The idea for the piece began from a haphazard field recording on an airplane. Later auditing it, I was struck by various elements of that moment, the different layers of sound, the interactions and relationships it captured. Although quite mundane, the recording imposed a feeling of contemplation upon me, of which I've tried to convey in the piece.

I have treated all the materials in the work with as little manipulation as possible: the recording sounds very raw at times, the acoustic composition quite austere, and the electronic applications reserved. I tried to establish a relationship between the minimal rawness of those different aspects. To try and invoke a listening state where one hears music in noise and noise in music. Moments where one can't tell if it's the recording or the composers manipulation of the sound environment, whether it's through electronics or the acoustic instruments.

Further into the piece I have tried to emphasise these somehow opposite poles of "music" and "environment", through superimposition and juxtaposition.

~440

The Old Man and the Sea is a fixed media electroacoustic piece inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s famous novel of the same name. Listening to Manuella Blackburn’s composition Landline and music performed at the 2019 Manchester Mantis Festival, I was tempted to limit the ‘real world’ sounds in my music using only two sound-sources, a sailboat and water. Through granular synthesis, FFT processing and various plug-ins on software such as Cecilia, Max8 and Reaper, I tried to capture the sound world described in the Hemingway’s prose by manipulating and reconfiguring the sonic fabric of my original sound-sources.

~440

yuct

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