Home Adrone by Christopher Nosnibor

As the adage goes, necessity is the mother of all invention, and that was pretty much the inspiration for this project. It isn’t all about lockdown… but it mostly is. With restrictions placing extreme limits on both live music and socialising more generally, doing what I usually do and enjoy doing – namely shouting at people against a backdrop of mangled noise – is not an option. And I’ve also found that I simply can’t shout with my family at home, and even with schools back, recording shouted-word passages isn’t really an option while my wife is on endless Teams teleconferences in the living room. Besides, I do find doing spoken word into a mic both uncomfortable and unsatisfactory, both as an activity and, more often than not, the end result. And so I’m deprived of that form of cathartic release.

However, I need to do something, and making noise is something I find quite therapeutic.

I’ve always been observant and curious about random objects and sounds around me, and while I remain at home I’ve found myself tuning into these more than ever. The washing machine, the boiler, the kitchen and bathroom extractor fans, post through the letter box… all of these sounds that occupy airspace but largely go unobserved, became new focal points. I recorded as many different things as I could, again, using the equipment to hand, namely my Sony Xperia ZX1. Many weren’t particularly successful. However, the whining whirr of my electric shaver and the awful, wheezing grind of my laptop booting up both appealed to my ear. The laptop had been sounding this way for almost a year now, and I feared it wouldn’t last much longer: with a replacement on the way, this would be one of the last times I would use it.

But as interesting – to me – as these sounds were, what I was really interested in was their potential to be manipulated as noise sources. And so I ‘remixed’ them. In many respects, there was nothing particularly subtle about my process, but that wasn’t the point. This was a noise project, not an ambient project, delicately weaving fragments of found sound together.

An EP made sese: the ‘original’ versions, accompanied by the remixes. Perhaps less abrasive than my previous audio works, this one is nevertheless fairly harsh in places, and is best heart at moderate volume or greater.