Disquiet0409 - Uncanny

My creation for the Disquiet Junto Project 409: Spooky 3.0 Read about the assignment here: https://disquiet.com/2019/10/31/disquiet-junto-project-0409-spooky-3-0/ Thinking about what makes music Spooky, I decided to consciously avoid the classic culturally-conditioned, received notions of musical spookiness that I could easily fall into, e.g.: Tolling bells, pipe organ, theremin, harmonic and Hungarian minor scales, etc. I tried thinking of recent films that had spooky soundtracks, and the first recent one that came to mind was The Favourite. Its soundtrack falls into a kind of “uncanny valley” between music and not-music. I read a bit about it and the film's sound designer, Johnnie Burn, has said basically that: "There was no composer on this film; we were working a lot in that space between music and sound..." I also recalled another recent-but-not-quite-recent film with a spooky soundtrack: Under the Skin. Turns out Johnnie Burn was also the sound designer on it! I guess I am now officially a fan. (Though I still consider myself an Elfmaniac.) I wanted to make sounds that could resemble something familiar, but not quite. To make this track, I started with a public domain recording of a Sedge Warbler: https://freesound.org/people/SiliconeSound/sounds/475048/ I reversed it, applied a gliding stretch so it starts out at full speed and slows to 1/8 speed by the end (i.e. down 3 octaves). I chopped it up into 7 pieces and made the pieces overlap at tail to head. Automated pans make each piece move gradually toward the center. Additional tracks: I played two analog synth tracks (on Prophet Rev2) using bespoke patches. The tonal patch is using a 7-limit just tuning that repeats every septimal tritone (not-octave-repeating). I applied distortion to the kick drum part I played (using puffy legato mallet) for “I am the Sweeper” by Diane Marie Kloba: https://music.dianemariekloba.com/track/i-am-the-sweeper Everything was mixed with multi-tap delay and nonlinear reverb. Image is color-processed version of Acrocephalus schoenobaenus 1 by Marek Szczepanek, from Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acrocephalus_schoenobaenus_1_(Marek_Szczepanek)-2.jpg More on the Disquiet Junto at: https://disquiet.com/junto/