Natural Snow Buildings
Natural Snow Buildings (formed 1998) are a duo that creates unique music blended between post-rock, free/psychedelic/ritual folk, drone and ambient.
Their album Daughter of Darkness clocks in at 7 hours 20 of material with single tracks ranging from 5 minutes to 45. The structure of each ‘song’ is generally centred around a droning guitar/dulcimer-esque theme ( with a heavy bed of echo/delay, distortion) that repeats, sometimes subtly changes over time. Many songs become more ritualistic with chanting, shakers and drums. Their albums are often quite overdriven and lo-fi, contributing to the improvised folk aesthetic.
Grouper
Grouper is the solo project of artist, musician, singer-songwriter and producer Liz Harris who makes reverb-heavy psychedelic folk. Acoustic in nature, the majority of her music is drowned in reverb to the point that the vocals become part of the instrumental.
Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill
The double album – A I A : Dream Loss and Alien Observer – saw more of an ambient focus and is a personal favourite of mine.
In context
In my radio piece, I will be using convolution reverbs, to give the soundscape a sense of place. I’ll use a long decay to make the room seem larger due to the impossibly tall ceiling and to accentuate the wet (dripping water) sounds.
At the current moment, I’m not sure how to implement music in my piece. The music in the dramatisations of M.R. James in the BBC Radio Collection that inspired my dream often came across as quite cliched, with the sounds of waterphones and strings.
I will likely use synthesis to create drones inspired by the film, The Innocents, what I watched last year and have previously written about.