Out with the old ghosts
I’ve since left the studio that I set up in my last post, disassembled and sent back to the packing boxes and to-be-sorted piles of Gananoque. It wasn’t an entirely unproductive little set-up: a few great jam sessions and a couple interesting recordings to revisit later, but by and large it wasn’t more than a nice place to go when the urge took me into that creative place.
After the studio was disassembled, and reflecting on the list of things I’d always meant to do in Kingston but hadn’t gotten around to, I embarked on one last musical project in the house I was sitting. CFRC was hosting a night of ‘Pirate radio’ a week ago where something akin to a carte blanche was given for a block of airtime. The only guiding factor for content was the theme, which was ghosts. Why not?
Using the date of the program 03/30-03/31 and a loosely sketched out idea about a seance gone wrong, I set to work on writing, playing and recording three tracks which I was going to submit to them throughout the night somehow.
I ended up shying away from my usual sequencing-oriented stuff, which it strikes me now is actually how all the sessions at the house went. Everything live in one or two takes, and for this I recorded the songs entirely in Audacity, having misplaced the power supply for my Tascam digital 8-track. This was a new process for me, and kind of fun – Audacity is a great little program and it brought me back in some ways to the old Goldwave days.
The three songs I recorded were ambient in nature, with various treated samples overlayed on them which helped sketch out the narrative. I cut them to 3:30, 3:30 and 3:31 in length respectively, being mindful that the longer they were the less likely CFRC would play them, especially if the Ghosts show proved to be popular with local night-owls looking to contribute their own spectral voices to the fray.
The concept for the narrative, take a deep breath and follow me in. The recordings I would anonymously upload on 03/30/2012 contained samples taken from a recovered cassette tape and radio broadcast from the night of 03/30/1982. On that night two Queen’s students – Ben & Nathan Green – male twins with an interest in the paranormal, held a seance at an undisclosed location on campus. Their goal was to contact another set of twins, young girls who were brutally slain on the same night in 1912 in one of Kingston’s most infamous unsolved murder cases. The 1912 killings resulted in the mutilated bodies of the girls, hands and feet tied together with wire, being dumped in a park sometime on the morning of the 31st. There were several suspects interviewed by police, but no one was ever charged and the case remained unsolved. Ben & Nathan were not able to contact the twins, but definitely made contact of some sort: their bodies, along with the cassette recorder they had used to tape the seance, were recovered from the smoking ruins of a barn that burned to the ground on the morning of the 31st.
So that was the gist of it, the track by track breakdown is as follows:
Y – Bandcamp link
There’s no unicode characters for the Sumerian number system, so the closest I could come to their glyph for 1 was a Y. I liked the idea that whatever compelled Ben to light that fire and immolate him and his brother was older and more foreign than they could’ve understood, so I used Sumerian and Babylonian imagery for the project’s art, as well as a doctored newspaper page from 1912 announcing the discovery of the twins. Y is probably my least favourite musical track, and for me playing the same parts for three minutes without just sequencing it is something akin to torture. I managed to do it, bad timing and everything it’s there, and then again with the bass, and it goes on too long but the joy of the track is the faux radio broadcast from 1982 which was a blast to record. A news report about President Reagan, a very appropriate snippet from one of my favourite songs that charted that year and then a newscaster setting up the twins’ seance. I used a variety of plugins to treat the recorded audio, falling back on my old standby of Orion to mix and master the track. In the end it’s marginally convincing which is better than I’d hoped, and it was a great excuse to play around with bandpass filters, static and all those other things I enjoy.
Transcript forthcoming.
YY – Bandcamp link
Easily my favourite track from the session, this is the one I kept coming back to listen to, on the shit speakers I mixed everything on or in the car when I burned the songs to CD. Playing the synth part that would ultimately end up buried underneath itself in endless repeats and echoes, using my right hand to play the melody and my left on the touch pad of my Novation Xiosynth to control the lowpass filter LFO, increasing its speed to produce a sort of AM (amplitude modulation) it’s-all-coming-apart-at-the-seams effect was just plain wonderful, in a way I can’t really explain nor expect anyone to understand. The whole song was made from 100% Xiosynth sounds and I’m very proud of the patches used and created as they’re my favourite type of warbly old Boards of Canada type synth timbres.
