Market reflections, part 1

"My approach to the piece involved a lot of processing. A number of times. And then, at some point, recording a couple of sessions, improvising with the pieces made up to then. This piece is half of the slightly edited and pruned output of those two sessions."Part of my process involved finding some videos on YouTube of the market where the recording was made, and then running a couple of pieces of that video footage through a Max MSP patch I had made which turns video into midi - this in turn was routed into the DAW to play back bits of the original. There were also a couple of sessions with results pitched up and down and through effects and some plugins too, and then that whole process happened again a few times with the bits produced too...."When going through the video footage, I spent some time thinking about what it was showing. You could see it was a busy market, with lots of stalls, lots of colour, stalls with all sorts of delicious tasty treats, and stalls selling bright and gaudy stuff for the tourists too. The videos I found were also mainly shot by Australian tourists, so there was probably a certain amount of selectivity going on in what was being shown. The field recording has a nice gentle feel - murmurings, bits of background radio and music, low chatter, there's a nice relaxed slow feel about things, but the market seems very much for the tourists, who are wandering around with their cameras. The two bits of footage I used included one showing a lovely smiling lady preparing and selling some tasty-looking food - care, hospitality, nurture, love - quiet and kind, but an exchange. And in the background of another bit I spotted a local chap - a man - down the side of a stall flipping through and counting a wad of money. It felt like two ends of a spectrum. Thought this all quite revealing about the place and its dynamics. Made me realise that there were obviously layers that could be peeled back."The pieces were and weren't made with these thoughts in mind (mainly I was just playing with, and having fun with the sounds), but they did serve to shape the arrangement and shape of the final whole afterwards, moving through sections reflecting these types of thoughts."Koh Samui night market reimagined by Sum Crossings.