outsider, techno may seem intimidating, simple, strange and scary. I also felt that techno was an appropriate genre to capture the contrasting aspects of ravens between their darkness and playfulness.
"The song got off to a rather disjointed start and didn't seem to really gel at first. I loaded the recording into my sampler and drum machine to convert it into loops and one-shots that I could sequence, but I wasn't totally happy with how it was coming together. I decided to try running the recording through a reverb with a long decay, then splitting the signal into high, mid and low frequency bands using a filter. These three bands were then sequenced into separate rhythms. This element tied everything together, but also provided a propulsive rhythm that really drove everything forward. You can hear the original recording at the start of the track, which then feeds into the reverb filter sequenced technique."
Greenland raven recording reimagined by Scott Riesterer.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration
"As I started playing around with the sound, I gravitated towards a faster pounding rhythm. This may have been because I had just finished classes and was ready to release some cathartic tension, but at some point I realized that techno had some interesting paralllels with ravens. Both have managed to successfully thrive all over the world, transplanting from one place to another and adapting to different environments. Furthermore, ravens and techno are subject to misunderstanding. To the outsider, techno may seem intimidating, simple, strange and scary. I also felt that techno was an appropriate genre to capture the contrasting aspects of ravens between their darkness and playfulness.
"The song got off to a rather disjointed start and didn't seem to really gel at first. I loaded the recording into my sampler and drum machine to convert it into loops and one-shots that I could sequence, but I wasn't totally happy with how it was coming together. I decided to try running the recording through a reverb with a long decay, then splitting the signal into high, mid and low frequency bands using a filter. These three bands were then sequenced into separate rhythms. This element tied everything together, but also provided a propulsive rhythm that really drove everything forward. You can hear the original recording at the start of the track, which then feeds into the reverb filter sequenced technique."
Greenland raven recording reimagined by Scott Riesterer.
Part of the Migration Sounds project, the world’s first collection of the sounds of human migration.
For more information and to explore the project, see https://www.citiesandmemory.com/migration