Oversound Interview with Ross Aitken

This is an interview with Ross Aitken about his Oversound project, a musical, photographic and psychogeographical exploration of the London Overground's East London Line. The interview was conducted for an upcoming feature in the Hackney Citizen. There wasn't enough space in the print edition for the whole interview, but Ross's in-depth answers about the creative process behind the project are too good to go unpublished. So here is the entire interview, which is a pretty fascinating and inspiring read.

You can listen to the project below, or with a full interactive map at http://oversound.co.uk/:

Zygmunt: Firstly, what was your main inspiration for the project? Do you use the East London line frequently, do you live in the area? What was it about this particular stretch of rail?

Ross: The inspiration for this project came from a desire to try and combine some of my interests outside of design into a single piece of work. I've been interested in music for as long as I can remember and have spent the past year especially trying to incorporate music in my work as a designer.  Urban exploration has also fascinated me for a long time and these were the two main driving forces behind the project. 

In particular, two existing projects provided key sources of inspiration. The most prominent is Funf; a concept album created by a British producer called Emika. To produce the album, Emika spent months producing field recordings in Berlin's famous Berghain nightclub, sampling the sound of echos, clunking pipes and even its strobe lights. These field recordings were then given to a selection of producers who were asked to each produce a track using the sample recordings only. Something about this project just struck me as being so simple and elegant and the idea really stuck with me.   

The other major inspiration was an app called Secret London which basically consists of a google map of the city that features unusual places to visit; landmarks, restaurants, museums, clubs, bars, all of which have been submitted by the users.  London has so much to offer its residents that some of the most interesting stuff often gets lost in the crowd, but this app makes discovering Londons hidden treasures that much easier.  Again, I wanted to replicate this theme in my own work in some way. 

Eventually I put two and two together and developed the concept for Oversound in order to produce a soundtrack to accompany the exploration of the city.  Since I rarely travel without music it seemed logical to try and combine these activities but it was also an opportunity for me to become directly involved in the process of music production. 

Also, whilst developing the project, I came across a practice known as Psychogeography which involves exploring the links between ones environment and the emotions produced by it. This really helped to influence the overall direction of the project. 

I have been living in Dalston for the past two years and have a lot of friends in South London so I was very familiar with the overground and the East London Line in particular. It was an obvious choice for me when I started the project.  I think traveling by overground train or bus is always a more intriguing experience then the tube because you are offered a view of the city around you. However, unless you make the effort to actually get off the train and explore these places then they remain nothing more then a view, something familiar yet unknown and intangible. After two years of traveling that same route on a fairly regular basis, I wanted to know what really went on in all those places I had seen from the train window and with this project I wanted to provide other commuters the chance to experience them too, all be it in a fairly abstract sense.

Z: How and why were the ten artists/musicians chosen?

R: A few of my collaborators on the project were musicians that I knew personally and was interested in working with. Those people I approached directly but aside from that I used social networking to find the rest of the musicians. In particular, I sent messages to the members of two Facebook music groups, one of which, SoundFjord, is dedicated to sound art and linked to a sound art gallery of the same name in Tottenham. 

In choosing the artists, I wanted there to be a diversity that I knew I was unlikely to find by simply recruiting my own friends so thats why I chose to leave it up to fate in a sense, although I obviously listened to previous work by each musician before accepting them for the project.

I knew from the outset that I was only looking for ten artists as this corresponded with the number of stations on the train route.

Z: Almost all of the musicians use electronic elements, synths etc., and there are very few acoustic instruments audible, with the exception of a few pianos, some of which seem to be field recordings anyway. Is there a reason you went for electronic musicians, is it to do with the nature of sampling / use of field recordings in a practical sense, or was it an aesthetic choice?

R: It was never my intention for the project to result in purely electronic music but I think this was a fairly natural conclusion due to the necessity for the artists to work with the samples I had recorded. I think that having explained the process in my initial call for artists, those who agreed to be involved chose the project because they were used to producing electronic music and knew it was something they would be comfortable with, rather then me choosing them for that reason. 

Early on I actually asked the artists to vote on whether they wanted to use their own instrumentation on the project or stick purely to the samples I had recorded. 6 out of 10 voted to use their own instruments in the production so we went with that. It just turned out that the majority of the musicians stuck to using electronic instrumentation for the project with the most notable exception being Lee Chapman who recorded his own piano piece for his track Canada Water - Surrey Quays. 

Z: And what was the brief you gave them?

R: I began by asking each of the ten musicians to chose one of the journeys on the route. Then, along with the samples I had produced, I supplied the artists with visual resources that I had created in the form of videos and photographs of each area which I instructed them to consider before beginning their production. The idea was that the resource material would directly influence the artists mood and subsequently their choice of instrumentation, pace and structure for the track would reflect this. 

Although I was mostly interested in each individuals response to the brief and the section of the journey that they had chosen I did provide the participants with a set of rules designed to ensure the project was coherent.

First of all, having made the samples for each journey, I separated the sound files into different folders for each part of that journey. For example, in the sample folder for Dalston to Haggerston, there was one subfolder containing samples from Ridley Road Market, another with samples from Gillette Square, another from Kingsland Road and so on. I requested that the musicians use at least one sample from each of these subfolders in order to create a detailed audio-portrait of the area, though how prominently each sample featured in their final composition was entirely up to them. 

