The Sound Of...

The Sound of Time

India’s Mix:

I’ve wanted to do a theme around time for a long time so I was super excited when Tom Lea and I decided to do it.

Perception of time and music are massively interlinked, there’s tonnes of research that looks into how different tempos affect how we perceive time. For example, music is used in supermarkets to make us stay longer, & in waiting rooms to reduce the subjective duration of time spent waiting. 

I start the mix with a recording of the clock in my bedroom. The clock is stuck on 21:40 because I haven’t changed the batteries since November. So the ticking is just stuck on the same second. I like how dull and monotonous it sounds. I should really change my batteries though…

After that I play Radiohead - Hunting Bears. This tune is considered to be free from musical time and time signature, the rhythm is intuitive and free-flowing (check out Free Time Music) 

I’ve included tunes that I feel have stood the test of time. I found some Enya CD’s down my street so I included a few of them in the mix. Including Aldebaran (played at 33rpm) & Boadicea. Pink Floyd - On the Run (48 mins) has definitely stood the test of time, what a powerful tune!

I’m sure everyone can relate to that feeling where you lose all sense of time when listening to music, and I’ve included some tunes in this mix that reflect that for me. I play Slackerbitch by Placebo (10 mins in), a tune that I loved a long time ago (over 10 years!), I used to play that loop on constantly guitar and just lose myself in it.

16mins in I play a piece called String Quintet in C Major, D.956 by Franz Schubert. Schubert was one of the leading composers to experiment with time signature. This article describes the piece well: In the work, he turns contrasting distortions of perceptual time into musical structure. Following the opening melody in the first Allegro ma non troppo movement, the second Adagio movement seems to move slowly and be far longer than it really is, then hastens and shortens before returning to a perception of long and slow. The Scherzo that follows reverses the pattern, creating the perception of brevity and speed, followed by a section that feels longer and slower, before returning to a percept of short and fast. 

Keeping in with the classical theme, I include an example of Rubato at (58mins). Rubato Is used in romantic period music. It has a expressive element whereby the composer deliberately sways out of time in order to give the sound a more natural, rhythmic flexibility whilst not losing pace.

After that I play Eudaemonia by Them Are Us Too (21mins). A tune introduced to me by my lovely friend Emily who was visiting from America during my preparation for the show. We haven’t seen each other in 3 years and it was so great to share music with each other. Raime - Passed Over Trail (51 mins) was also from Emily <3

I purposefully speed up and slow down a few tracks and played with the pitch a bit for obvious reasons. 42 mins in is Rockwell - Underpass played at 33rpm, I used to love this tune back when I played a lot of Drum and Bass, I think it works so well slowed down too. I’ve also slowed down a DJ Rashad tune at 1hour5mins in (Something 2 dance 2) as this sounds so soulful slowed down! RIP DJ Rashad. I’ve also played some tracks backwards.

The night before I saw Special Request at Tobacco dock, his set blew me away so I wanted to include one of his tunes. His jungle/old school influence obviously links into the time theme!

At (1hour 11mins) I play the sound of Gravitational Waves, one of the major scientific breakthroughs of our lifetime which favour’s Einstein’s theory of general relativity through measurable space-time (or something like that).

Tom Lea’s Mix:

When India originally said we were doing Time as the theme I was going to do a mix of tracks played at the wrong tempo. I’ve always been into the idea that music sounds totally different in different situations: when I first got an iPod as a kid I used to listen to an entire album just through the left earphone, then again on the right because some albums were so panned that it was like listening to two different records. Then you have records sounding better played at the wrong speed, and even in a v practical sense there’s two sets of monitors at the Local Action studio and demos never sound the same in both. It’s a constant reminder that there’s no such thing as perfect or true sound - it’s all to do with context, perspective and time - or at least, the time when you’re listening to something. 

 Anyway, I didn’t do that in the end - though I did keep the chopped and screwed version of Paul Wall ‘Girl’, which is one of my all-time fav records. There’s a lot of different things on this mix: some of it is lost Local Action demos that never got past the loop stage, which is often when music’s at its most truthful and powerful (there’s at least one Local Action release where I prefer the original drafts to the masters), some of it is songs that remind me of specific times in my life, and there’s no mixing and a lot of ambient layers and tape saturation - I wanted the whole thing to sound like that situation where you’re on a long-haul flight and you have headphones on but you’re drifting in and out of sleep for hours. I guess that’s the ultimate situation where you have no concept or time or timezones, right? 

 Centre of the mix is Ty Dolla Sign - ’Time’ which is about his brother getting a life sentence and puts all this shit we do in perspective really. Beyond that there’s music from Deadboy, Slackk, Shriekin, Lil Jabba, Tom Waits, Ezro, Sharp Veins, Yaroze Dream Suite, Yuki Kajiura, Erykah Badu and more