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| Rob Switzer | |||
| rswitzer@721.com | |||
| about | Robert Switzer is a digital artist and improvising musician from Mifflintown, PA, US | ||
| Rob Switzer coordinated these CT projects: |
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The copyright to each song belongs to the respective artist.
Right-click audio player and then click "save as" to download a track
| An exponent of Breath |
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| A multitracked soprano saxophone collage recorded over a 7 day period. Different effects were achieved by circular breathing and blowing through the horn in different ways, with and without a mouthpiece and reed effects were also achieved by moving the horn around, varying the distance from the microphones in real time. The final mix was sweetened with a touch of reverb. No other digital/electronic effects were used. Recording was done in 96k stereo in Rezound using a Linux laptop with an Echo Indigo sound card. Mics were a pair of cheap omni-directional condensors from Musician's Friend. Horn was a Selmer Super Action 80 Series II with Vandoren mounthpiece, ligature, and reeds. | |||||||||
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| Soundtrack 1, Act 6 |
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| If Caligari was a short story, Act VI would be the plot twist, the place where expectations are dashed, and the whole story is redefined. Through the first part of the act, I worked to build a feeling of vague dread and unease with a looped sting pad, angular bassline, asymmetric rhythms, skronking woodwinds, edgy slide-wah guitar, and the atonal Caligari piano theme. When the action finally returns to the garden wall outside the asylum and all is revealed, I wanted to up the feelings of dread and unease to disassociation, paranoia, horror, and fear. To do this, I used a bed of high-pitched electronic sound, underlaid with gently ascending loop-drones of guitar feedback and overblown bass clarinet harmonics. I added a creepy, wibbling, psycho-blues alto sax solo played in the key of metaphysical distress to up the discomfort factor even further. At the very end, I reiterate the atonal Caligari piano theme, to underscore the irony of the reversal of fortunes experienced by Caligari and Francis. To get the feel I wanted, I decided to go with a mixture of acoustic, electric, and electronic instruments, and take the style of music outside of the period of the film to include contemporary free and electronic musics. Alto and soprano saxes, bass clarinet, laptop and electric guitar parts were cut from previously recorded solo improvisations of my own, and collaged into final form using Rezound and Ardour with xJadeo, open source audio editors + video channel running on Linux. Piano, electric bass, and drum parts were created from algorithmically generated MIDI data voiced using general MIDI and GigaPiano sample sets. |
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| Study One |
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| Soundtrack for an excerpt from a video work in progress that pays tribute to abstract experimental films and visual music by the Whitney Brothers, Harry Smith, Len Lye, Oscar Fischinger, as well as video pioneer Nam June Paik and others. Download the complete video here: http://www.archive.org/details/Study_One Get the Xvid codec (required) here: http://www.xvidmovies.com/codec |
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| What Happens While We're Away |
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| Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA | |||||||||
| Date was 4th of July weekend, 1997 or '98 -- I forget which. I suspended a microphone from the attic window of the house in the foreground and recorded the sounds of the intersection -- I also did some time-lapse video of the same intersection from another window, but sadly, I've managed to lose the tape . . . It was created by layering and timecompressing over 8 hours of raw recordings down to the length of the finished track. It is designed to be barely audible and to blend seamlessly with the ambient sound wherever it is being played to heighten the listener's awareness of the sonic environment they find themselves in. |
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| Freon Frank |
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| Solo alto sax. I played a Selmer Series II alto sax with a Meyer 5M mouthpiece and LaVoz Medium hard reed direct to DAT via an SM-57, then transferred it to the computer and post-processed with TC Electronics reverb. | |||||||||
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| It May Be Musical |
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| Dance music parody. Listen to the wheels come off. | |||||||||
| singing, pump sound, and flute |
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| electronic noise and muted sax |
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| speech loops |
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| drones and sounds |
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| guitar riff; electronic noise, rain stick |
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| rain stick, philosophy, electronic sounds, drum cuts |
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| Eros Dioptra (CT Mix) |
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| Eros Dioptra is a MIDI process improvisation recorded live, in real time. | |||||||||
| Lose Balance |
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| Wireless |
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| Deep Throat |
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| Making the Meat It Feeds On |
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| Remove the Block from the Spirit of Lust |
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 write a feedback for one of the above tracks
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