Following the group improvisation, I was very interested in the idea of no input mixing that Cai, one of the students, had introduced to me. I have heard of this idea before but have perhaps been slightly ignorant toward it as I didn’t understand how it worked. Cai explained it to me simply after I asked him, and it all began to make sense.
I decided to try it out for myself with an old mixer that I found at home which I haven’t used before. It’s an Alesis mixer with six channels, a hundred effects and auxiliary sends/returns, offering a lot of different options. I connected 1/4 inch jack cables from the outputs of the mixer (including the main outs, control room outs, aux returns and headphone out), and routed these to the inputs of each channel respectively. The result was a feedback loop that sounded a lot rougher in texture and dynamic in frequency than what I had heard Cai’s mixer produce.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EV1OPchsXNgiqMyJaB8hxAsWxPUNBNyU/view?usp=sharing
I found the process of mindlessly playing with the mixer so fun because I ended up getting completely lost in a wave of uncontrolled sound, which is refreshing as I am usually a bit more in control. It reinforced the ideas I’ve been working on of exploring the sound and the producers’ relationship with the sound in an organic and goalless way, creating a more natural workflow. The sound would range from more rhythmic, bit crushed sequences to swells of warped bass tones and waves of rising frequency that had a much smoother sonic aesthetic. Randomly altering the EQ frequency gain, the amount the channels that were being to sent to the effects and the effects themselves created an unpredictable and fluid sound creation process. Quickly turning knobs would often create glitches and intensely electrical sounding artefacts. I chose to record all of my experiments, which I will link below.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qjLYCULe8DJz9ZNSIEwMDDsByj1N5F7p?usp=sharing
I realised after taking a few recordings that the principles of sound still apply here, for example turning up the gain of high frequencies/cutting out the low frequencies would cause the sound wave to oscillate faster and result in a pitch rather than a rhythmic sequence, and vice versa. I began to have more control over the mixer after it initially seemed so random to me, which helped because I had the ability to begin to construct an arrangement of sorts in my recordings. I was able to go from minimal techno sounding sequences and seamlessly weave it into a noise driven bass just by playing with the frequency. This made me think about performing with this instrument because you could essentially build up an entire track live with enough practice. I think if I were to invest in a better mixer with mute buttons and more channels I would be able to create really intricate compositions from scratch and keep it contained within a tempo, rather than the mixer acting purely as a random sound generator. This is definitely something I would like to develop more as the year goes on.