Quote from: FreakAnimalFinland on November 13, 2020, 07:38:58 AM
I think it is not usually about single idea that would have failed, but difficulty of circumstances.
Such as being on construction site, hearing exactly the kind of sound you wish to use, recording the situation and realizing soon that your ears picked up the sound you thought of, but microphone picked up everything.
Instead of the great rhythmic thumping sound and steelworks being done, you get most of all traffic, people talking, and so on. Things you completely managed to ignore while listening on the spot.
With regard to trying to record things on building sites and certain circumstances influencing the recordings:
Whether a recording / field recording 'fails' is a matter of opinion, sometimes it's clear you haven't gotten what you wanted, sometimes you get something you would never have been able to expect....
What was likely to be the best field recording I ever made was lost to a portaloo on a site I worked on a few years ago. Thought I might as well make a short story of it as i'm near housebound at the moment and have little else to do this evening:
I was once given the task of keeping an eye on agency workers on day release & non-English speaking workers on a fairly large site, in the absolute middle of nowhere, at he hight of a stinking hot summer. Other than the sort i'd been to keep an eye on before ( teenagers and twenty somethings for example on day release / 'on tag') there were also a few Romanians who spoke fairly good English, and one Hungarian who's name was Atilla...
Atilla was well over 6ft tall , had hands like cow udders,and could probably eat the average human being if he was hungry enough. Due to his lack of English speaking skills, he referred to himself in the third person, which was absolutely hilarious. When it would get close to lunch time he would say "Hal....Atilla Hungry!" in a rather high pitched voice for a man of that stature,and would rub his belly. Despite not understanding much English, and me not much of his native tongue, we did agree that we both liked metal, and most of our summer was spent digging huge drainage ditches together whilst listening to Demolition Hammer on Atilla's phone and portable speaker...
On this same site, there was a portaloo that had been rejected for return by the portaloo company because it had been 'treated with neglect' according to them, and in all honesty they were right. When the portaloo was still usable, the 'game' we would all play was to throw brick bats and large bits of left over Yorkstone at it whilst someone was in there using it. If you wen't expecting it when you were in there it was a shock to say the least. It made an absolutely fantastic resonating 'booming' sound & I remember thinking whilst I was in there having bricks thrown at me; "I should try and record this, it sounds great!"
It was an absolute state after weeks and weeks of this, holes in it, parts smashed off, it was fucked.Unless a fine was paid to the company who were supposed to collect it , it was going nowhere, and in the baking hot sun (over two months of 30C+ days with no shade) it was starting to stink. No one used it anymore other than in desperate circumstances. Even the hardened alcoholic Poles refused to go anywhere near it, and as it got worse it had to gradually be moved away further and further using the arm of a digger over by a disused barn where we kept old brick pallets and things that at some point needed to be burned , destroyed or gotten rid of.
One day towards the end of the summer we had built up a wicker man size pile of brick pallets that needed to be destroyed, and then burned. Myself and Atilla were given the job of taking care of it. Problem was, these pallets were next to the now putrid shithouse. So bad was it by this point that a couple of the other blokes on site were playing games such as 'Lock your mate in there and don't let him out'... etc etc . Eventually, the fine was paid to the portaloo company, but weeks went by and it stayed there. I guess it was beyond hope this thing was ever going to be salvaged...or taken away.
On occasion I would bring a dictaphone I had to record sounds for use on noise releases. A bit of fun to break the monotony.Sometimes, Atilla would smash things up whilst I recorded him screaming profanities at the same time and vice versa. On the day we were smashing up the brick pallets, we were told by my supervisor that we should smash the portaloo up too out of spite because he was getting grief from the home owner and housekeeper about it, and was sick of it. There and then, out of sheer vitriol my supervisor then proceeded to put a paving slab through the side of the stinking Dunny making an awful racket, and as he walked off he turned around & said "Oi Hal that sounded like the sort of shit music you're into, you should record it!"
Well, not being one to turn down such advice I proceeded to place my dictaphone on the inside of the shithouse door (as fast as possible without wretching my guts up) with tape and began throwing bricks, chunks of rock & hardcore at it whilst Atilla screamed all kinds of Hungarian swear words in between rocks hitting the now half destroyed & stinking plastic shitter...
Seeing what we were up to my supervisor and another of our colleagues simply known as 'Old John', a Teddy Boy in his 60s who lived in a caravan, came up to us and taken by the moment began screaming "Go on Atilla you cunt! Go on son!" at the top of his lungs whilst smoking a rollie. "This" I thought "needs to be an endless loop tape of some kind, this is hilarious." Atilla suggested his back tattoo should be the cover of any release using this recording. Atilla, as an aside, being a metalhead and into pretty brutal shit,had a huge back tattoo of a bomber dropping its cargo on a city. It would have fit perfectly.
As Atilla hurled huge lumps of rock at the bog, Barry the Teddy Boy screamed all manner of obscenities within range so the tape would pick it up, whilst I watched, and my supervisor just shouted all manner of profanities over and over whilst we all laughed, knowing our childish collective tantrum was being recorded...
Once we'd had our fun throwing rocks at the shithouse like idiots, making a horrendous racket and screaming at each other , I went to retrieve the tape recorder. I opened the door whilst holding my breath and saw that a brick must have hit it from the other side of the door, as I couldn't see it anywhere, not on the door , not on the floor, nowhere to be seen...."oh fuck" I thought.... I imagined the worst, and I was right. The tape recorder had been hit from the other side of the door & hurled into the morass of overflowing liquid viscera, as once I got the nerve up to look down into the bowls of hell where I saw it floating, half submerged in shitty agony. No way was that recording ever going to see the light of day.
I emerged feeling sick as a dog from there only to be asked by my supervisor - "When's the album out then, Hal? Will I get royalties?"
Other than that, speaking of recordings that aren't expected or seen as 'failures' :
Out of humorous interest I have made several recordings of scaffolders over the years shouting at each other on various sites i've been on (some I think I did in binaural actually) , being around them in large numbers or on a big site is like being in a human sized aviary, and when layered & mixed down it's hilarious to listen to.All the utterly inexplicable random vocalisations they make (that are very much particular to scaffolders only, other trades never seem do this), bits of songs being whistled and occasional unannounced profanity coming from them whilst they are all ensconced individually on different levels of a huge scaffold behind the weather sheeting so you can't quite see where they are is very much like watching a bunch of birds in a large aviary. 'Hitchcockian' almost.
On the ZSS release 'Racial Superiority' the distant crashing sounds you can hear on the track 'Ascenion Cycle' are scaffolding poles being dropped but recorded from the top of the riser of the building I was working on,around 13 or 14 floors up I think.I was installing backup power supplies for lift shafts, and the reverb travelled really nicely up there, as it did across the whole basement floor. Only problem was that I spent an eternity editing out the various birdlike vocalisations of the scaffolders!
