Because of my nationality, I do have some roots in the Romanian minimal techno scene. And I would be lying if I said I never enjoyed a techno party back in the day. Back in the day, before he rose to international stardom, I was lucky enough to have attended quite a few parties where Barac was playing three or four-hour sets, where he helped sculped what is now known as “the Romanian sound”. I recently a very interesting and detailed article by William Ralston (https://www.scribd.com/document/487393802/Sunrise-in-Bucharest), about the so-called “Rominimal” scene, and the Sunrise collective – the engine behind the Sunwaves festival. I was happy and surprised to recognize a few of my friends’ names mentioned in there, as well as quite a few DJs whose sets I had the pleasure of dancing to a decade ago.
Category Archives: 2nd Year
S#2
I’ve spoken with an old friend of mine, Samuele Simeone – the lead singer and guitarist of The Fuzz Brothers, and he agreed to let me interview him for my audio paper. The Fuzz Brothers is an Italian stoner rock band while Sam is a very talented multi-instrumentalist. I met him five years ago while he was studying guitar at BIMM. I always knew him as being very open-minded, and capable of seeing the whole picture even when he’s right in the middle of an issue. I hope he’ll help me shed some light on the matter.
S#1
I decided that my audio paper will explore the question, “Are the recent rapidly increasing technological advances a threat to traditional instruments?”. I chose this topic because it’s a question I dread because I think the answer is “Yes”, although I hope to God I’m not right. Ultimately, I guess I’ll try to prove myself wrong on this. I did purchase a violin just before I started writing this, to add to the ever-increasing number of instruments I’m doing my best to master. That is perhaps a panicked attempt to somehow balance things out in the world, like the more instruments I learn the slower they will fade away in the ever-growing shadow of the digital era, so I am somewhat biased. I hope that won’t interfere with my investigation.
I#1
For my creative sound work, I decided to write and record a funeral song. Its lyrics are going to be based on a few Christian Orthodox prayers as well as contain traditional Romanian funeral themes. It will make a great audio companion to my essay, Exploring the Role of Music in Christian Worship. I will record it at my home studio and will try to keep it as simple as possible. So far I’ve got the tile, “Groapa” which is Romanian for “Hole in the Ground”. It will portray my own funeral. This’ll be fun.
C#2
I was lucky enough to have joined the project pretty early, so roles within the group weren’t really assigned yet. I took advantage of this and started working on game’s score. I uploaded tree different flavors of tracks.
First one was a short crash-type of sound, just 17 seconds, western-themed. I used electric guitar banjo and harmonica – I felt the reactions were mixed.
The second upload was a techno track of sorts, slowed down to 96 bpm, I put together using harmonica and playing around with Ashlight for NI’s Kontakt. No one said a word about it.
The third track I made using nothing but VST instruments – a slow and eerie composition of saw based sounds accompanied by a few sparse piano notes. Everybody loved it, and from what I understood we’ll be using it in the first scene, for the first part of the space flight, right before the crash.
I now have an idea of what type of sound everybody envisions for this game’s score, which will be of great help with this project.
C#1
After missing the first block, I made my way back and found myself in the middle of a collaborating project with a couple of IMMR students. Our assignment, from what I understood, is to come up with 10 mins. of virtual reality experience. They decided on a sci-fi game where the player’s spaceship would crash, and they find themselves stranded on an alien planet, with a system of tunnels to explore – a sort of puzzle. I found it to be a great idea with a lot of room for experimenting.