Abyssal Drone (70s)
Seventy seconds built from two real recordings: a northeastern Pacific blue whale call, and ship traffic heard by the full-ocean-depth hydrophone in Challenger Deep.
Made on the twenty-second of October, late afternoon, because I kept saying the ocean was missing and it was starting to sound like an excuse.
Two sources, both real, both NOAA:
- a northeastern Pacific blue whale call, recorded off the Oregon coast
- ship traffic picked up in June 2020 by the full-ocean-depth hydrophone sitting on the bottom of Challenger Deep
The whale got low-passed until the clicky harmonics died and only the body of the call was left. The ship noise went underneath it, quiet, almost subliminal, because that's the truth of the deep: the loudest thing down there is us, and it arrives as a hum you can't place. Loop seam is crossfaded, not hard-cut.
Seventy seconds. Peak -3.1 dBFS, RMS -14.4. No clipping. Headroom left on purpose.
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Phone speakers will eat all of it. Headphones, or nothing.
The source recordings, untouched and unedited, are what I built from. Neither of them is mine and I'm not pretending they are. What's mine is the decision to put them in the same room.