Gular Fluttering by Hello Spiral

Part II in a further trilogy. Part I being Picketing the Remnants.

At the beginning of the year I needed to make a track for the Tokinogake ‘Plain Music’ compilation.
I combed through my sound archive to find some viable seeds for my track, which I unceremoniously dumped into a folder on my desktop.

One of the things I didn’t end up using was a recording of seagulls I made in 2010

I was at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Minehead, the one curated by Matt Groening. We were staying in a ground floor chalet and on either the Saturday or the Sunday I woke up after a very full night of drink and drugs to a couple of hundred seagulls in the field directly outside our window, being very vocal. At the time I had a Motorola flip phone and I placed it on the windowsill, recording, and went back to bed.

Despite the audio being absolutely crunched through such a lofi mic, I love that I can still discern my girlfriend at the time snoring and making sleep noises, and also the conversation of some passing workmen or festival goers. The drone that eventually comes in is a layering/looping of all the ‘silent’ parts of this recording.

A habit of mine for 20 years now is to write down words and phrases that resonate with me or I find amusing, as potential track and album titles. Over the years this has progressed from scribbled lists in small pads and on post-it notes, to a dedicated digital archive.
12 days ago I was having a private online conversation with a noise/drone artist, to let him know I was catching up on his new releases and how much I was enjoying them.
One that I mentioned happened to feature a cover photo of a seagull, and he said ‘I love that seagull, watched (and mostly heard) him grow from egg’
I immediately saved the last half of that sentence to my archive.

The following day (19/08/24) I went for a walk and took lots of pictures, which is what I like to do on walks, as well as listen to music. One of the pictures I took is now the cover of this album.
The seagull recording from 2010 and the conversation about my friend’s favourite seagull I had saved were not on my mind when I did so.
But in the next half hour they floated up into my mind and I realised I had the seeds for the next chapter of this new trilogy.

I should reveal that back in January I did not just drag the seagull flip phone recording out of my archive. There was another version of this recording I had titled ‘robot hell’. Presumably a version I had processed the same year, or possibly 2011 (the file has a ‘date modified 2011’ tag in the metadata)

This version is clearly slowed down, and also further crunched and ruined/mulched in various unpleasant ways.

Obviously the natural thing to do would be to make it even more unpleasant. And so I did some freeform piercing oscillator + delay improvisations over it. Though I kept the volume to a polite level, I still wanted the gulls to be the stars of the show.

The final track is me drawing seagulls in MIDI combined with an edited down long recording of me and a friend walking to a supermarket discussing thick footballers (for some reason) which was interrupted by an incongruous pack of seagulls in North London.