DIE NACHT IST LEBEN PART 4
If you listened to the MP3 to my last blog for Die Nacht Ist Leben, at the very end of that sound file you can hear a chugging rhythm. That rhythmic element was made by Bruce McClure. The conception for this song that I had in my head was to have a quiet opening that explodes into a long harrowing middle section and the remnants of this explosion then become the coda and return.
Bruce McClure is an experimental film artist who feeds hand crafted loops through film projectors that generate blasts of flickering light and also the original pulse of sound. This sound is then fed through various guitar pedals to make (what I call) a “wall of terrifying delay." I have shared a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn with Bruce and various other artist types for the last 14 years. I'm leaving this studio behind at the end of March and as a parting gift I'm buying Bruce 14 raw oysters - one for each year he has subjected me to his "wall of terrifying delay." It's the least I could do. Did I mention that it's really loud. Recently they blew up the Kosciuszko Bridge that we are practically underneath to make way for a spanking brand new bridge. That explosion came close, but not quite, to rivaling Bruce's volume.
I have included a video I made of him working because a video of his working methods are worth far more than a ton of explanatory words that I can dream up.
Although we work with percussion players, ZXE does not have a full time active drummer in the band which means we're always thinking of ways to create rhythm whether we're banging on objects in my studio or finding and manipulating loops fed into Kaoss Pads, recording the repetitive grind of machines, etc.. I also wanted to reach out and work with other artists that I knew in NYC for this record since it was going to be a double album and here was an opportunity to do just that. I asked Bruce's permission if I could record him and then use that material for an underlying rhythm bed for ZXE to play over. I wound up recording over three hours of Bruce’s “wall of terrifying delay” and edited the three hours down to 25 minutes for ZXE to experiment with. I then scheduled a rehearsal with Tony and Pietro and was eager to present them with this strange, machine generated rhythm - but a funny thing happened before we got a chance to rehearse.
I met Reg Bloor.
Till next time,
Richard