I also instructed the artists not to place samples in a geographically chronological order within the track since this would mean the tracks only matched the journey in one direction. I wanted the tracks to be interchangeable so the soundtrack would work regardless of whether the listener was travelling from north to south or vice versa.  There for, I instructed the musicians not to think of their track as the journey from Dalston to Haggerston specifically (for example), but rather a reflection of the space between those two stations

I also created a folder of "shared samples" for each musician. This folder contained samples from the journeys immediately before and after there own and both of those samples had to be used.  The idea behind this was to try and allow some of the atmosphere to transfer between the tracks, with elements of different tracks being detectable throughout the soundtrack, hopefully making the overall soundtrack more seamless. In regards to this, I also requested that throughout the production process, each artist discussed and compared their piece with those that would be placed immediately before and after theirs in the soundtrack. 

I also gave each artist a very specific track length that they had to stick to. This roughly reflected the time their section of the journey took by train, shortened by a few seconds to avoid any overlap when listening to the soundtrack.

Z: When making the field recordings on foot, what kind of equipment did you use? 

R: I used two different types of portable directional microphone to make my sample recordings. I started out using a Tascam which had two built in microphones that could be rotated to pick up sound from different directions. It also came with an external microphone which was useful for certain circumstances but ultimately I found the Tascam was too prone to picking up distortion and feedback so I started using a Zoom recorder with a built-in mic only. This proved far easier to use with more dependable results so I used the Zoom for the majority of the project.

Z: Did anyone notice you making the recordings and react? 

R: It was interesting to see peoples reactions depending on where I was making the recordings. In some situations it was necessary to not only alert people to my presence but ask their permission to make a recording. Aside from this though, I quickly learned it was easier to make my recordings as subtly as possible in order to capture an authentic atmosphere and avoid confrontation. I remember one person on Ridley Road Market was particularly obstructive and took real offense to my recording, even though I wasn't remotely concerned with whatever it was he was doing. Most people however, either pretended not to notice me or else were intrigued and even helpful which was nice.  It prompted a lot of interesting conversations. 

Z: How did you choose what to record? Some of the recordings are obviously public, like market traders and bicycles, but some, like the man growling “stop that fucking childish shit…never grow up do ya” on Haggerston-Hoxton or the kids on Shoreditch Hight Street-Whitechapel seem like less public but more telling moments. How did those come about?

R: This all relates back to the concept of Psychogeography.  It was my intention to discover aspects of each neighbourhood I walked through that would speak for themselves in a sense. I made the walk from Dalston to New Cross a number of times over the weeks I was recording just looking for interesting places that I felt would betray something of the atmosphere and character of an area. If it was something architectural for example then I would photograph it and these photographs were provided to the musicians as PDFs. More fleeting moments were captured on video and a short film was also created for each section of the route and presented to the artists. 

For the samples, I was really trying to record things that were not only geographically unique to an area but that would produce interesting sounds that would not necessarily exist elsewhere. Therefore, while there are indeed more generic sounds like cars and bicycles, I did not simply record the sound of a road, since roads are everywhere, but instead I wanted the sound of a cars echo in the Rotherhithe tunnel for example or the bicycles on the canal tow path in Dalston.

Moments like that audio sample you mentioned usually came from my personal interaction with people in the area which was a really interesting experince for me. That particular vocal sample came from some mechanics at Cremer Street Garage near Hoxton station. I had approached them to ask if they'd mind me making a recording there as I felt the garage had a lot of character and really said something about East London that is not so easy to find any more. Thankfully they were happy to help and were wonderful to record. Aside from the obvious sounds of tools and machinery there were some priceless examples of cockney banter that are seldom heard just walking down the street, especially in more gentrified areas like Dalston. 

Z: Some of the tracks also seem to feature beats that mirror the sound of trains -- I’m thinking especially of Theo Alexander’s Wapping-Rotherhide. Trains are naturally rhythmic things, and the Overground seems especially musical to me as its rails seem to sing or produce a note before it pulls in to or leaves a platform. I know the project was an attempt in some ways to escape the confines of the train, but do you think that elements of railway sounds snuck back in?

R: Yes definitely. One musician did actually request that some samples were made from inside the train though I was keen to avoid this as I felt it was unnecessary to include sounds that the listener was already being bombarded with. Still, I feel it was inevitable that the train provided inspiration in terms of the tracks pace and structure and I think an example of that is present on most of the tracks to a certain extent.  For example, on the original mix of James Thompson's Haggerston - Hoxton the track slowed down gradually towards the end to represent the train rolling to a halt at the next station. Lee Chapman's Canada Water - Surrey Quays also mimics the trains underground journey; grinding and echoing through a tunnel in its first half before emerging into the the outside world; represented by the piano piece at the end of the track.  

Z: Some of the tracks stop quite abruptly, whereas others fade out or end more formally. Was it a challenge for the artists to produce such short tracks? Did you have to cut any down?

R: Yes, I think all the artists had some difficultly in making such short pieces but I didn't cut any of them down personally. The only editing I performed was mastering, which I did on all the tracks in order to make sure they were consistent with one another and fitted together as part of the soundtrack.

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A feature on Oversound will be published in September's Hackney Citizen.