Markus Reuter’s Touch Guitar solo on “Wrest” by Earthdiver
In instances where I might be stuck in an arrangement that needs a little extra something, often times my first instinct is one of two things:
1 - to pick up an instrument and try to play something that might fit the section or
2 - pause what I’m doing and schedule a session with a friend that stops the creative flow dead in its tracks for however long it takes to get that person in the studio.
In these cases, a production trick I’ve learned from Pat Mastelotto over the years is that I might actually already have what I need somewhere in another folder or hard drive from a completely different project.
The guitar solo for the song “Wrest” from my band Earthdiver’s latest EP “Reanimate” is one such example of employing this “audio found object” technique of composition augmentation. My friend Markus Reuter had provided a series of soundscapes and fragments of guitar/bass parts for several Earthdiver songs in various stages of development back in 2013. Several of these fragments were a few passes of guitar solos for a song that was never released. I pulled a few chunks of those into the Wrest session and slid them around til they started to make sense.
I spoke with Markus recently about this technique and how it was used in this song. Here is an except from that discussion:
AB: I’d like to discuss the technique of collage with audio and what that means for us as producers, composers, writers, arrangers when we’re working on a project and maybe we’re stuck on something when we realize ‘oh wait a minute I have this whole folder over here from a session that we never did anything with.’ That’s such an unorthodox method I think.
MR: It’s interesting that people would consider it unorthodox because it really is the liberation, the sampling culture let’s say, even before there were digital samplers. It’s just the next step where it’s not just the listeners who are utilizing the recorded music but the musicians start utilizing recorded music as new instruments or collections of sound and start incorporating them. I think for me as a producer/ composer, it has become the main mode of working. My playing or my contributions should be as self contained, let’s say, or the opposite of self contained as freely placable in as many musical contexts as possible.
AB: So this is something you are actively considering when contributing a performance?
MR: Yeah, it’s sort of the underlying attitude. The attitude is that the whole idea that one has to find the perfect part is like a mislead human growth let’s say. Where humans and artists are taking ourselves too seriously in a way. Where you say, ‘ok I can build any track around a vocalist’s performance.’ It’s not that that performance only works within one context.
AB: Right, and that’s part of remixing culture as well.
MR: Yeah exactly. And you know you could also say it lessens the artistic seriousness that some people have about their artwork but it’s absolutely true. You can build a track around a vocal because you’re good enough to and you can feel out the vocal in such a way that you can build around it in such a way that works as well as the original track that was built around it or the track that the vocal was sung over. Sometimes the order in which these elements appear may not be the way that you would expect anyway.
AB: In the spirit of not taking one’s performance or proficiency in an instrument or creating tones as seriously ends up being something liberating in that process in a sense right?
MR: Liberating and also I think it creates better parts. That’s why I think repurposing is exactly what I encourage. And you know, with anything that’s a soundscapey bit or even a solo, the tempo doesn’t even matter much. But obviously if you know the harmonies or the scale of a solo that somebody recorded and the BPM then it’s super easy to build something around it or to slide it into another session that has sort of similar parameters.
AB: Yeah that’s great.
MR: For me I think that’s the ultimate expression; if what you play works universally and can stand on its own as well. You know, that was the whole approach to the soundscapes I recorded for your first full length album, Same Time Next Life, the idea was that each soundscape is sort of a piece in itself.
AB: And then I ended up building up arrangements around those.
MR: Yes, and so I really like that. That now days, music can be so super complex and you can have a song within a song within a song, right?
Here is Wrest from Earthdiver:
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