The vocal snippets are meant to be the recovered transcript of the seance itself, with Nathan calling out to the spirits of the girls asking for them to make their presence known, to speak to them and tell them what happened on that night so long ago. The recordings were bandpass filtered and wow and flutter were added to the space echo type effect I added, and I probably wouldn’t have mixed either of these effects as strongly today, making the recordings more intelligible, but I’m still getting goosebumps whenever Nathan screams helplessly at the end, imagining his twin brother’s arm holding him firmly in place as the gasoline soaks through their clothes and onto the barn floor, and then, slowly with his other hand, Ben strikes his zippo.
Transcript forthcoming.
YYY – Bandcamp Link
This was a fun track if for no other reason than I recorded a full 3:31 of me speaking in a creepy made up language that half scared me by the end of it. Somewhere between whispered Arabic and a rejected Star Trek language, I layered it on the track beside a reversed version – not-quite-quiet-enough for my present tastes. The hokey backwards whispered vocals thing was one of the tropes I had wanted to avoid, but couldn’t resist putting it in. YYY takes place after the damage is done. The twin girls are lying in a heap in the park awaiting to be discovered, Ben and Nathan are both smoldering while the coroner receives his early morning phone call. It feels a bit out of place because I think this song exists outside the perception of time and fragmentary documents of the other two.
Featuring the only percussion amidst any of the three tracks, a single Freesound’d sample of bassthump-pause-crunch subtly slows its frequency and lengthens itself producing a largely subconscious stretched out dread with each repetition. The synth with a fair amount of attack to its amplitude envelope is lightly playing a scale pausing at various points to sound ghost notes and brief snippets of intervals and in another fun departure there’s me playing my melodica in there too, as I walked around the house droning into the dark and capturing it all for later reverb drenching ambiance. The whispers are corny, but it’s a nice enough track and was finished just in time for broadcast.
I burnt a red piece of construction paper, which originally had a QR code on it, but the fire got a bit out of hand, so I folded the paper over and enclosed a Twitter name: @03300331 which I then placed in a manilla envelope and left outside the door of CFRC’s studio in Lower Carruthers Hall. I had worried so much about being spotted, but now worried that no one would find it since it seemed pretty dead at the station. I took a gamble and called the studio via Skype and told them I had left them something outside the door, that after that there would be two more (songs) but in the first of several not-going-according-to-plans I think they interpreted it as meaning two more letter drops, which I wasn’t prepared to follow up on.
The show started, and it started out pretty well. Some great tunes, a few less than stellar readings of some of my favourite and well-worn gothic poems or organ solos and after awhile, my song. There’s a special feeling, especially for us non-professional musicians with no delusions of getting regular radio play, when your song is on the air. The young hosts were happy I think to get the content, laughed about the less-than-arcane use of Twitter and in a not-sure-if-planned moment an entire conversation about who I might be and when the next documents might arrive was broadcast for all to hear, seemingly from a mic left on during an instrumental piece, which was thrilling and mildly embarrassing all at once.
I busied myself on Twitter, and every 30 minutes I counted down the 3 minutes and 30 seconds to the next track reveal, as can be seen in the feed, but I didn’t hear anything further about it. The show took a decidedly sharp turn as new DJs came on board around 1:00 am and I was well on my way home to bed. I’m not sure if either of the other tracks ever made it onto the airwaves, which is a bit of a shame I suppose, but it was a fun evening at any rate and I enjoyed working on the songs immensely. The twins and their mysterious fates, and the unspoken question posed to the listeners about what might happen on this the 100th anniversary of the original slayings are now fading from my memory, but it was a fun ride while it lasted and as always I seem to have these bits of creative output at the last minute before large disruptions in my life/routine. Huge post, thanks for reading and listening and as always your comments and feedback are greatly appreciated.
