One of the issues that confronts anyone engaged in artistic endeavors is the search for something new, something different, something exciting, something confusing, something upsetting, or something that is likely to induce a sensation of profound nausea. Inspiration can strike in the most unlikely of places, even in the fulminating world of twitter. @rogger_ebooks is a strange little twitter bot that mashes up the tweets of an old friend and turns them into a stream of dark nonsense from which occasional pearls of bleak wisdom shine through. I made a throwaway comment on twitter to the effect that it might be interesting to write a noise album based on @rogger_ebooks. It was intended as an amusing absurdity but I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was reading a biography of William S Burroughs and I was struck by the thought that the gnomic utterances of this mad little robot were an excellent example of the cut up technique in action. Reading back over @rogger_ebook’s tweets I noticed that a certain sense of character came through, it was developing a personality purely through the accidental juxtaposition of fragmentary sentences. The idea of creating an album based on it no longer seemed ridiculous, it seemed necessary. I put down the wine bottle, wiped the drool from my face, put on some pants and set to work.
@rogger_ebooks consists of two tracks both heavily inspired by the cut up technique. Rogger, the centerpiece of the album is half an hour long, a properly challenging and noise composition. I began by recording a ten minute track of free form noise using one of my favorite synths and an array of distortion effects. I then cut the audio file into 20 sections and began assembling a new track out of them by rolling a d20 to select a section of audio to add to the new track. I continued adding randomly selected snippets of noise until I had a 30 minute track which utilised 19 out of the 20 snippets of noise. It creates an interesting effect, there are several passages where the same snippet is repeated and the re-occurrence of previously heard sections creates a feeling of nebulous deja vu, even though it’s hard to identify specifically familiar noises.
For vocals I used a basic text to speech programme. By happy accident I almost immediately found a voice that sounds a little bit like a sofa salesman from old DFS/Northern Upholstery adverts. By running the speech at it’s slowest speed it wound up sounding like a confused drunk. This was clearly the perfect vocalist for the surreal robotic babble. I chose some of my favourite @rogger_ebooks tweets and liberally scattered them over the assembled track. The tweets were marginally curated, I focused on those tweets that I felt had a poetic element to them and tried to avoid those that might reflect badly on the original source. I wanted @rogger_ebooks at its lunatic best. The result is pleasingly insane and impenetrable, a riot of shifting distortion, repeated fragments and almost, but not quite comprehensible gibberish being intoned by an alcoholic robot. It feels like it has a meaning that is all its own whether you are familiar with the source material or not. It also makes me wonder if there isn't some more inspiration to be mined from the world of bots and spam communication.
I also wanted to create a short track, something more obviously digestible for those that were intrigued by the premise but lacked the intestinal fortitude to make through 30 minutes of howling static. I wanted an @rogger_ebooks track you could play at a party to disturb and annoy your guests, a small conversation piece if you will. The second track I created is called Lizard Jazz. It’s another example of the cut up technique but here the source material is an out of copyright jazz recording. Once again I created twenty sound clips from the source material and used a d20 to randomly select fragments. I interspersed the vocals this time so that they were more audible and because I liked the stop start effect that this gave. I then went absolutely fucking nuts with audio effects on the jazz samples, just full on berserk, until everything sounded fucking horrible and called it a day.
The album is out now at malesperi.bandcamp.com available for free download or you can pay what you think it’s worth. I always make my music freely available, not because I don’t think it’s worth money but because I feel uncomfortable with the idea of making money from something I would do anyway. Any and all profits will be spent on new musical equipment so anyone who does feel moved to pay is very much part of the problem.
I’m very pleased with @rogger_ebooks. Anyone who considers themselves a serious artist (and I do unironically consider myself a serious artist) feels the need to grapple with big themes and big ideas, to create work which has something to say. Sometimes though you find that it's actually the small ideas that resonate the most. There’s something very freeing about taking inspiration from something extremely niche to and using it to create art that is located at a very particular time and place. Twitter will not endure, @rogger_ebooks will not endure. In another decade it’ll probably be impossible to revisit the source material for this album which will make it even stranger than it already is. It feels like a private joke between the past and the future.
