Pat Carroll

Tag: installation

  • Treating Material Roughly

    I’ve recently been working on the Elysian installation quite a bit. It’s being presented next Friday the 26th of September, 2025.

    I’ve primarily used the material of Time Vials (all parts) as a starting point. I used it to map out a base structure for the work, which ran for approximately 45 mins. This foundation gave me a good overview of the intensity trajectory the piece would travel through.

    With this, I created a bunch of new material by heavily processing the existing sounds and pieces, and creating new parts. This process presented me with an important lesson: be rough with your material. What I mean by this is that it’s important to get out of the mindset of the engineer, who is focused more on the subtleties and fine-tuning of existing material, and into the mindset of the creative and experimental artist. There’s so much information out there about the ‘correct’ ways to treat audio, but I’ve found that this mostly comes from an engineer’s perspective of working with sound. There is a massive focus on tidying out audio, or changing it subtly to meet an artist’s vision. Of course, there are examples of discussions of tones and overdriven sounds, but I feel like there is very little being discussed about the longer processes that can be undertaken by experimental artists working with material with more of a generative approach: aiming to create new materials, rather than clean up existing materials. To future me, I say: when doing work similar to this installation, go ahead and carry out very drastic levels of processing on your existing material, whether that is parts of, or entire, tracks. Transpose and stretch whole pieces; granulate them; run them through some spectral processors like SpecOps; do all of these things in a chain. Use ‘finished’ pieces or parts as the raw material in processes that result in new pieces. This isn’t some groundbreaking idea or anything – it’s a very common technique for more experimental or technical electronic music. But it’s one that I’ve really employed to create the installation piece, and want to adopt more in the future.

    I remember hearing Blawan talk about his studio processes, centring around similar drastic approaches to resampling material. It involved starting out with a drum groove or percussive synth line (created on a drum machine or modular synth), which is then processed and recorded it into a DAW. Then, the recording is sent through more processing equipment, driving or altering it in a range of ways, and recorded back into the DAW. This process is repeated over and over. At some point, you can stop and listen to what you’ve made, and it’ll most likely be pretty experimental and ‘weird’.

    What’s important here is the mindset: don’t think your material has to be treated like it is so fragile. Be rough with it.

  • Plans & progress for Machine Hall installation

    I’m currently working on an Installation that will be presented on the 26th of September at Machine Hall in Sydney. The event is called “Elysian”. I’ve sent over the references to the visual artist I’m collaborating with for it, Kevin Nguyen.

    I’m now in the process of building a big foundation of music, which I’m going to send over to Kevin by the end of the week. It will be good to have this all as a framework to then build new material on top of. I want to play with some generative music approaches to create that material—a bunch of randomness and unpredictability on top of more stable material. Bitwig will be great for that. I’ll record long takes from a generative system built in Bitwig’s ‘The Grid’, and isolate the useable parts to work into the foundation.

    At times, I want the generative material to be the sole focus, and at other times, I want it to sit behind or embedded within the foundation layers. I want there to be a decent flow to the music, but also areas where the focus does shift between different types of material. In other words, I want there to be a kind of contrast between different sections. I want this contrast to be in the types of sounds used—presenting textural and atmospheric materials, and then more pulsatile and transient ones. Sort of like a mix between the Hypnus Records sound and Ryoji Ikeda’s approach to minimal-glitch (but no one can do it as good as Ikeda—he’s just an example of someone who nails the installation approach. It almost feels cliche to reference his work, but there’s no denying how good it is).