LON AMS PAR
LON AMS PAR is a lo-fi ambient album made up entirely of found sounds and soundscapes recorded in London, Amsterdam and Paris during the summer of 2016. Sounds from famous landmarks (or ‘soundmarks’) were recorded with a portable digital recorder and then put together to present a journey through all three cities . Some are presented with minimal changes while others have been manipulated to sound completely different from their original sound. This was an exercise in creating music with limitations. I hope you enjoy this journey!
“The Earth has music for those who listen”
Below is the 1 minute trailer for the album on YouTube but you can listen to the whole album on Spotify, Apple Music or Amazon Music. Below the trailer are pictures I took in each city as well as a brief description of what makes up each track. Each track title will take you to it’s video on YouTube. Thank you for listening!!
London
Big Ben At Midnight/Waterloo Road 6am
I love cities at night and I don’t know why but I love midnight! There’s just something special about that time..…anyway, this track is built on two sound beds. The first is the recording of Big Ben striking midnight while on Westminster Bridge while the one that follows is from Waterloo Road at 6am in the morning where you can hear Big Ben faintly in the background while the birds are singing their morning tunes. The main melody from Big Ben was cut out and looped. One of the main bells from the hourly chime was cut out from the recording and put it in the Kontakt sampler so that the chords could be played with the Big Ben bell.
Angel Underground
This piece is made up of several sounds recorded on the London Underground trains and stations. It was noted that on some trains when the door opens, a note plays. This was cut out from the recording and put on the Kontakt sampler in order to be able to play what sounds like an organ throughout most of the piece. Sounds were cut out from the recordings on the train which were used for the kick, snare and hi-hat drum sounds. These sounds were made by using surgical EQ techniques and transient shaping tools. Some of the train sounds were looped to create interesting rhythmic variations when played on top of each other. The announcement of ‘Angel’ station was cut out and duplicated twice in order to treat it differently. Lastly, a voice through a transistor radio is heard several times asking “Are you okay?” - this was also cut out from recordings made and came from the walkie talkie of London Underground employee.
Whitechapel Ghosts/Tower Bridge
This track is made up on the bed of three sound beds. The first was a recording made at Old Spitalfields Market. Following this is a recording made on Whitechapel High Street and lastly is the traffic and people on Tower Bridge. A four bar loop of a recording I made while sitting in the back of London black cab is repeated throughout the whole piece and produces regular ‘bumps’. The eerie sound at the beginning of the track is sound of Tower Bridge lifting it’s bridges to let a ship sail through into London. The recording was extremely short but this was used as the basis of the rest of the haunting sounds heard in the composition. The sound was put in the Kontakt sampler but was deliberately put in the traditional sampler mode so that when it was ‘played’ back at a lower pitch, not only was it a lower note(s), but it was a lot slower. The same ‘notes’ are played throughout the piece but at different pitches and at different lengths.
LON - AMS
This track is made up of two recordings; one while being on the plane which was taking me to Amsterdam and the other one which was taken at Heathrow Terminal 5 in the parking lot where I could get a good recording of planes taking off. These tracks were put on top of each other and consist of minimal production work in order to preserve the musical qualities that arise from machines which we may not pay much attention when we are travelling.
Amsterdam
Westerkerk 4am/Dam Square 3am
This piece is made up on two sound beds. The first is the bells of Westerkerk chiming at 4am while the one that follows is the traffic, people and police going through Dam Square at 3am. Two instruments were made by using the Kontakt sampler. One was what sounds like a bass synth lead and the other is a pad like sound. The former was made of tables and chairs being moved at a cafe in Dam Square in a recording made earlier that day. The latter was made of a tram bell sound from a recording made in Dam Square also earlier that day. Both sounds were manipulated with surgical EQ and transient shaping in order to make them unrecognisable.
Bicycle Underpass Rijksmuseum 1am
This track is built on one sound bed which is just the sound of the bicycle underpass through the Rijksmuseum at 1am. It features people talking, people walking, people riding their bikes on their own and with others as well as people skating and making funny noises. The underpass had a great reverb to it. The sound of the bike bells heard around 1:45 was put into two different Kontakt sampler instruments. One was with the traditional sampler setting where when you played it several pitches lower, the notes played for a lot longer - this is what sounds like a bell like tone at 1:46 and later in the piece. The other Kontakt instrument was used for the ascending melodic figure at 1:54.
Rain On Keizersgracht Canal (Fallen Lady)
I must be one of the few people in England who genuinely loves the rain! However, that did not prepare me for the rain that greeted me in Amsterdam while making the recordings for this piece. This track features a couple of recordings of rain on Keizersgracht Canal spliced together in order to be as one take. They were spliced together in order to get rid of unusually loud sounds and bumps that seem to take away from the relaxing nature of the recording. These loud sounds and bumps I presume were from the rain hitting the microphone. Despite the microphone having the windscreen on it, it still had a lot of unwanted noises.
AMS - PAR
This track consists of two recordings taken from the Thalys train taking me from Amsterdam to Paris. This was to highlight the musical aspects of train journeys.
Paris
Notre Dame De Paris
This piece consisted of two different recordings of the Notre Dame bells. One was on the hour and the other was later in the day. One is faded out as the other is faded in. This piece involved putting it through EQ and tape emulations to thicken the recordings. Towards the end, you can hear one of the recordings put through a haunting effect.
Jardin Des Tuileries/Place De La Concorde
This composition was built using four different sound beds. The first two which are heard are recordings made in the Jardin des Tuileries and both tracks use binaural panning that moves around from speaker to speaker moving backwards and forwards in the stereo picture constantly. The third bed starts to fade in around 1:12 and features the fountains at the Place de la Concorde. Soon after this, another bed of this same fountain fades in but this was put through a granular effect where it gave it a beautiful shimmering quality. The latter part is one of my favourite sounds from the album.
Arc De Triomphe (Slowing Down)/Café Culture
This track is built on three different sound beds. The first one is the sound of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe. About a minute into the piece, this audio file is very gradually slowed down over thirty seconds. At the end of this, we then hear the other two sound beds come in which are taken from recordings taken at two cafes; Les Deux Magots and the cafe at the Gare du Nord. Binaural panning was used with these two tracks where one was placed at the front while the other was placed ‘behind’ the listener. The ‘synth’ sound heard about 90 seconds into the piece was made from the car horn heard earlier in the track.
PAR - LON/St Pancras Station (Home)
This track consists of recordings made on the train from Paris to London on the Eurostar and an eerie sound of a train leaving St Pancras Station. The sound was cut out and made it into an instrument that plays the chords throughout the track. At the end, the haunting sound is layered on top of itself several times over with binaural panning taking the sounds around the listener.
Home
The tools that were used to create this album
All the recordings were made on a portable digital recorder, the Sony PCM D100 and then worked on from composition through to finished masters in Logic Pro X. Native Instruments’ Kontakt sampler was used in nearly every track to cut out interesting sounds and to turn them into playable ‘instruments’. The following third party plug-ins were also used extensively:
Audioease - Altiverb
Izotope - Ozone 8, RX7
Michael Norris’ Soundmagic Spectral Effects
Native Instruments - Absynth, Kontakt 5
Output - Movement
Universal Audio - Ampex ATR-102 Tape Recorder, Lexicon 224 Digital Reverb, Manly Massive Passive EQ, Moog Multi-filter, SPL Transient Designer, Studer A800 Tape Machine