Steven Lambke and Jimmie Kilpatrick – Friendship Traces

Foundational label-mates on the artist-run You’ve Changed Records, meet for a surprising collaboration in instrumental electro/acoustic improvisation, composition, and home-studio creative processes. Friendship Traces is a post-dub, post-minimilist, post-guitar, post-mixtape playground of bespoke drum samples, melodica, and distorted bass.

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A CONVERSATION

Jimmie:
I use the Elektron Digitakt. It’s a tactile drum sampler with keypads that make the most satisfying clicking sounds when you play them. It feels like a piece of medical grade equipment. It also has a bit of a homemade vibe, in-terms of how plain and simple the enclosure is. It looks both futuristic and retro at the same time. Rather than using pre-existing sample packs, I generated bespoke samples for every song on the album. I sliced up the samples on the Digitakt, stretched and mangled them into new sounds. I was thinking about acousmatic music while we were working on this record. Music that is created through divorcing sounds from their original context via tape-editing-studio-techniques originated in the 1950s. These techniques include slowing sounds down, speeding sounds up, playing sounds backwards, layering sounds and copying and repeating sounds. This is how I created all the drum sounds on the record. What sounds like a bass drum might have originally been the sound of a knock on the door, that was slowed, filtered, cut up and manipulated using attack, sustain, decay and release envelopes. For our record I wanted to utilize EDM programming and editing techniques, but instead of using synthesized sounds I wanted to use acoustic sounds. I sampled acoustic instruments like tambourines and hand claps. I created a dogma for each track that typically called for samples that came from one source only. I like to design limits for myself when making things; I tend to get paralyzed by decisions. Working with limited samples and sounds helped me to focus on the shaping of things rather than the choosing of things. In many ways, I saw this process as a challenge. I would open a can of sparkling water, hear the crisp snap of the tab and think “can I make a beat for Steve out of this”?

Steve:
They arrived like letters. What’s in the envelope? Beats and sounds, falling out like glitter. A conversation began, question and response. I played the Fender bass and the Suzuki melodion over the tracks that Jimmie sent. The bass as grounding, the melodion as air, air in a small room in front of a microphone, all the clicks and clacks of plastic and my breathing. The simplicity of the tools, the slippery-ness of their position, half-instrument, half-toy, reminds me to play, reminds me of a shared presence, a “thereness” in the world. Because of their accessibility, because they do not require much in terms of acquisition or external accumulation, they hold, without distraction, a reminder of the world-as-given, a waiting-there, all potential, all possibility. Is “what can we make of this?” always the first question? After a while, after an accumulation of improvisation and composition and building, I mixed the recordings, like editing a conversation, the surprise of what you said, the sound of it, the way it moves. I cut and tore construction paper into shapes. Colours made bright beside each other.