The mixtapes took an unplanned summer holiday, so this one has three sections to make up for that. Normal service should resume shortly. 

This one is quite intense and fairly noisy in places, but this seems apt for the material it’s built from.. 

[ rough content guide ] 

0'00s - 4'10s concrete triggers 

4'10s - 9'20s nighttime strata

9'20s - 14'10s concrete triggers (cont.)

14'10s - 20'40s meat market 

Concrete Triggers

I've rarely use completely generative or random processes in composition, but they can be a useful tool for moving away from learnt patterns or to trigger ideas. My favourite approach is to set up systems that force me to respond to them, to tame wildness or to coax out things the sounds start to reveal.  I used this method for these parts of the mixtape but also restricted the tools, creating focus through creative limitations. I've been selling a lot of audio equipment recently, and this has given me the chance to re-evaluate some bits of kit I haven't fully explored. This section was constructed almost entirely on a Digitakt II with generous use of modulation, resampling and its retro style timestretch. I set up a system where pressing one button would throw 8 layers of field recordings from my archive at me, all looping at random lengths (some so short they approached wavetable synthesis). After some time reshaping them with filters and other distortions I would then launch a new set of recordings, these being processed by the same reshaping I had already applied for some continuity. The recordings were all selected from a small bank so often the same source would appear on multiple tracks but with different processing.  I recorded a long set of improvising with this system and then sliced it up into the structure you hear. (I've been listening to a lot of music concréte recently and this definitely inspired me to be more vigorous with my cuts, letting the shape of the sounds guide my editing decisions.)

Nighttime Strata

This part is a work in progress for something more directly connected to my counterfactual sound research. Through a combination of electromagentic field recordings (using the wonderful SOMA Ether), contact microphones and acoustic sound it imagines a more than human way of sonically sensing the city.  I've worked with EMF recordings on and off over the years but rarely connected them to site. Inspired by Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks and KMRU's amazing Natur album I'm keen to explore a combination of the audible and inaudible sounds of one place at one time.  What would a future be like where our range of hearing stretched up into the spectrum of wifi networks, security cameras and drone batteries?  I'm in the early questions stage of this work, and this sketch was constructed from nighttime recordings made in Bristol where I captured EMF and acoustic sound at the same time. The composition combines these both as simultaneous layers, sometimes raw and sometimes using audio convolution, where one sound is shaped by the other.  

Meat Market

A family holiday in Burgundy led us to the cattle market at Saint-Christophe-En-Brionnais. This last section collects some sounds roughly captured on a handheld recorder of this intimate encounter with the meat industry.

Summer Trilogy [CounterfactualMixtape #5 JunJulAug 2025]

the weather and the land
guitars, mics, pedals and boxes
in the dust of this planet

Summer Trilogy [CounterfactualMixtape #5 JunJulAug 2025]

DSPK