Performed at Xosphere series, 5.11.2021.
Matti Raita
Ava Imogen Grayson
Aether Soot

unnamed (live)

dubverk3

I've been experimenting with taking field recordings and reworking the material by repeating and layering small segments, as well as applying light effects, notably pitch-shifting. That's what this is. I use various tools. In this case, I did it all just in Audacity. The source audio is something I recorded in an office supply store on my phone. You can find the original here:

- https://freesound.org/people/disquiet/sounds/838457/
- https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/retail-phase
- https://disquiet.com/2025/12/16/retail-phase/

Retail Pneumat

Another go at transforming a field recording. This is based on the same source audio as my first Jamuary track of the year. This time around, I pulled out the ping of the cash register, and then created some melodic loops of it in VCV Rack, using pitch-shifting, and then imported those back into Audacity, where I did some subsequent editing.

Cashier Seq

There are various forms of distance, key among them spatial and temporal. A week or so ago, the rain had colluded with fires at key infrastructure outposts to turn off power across the city, especially in our immediate neighborhood, where outages planned and “unplanned” took a wrecking ball to holiday plans. The wind masked the rain, but nature couldn’t entirely overpower the sound of the generators put in place to temporarily serve the area while the nearest substation was out of order. Several of these massive portable machines appeared quite suddenly, and my phone’s meter registered the noise at close to 100 decibels when we walked by to investigate. That was what it was like at the time. Now that the time is at a distance, the generators, while still in place, have been turned off, and the neighborhood is back to quiet, or what passes for quiet in a city. I can summon up memory of the physical discomfort, while the recording manages to retain the sense of shock at what was unfolding.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Wednesday, December 24, 2025, in San Francisco's Richmond District near the corner of 24th Avenue and Balboa.

Unplanned Drone

Third day of Jamuary, working just in  VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma. 

Source audio here:

- https://soundcloud.com/disquiet/unplanned-drone
- https://freesound.org/people/disquiet/sounds/840803/

Re: Generators

Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack. 

Source audio recorded in San Francisco in late December 2025 and early January 2026.

Chatter Boxing

The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real. (The bathroom photographed here is not the same as the one where the recording was made.)

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco.

Bird Bathroom

My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.

Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025.

Two Block Drone

I've lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I'm not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I'm not sure I'd share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I've done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion. 

Source audio recordings made on an iPhone 13 Pro and an iPhone 17 Pro sometime in 2024 or 2025.

unnamed (live)

Ava I. Grayson

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