A big part of my creative life has always revolved around the raw sound of things, much more so than composition in the traditional sense. I’ve got a pretty good ear for melody, and I’m decent with beats, but I’m still a sucker for a nice sound. There’s a reason why I still listen to (and create) noise, as well as ambient bits and pieces. It’s something I enjoy enormously.
Having said that, I have to confess that I’ve always been of two minds about releasing such things. I find that most noise recordings don’t hold up well with repeated listens. Hearing them live, as part of a performance piece, is often a fantastic, visceral experience.
The same is true about a lot of ambient, sound-collage, or other “experimental” sound art that I’ve heard. It’s wonderful in passing, but it doesn’t hold up as well over time. Your mileage may vary, of course, and there are exceptions: there are certain Merzbow albums I’ve listened to over and over, and I own recordings of Stockhausen’s early works that I consider worth their weight in gold. Those are exceptions, though. I have far more recordings of that nature that I’ve listened to once or twice and then not gone back to. And rarely do I hear a noise track and immediately want to go back and give it another listen.
I wonder whether many noise artists would admit it, but for me, it’s often much more satisfying to create those tracks initially than it is to listen back to them later. And when I release things — properly release them, for other people — I’d like them to be of lasting value instead of a transient thing. Maybe that’s vanity, but I create a lot more material than I’m ever going to give a proper release. I also have hours upon hours of recordings of, say, me banging around on bits of metal, or field recordings of train stations and thunderstorms.
So this brings me to my point: my original intent with this material was to use it in more polished tracks, either as sample fodder, or background textures. But I have way, way more of this stuff than I’ll ever use. What to do with it all? Deleting it seems wasteful, and simply hoarding it as I have been doing feels both wasteful and selfish.
So here’s the deal: it’s yours. And yours, and yours…and yours, too. I’m putting my samples, recordings and bits of unreleased noise and experimental bits up on the web, for anyone to use. For now, I’ve settled on donating it to the FreeSound Project. If you use any of it, in addition to respecting the Creative Commons licensing, please drop me a line and let me know where I can hear your stuff! It would make me really happy to see this material get the love and attention I can’t presently give it.
A direct link to my FreeSound page is in the sidebar (to the right of this post). So far, there are only a handful of files, but I will be uploading more in the near future. If I upload even a fraction of my sound library, there will eventually be hundreds of files. Share and enjoy!