Primordial Soup

These pieces are based heavily on improvisation with virtually no editing afterward. The appeal of noise as an aesthetic for me, especially as someone who works with electronic instruments that can run sequences and loop infinitely, is the challenge to improvise and change parameters in real-time in order to work with these abrasive textures and shape them to an extent. Noise is an excellent primordial soup and an inevitable ending point.

“Omni Spree” was recorded using a small granular sampler (Bastl's Microgranny). It features a very cutting distortion/bitcrusher and allows the musician to chop the sample (voice, guitar, chord, piano, whatever) into small bits (grains) which, by using some parameters, can change size as well as direction.

That technique is also used in “Minimal Theory” where I recorded myself reading from an essay on U.S. American minimal music (Reich, La Monte Young, etc.). This piece starts as a linear reading underpinned by the wavefolded kick (built up using an analog modular synthesizer) before devolving in these grains, bits of speech rearranged, cut and glitched out.

Godefroy Dronsart is a writer, teacher, and musician currently residing near Paris. His poetry has appeared in Lunar Poetry, PostBLANK, Paris Lit Up, The Belleville Park Pages, and Twin Pies Literary, among others. His first chapbook, “The Manual” (Sweat Drenched Press, 2020), explores the space between poetry, prose, and gamebooks. He has a sweet tooth for all things experimental, modernist, and strange. Follow him on Twitter and his Bandcamp for electronic explorations.

Artwork by Garreth Chan