Runtime: 32 minutes
ASMR.WAV (EvolvingPortals) - Produced by Dutchyyy
"I should have saved this hours ago"
Backstory:
This isn't the most technical or intricate piece of audio I've ever shaped, However is by far one of the most important and pivotal tracks for me personally, out of everything I've ever made since I began creating music in back in 1995. But Why?
This was very first long form Portal I captured on my SP404, but to understand the significance of this recording. Let me start from the beginning.
What are these Portals?
Portals are live recorded sessions, capturing the entire process of making music in real time. Nothing is Finalized, all mistakes have a purpose, all fumbles build to evolving ideas. The Patient Ear is rewarded.
How did we get here?
I've created multiple albums worth of songs from 2017-Present. Yet I haven't released an official album since I dropped "Traversal" on Cassette shortly after my mother passed late 2016 while I was living in Los Angles. After a lifetime of living in apartments, getting evicted nearly each time for noise complaints, after couch surfing while traveling and Traversing across the country bouncing from Los Angeles to New York non stop. I moved back to Tampa and finally rented my first house in April of 2017.
No more noise complaints, No Relationships to distract me. No room mates or family. Just solo and super isolated alone in a 2 bedroom house a half a mile away from the ocean (Gulf of Mexico). Living alone, So close to nature in walking distance with no one around that I could bother or that would question what or how long I was creating. (if you ever lived with a producer, you probably understand the pain of listening to us audition 600 snares in a row before finally choosing one, and that's just choose one drum haha) I was able to experiment and create endlessly. I'd black out for 16 hrs at time with extreme creative tunnel vision and come to, realizing I was on my 40th version of flipping the same sample. I would have so many different variations I liked, I could never choose or settle on which version I would choose to make a final beat.
There was something about finality that I wanted to defy with every fiber in my being. I just couldn't find the desire to complete or polish tracks. I put so so so much love into my official albums. A lot of emotion, time & energy go into making long elaborate journeys that flow like a story. So in an age where albums maybe have about 10 to 12 one minute tracks, and algorithms that make it near impossible to reach the fans we've spent all these years building up. I found myself needing to slowdown and re-evaluate how to navigate in this brave new music industry. I put a pause on releasing new albums. However I never stopped creating. Truth is, I've made more music from 2017 to present, then I made from 1995-2016 combined. All while having the most fun i've ever had experimenting while no one was focused on me. So many long sessions of inspiration and I wasn't capturing any of it. I began thinking about music in a different way. Thinking about our favorite albums. The collection of songs that only last a few minutes each. Knowing that to get to those refined final versions. Hours or days of creating went into shaping them into the tracks we end up with. I thought about albums like Miles Davis "Bitches Brew" and Arthur Verocai's 1972 self titled album and thought to myself, how crazy would it be if we had access to the entire creative process for those albums, or any of your favorite artists albums. The jam sessions and sketches before they turned into the truncated and finalized versions we ended up with.. Magic tends to happen during the experimental phase of music production, a lot of which is never heard on refined and released songs. Think about it like this, you ever noticed how people do their best work when the pressure of being recorded isn't there. Ever did something so inspired and just couldn't replicate it once you remembered to press record. I became obsessed with wanted to document those possible moments of magic, mistakes and all but unfortunately, I wasn't able to pull this off in Ableton alone, Id capture long takes, but the moment I pressed the stop button, it would stop the recording (resample) which led to hundreds of recorded files and killed my hard drive space very quickly. I needed an external source to capture everything I was doing on my computer. So I decided to stream on twitch. I would stream my sessions for hours, and forget I was streaming, completely neglecting chat because I so tunnel in the creative zone. I would start to read back the chat after I ended the stream and realized people where trying to interact and ask me questions and felt neglected. I felt bad because I wasn't purposely ignoring anyone, I just have severe ADHD and I get lost in the creative process, constantly moving from idea to idea which is why I wanted to begin capturing the entire process in the first place so I could try and understand how I work while in this meditative state. People started making a big deal about me not interacting with chat when I was live so I had to disclaimer my streams with intent and label them as a Portal opening inside my home that allows you to just see and hear what I'm doing but I'm lost in the portal and can't see you. This went over well and people would sit and watch me for hours at time just to see where I was going to take things. The twitch culture was changing and I started to notice more and more new people come in and lose interest when I didn't answer their questions. So on January 4th 2019. I promoted my first live stream in which I would be periodically popping out of my creative zone to make sure I could interact with chat. I began the stream in the morning playing ambient, improv keys and practiced looking at chat, I then began to go thru some sessions, allowing chat to look thru the file names and choose which session I would open. It was dope, like I was hanging out with people in my house, but I'm still me, so I'd go long periods where I'd get lost in a project and forget about chat haha. As someone who loves a challenge, I decided to let chat send me samples to flip. The stream ended up being 10 hours, and because I was unable to hyper focus in my zone and felt the pressure of knowing chat was watching and craving interaction, I had this voice in the back of head to constantly keep changing up the sample. Which worked out because it forever altered how I approach sessions.
