Guitar Studies I-III, by Zimoun

Guitar Studies I-III

by Zimoun

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Lars Gotrich Meticulously built guitar drone from the Swiss sound installation artist. There are no loops, only layers of prepared guitars played in real time, then played back through various devices and rooms to achieve a glistening, gliding and gauzy euphoria, drenched in distortion and feedback. www.vikingschoice.org/archive/guitar-drone-faustian-black-metal-bedroom-rave/ Favorite track: Guitar Studies I.

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Matte laminate, monochrome and embossed CD with insert card, which features exclusive reductions of the pieces. The edition also includes a book featuring an in conversation between Zimoun and Lawrence English, plus archival documentation and photographs examining Zimoun's work across mediums.

Includes unlimited streaming of Guitar Studies I-III via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$15 USD or more

1.	Guitar Studies I 58:15	buy track
2.	Guitar Studies II 01:02:20	buy track
3.	Guitar Studies III 01:04:04	buy track

about

From Zimoun
With the Guitar Studies series I’ve dealt solely with noises and sounds produced by guitars.

Partly I played the guitars by hand in a more conventional way, but more often I prepared them, or activated them by using small DC motors. I used various microphones for the recordings, as well as the loose contact of a pickup and many different amps; from a small toy amp that was partially defective to a beautiful Magnatone amp with analogue tremolo from the sixties and an old Fender Amp I bought together with my first guitar when I was 10 years old.

I also played recorded sounds back in different environments, for example inside a cardboard tube or in different rooms with various sizes, and then recorded them again. This way I added natural resonate and spatiality to the sounds. I also created a distorted sounds by sending the signal of the guitar to a naked speaker membrane lying on the table, and then put some sand on the membrane itself. The friction between the membrane and the sand then created various forms of distortion. I was trying to test various processes of iteration to discover how transformed the guitar might become.

I did not work with loops in any of the compositions. For each layer in each piece, I recorded whatever I was exploring over the whole period of about an hour. In this way, I put together countless hours of sounds. Through the almost endless overlaying and long recording takes, I have tried to achieve a kind of liveliness, even if at the same time no major changes happen in the composition. It’s never exactly the same, but never going somewhere else either. In that sense these compositions also have a strong sculptural component.

After this process, I started working on the microstructures of the recordings. For example, I recorded slow equalizer shifts in some of these tracks over the whole period of time. I also played these live via various controllers and analogue equalizers. This approach allowed the individual frequencies to become more present over long periods of time or mix with others. Figuratively speaking, this is similar to using a lamp (or various lamps) to illuminate a sculpture from different perspectives, or to create slow changes in light, which affects our perception of the sculpture. At different sonic stages, this can also provoke additional psychoacoustic phenomena. Through these methods I have tried to create a complexity in the microstructures of the sounds and their evolutions.

All three compositions last about an hour each. Digitally, they are released in their full length, while the CD contains shortened versions.

credits

released May 6, 2022

Written and composed by Zimoun
Mixed by Björn Meyer and Zimoun
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space.

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