You can watch the entire 10 hour live stream here for Free.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o8T4qm6kHwuos6h_3cLbkYgX8QvDBXkb/view?usp=sharing
This session would end up fundamentally changing how I approach music and ended up becoming the first #EvolvingPortal A project file I would revisit over and over for the next 3 years. Constantly resampling what I did the previous session and evolving it into something new. I perfected this method by 2020 and went absolutely bonkers evolving multiple portals until I eventually forgot how to create a normal, short song haha.
But it all began with this Project file titled:
"I should have saved this hours ago" or "ishstha" for short.
https://dutchmassive.bandcamp.com/album/portals-i-should-have-saved-this-hours-ago
This isn't every session for this project file. If you inspect the Artwork, you will see how many different versions exist. I still have never exported the initial version I began creating in that 10hr live stream, but the version on bandcamp has the 2 most recent Portals I recorded in 2021 plus the video attached in the bandcamp link is a truncated snippet version of the newest most evolved version in which I did all the visuals for as well. Plus, one other portal which brings us back to this 1 of 1 you are reading about now and why it's so important to me.
Capturing my sessions on twitch was nice. But converting twitch streams to audio files would result in super degraded audio quality. So I first attempted to capture my audio coming out of my audio interface and into my portable Tascam-DR05 but all the recordings would come out thin and didn't sound anything like they did in Ableton. I sold my OG SP404 a few years prior, but remembered I could resample for an extended amount of time when I had it even though I never used it in that manner. So I copped a SP404SX from the homie, even though I wanted the OG404 again, I wanted to test this method out as quick as possible so I payed to have SX shipped overnight and went to make sure I bought any cable I would need to execute pulling this simple task off. The SP arrived the following evening after the sun went down. I opened up the project file "I should have saved this hours ago" created a new version, added a few new samples into the project for some new creative energy. Hooked up the SP404, Pressed Record and thus was born the first, long form, in the moment live captured Portal as one long file.
ASMR.WAV
I've gotten way more advanced in my methods evolving portals since, While this may not be my favorite Portal. It is the most pivotal and special one since it was the first time, I realized I would be able to pull of my vision.
Since then, I've recorded thousands of hours worth of Portals. 32 minutes is now a short "song" to me. Most ranging from 1hr to a few hours each. Due to live, real time nature of Portals, if you don't have patience or faith in where I'm going take things, I recommend approaching long Portals like you would putting on a new record you found to dig for samples, and maybe skip around at first, because most portals are albums inside albums with the dopest music I've ever made tucked in between the weirdest experimental pockets. In a world obsessed with short form content, Portals have no chance of surviving in terms of marketing or monetary value. All streaming services like Spotify pay fractions of a penny per stream. I can't imagine a 3 hour opus getting millions of unskipped plays. I had to have bandcamp, specifically and manually increase the size of my uploads because the wavs were so large, I couldn't even fit a fraction of a portal, which brings me to the other difficulty. Attempting to separate and/or name hours of improv recording that changes so often while also revisiting the early parts for new passes to evolve the ideas in different ways. Because of these issues and file size limits, Most portals remain unreleased with a few exceptions that exist on bandcamp, even more for bandcamp subscribers and even more exist on "Dutchyyy VS the algorithms" master vault cloud drive and because that drive holds most of released discography also, I have to be selective with what I upload to not max out the 200gb limit which I'm quickly approaching with 142 of 200gb used.
So for this Auction, I'm going to do something different.
*****Anyone who bids on this auction will receive a link to my master cloud based vault "Dutchyyy vs the Algorithms" of nearly my full released and unreleased discography. *****
and
*****Winner of the auction will get a 1TB Samsung SSD portable drive that not only holds everything on the cloud drive, but all the Portals unreleased in super long raw form directly from their master folders strait from the SP404SX and All the long videos and twitch streams that are too large to upload anywhere*****
Be the first to cosign this record!
@dutchyyy owns this record