James Belflower

HIST Soundtrack

In September 2022, Calamari Press published my collaboration with Matthew Klane, HIST: A Graphic Novel. The images are almost exclusively sourced from 19th Century steel engravings that framed the anachronistic sections from our source text, “CHAPTERS,” a collection of excerpts from James Fenimore Cooper novels. Through handcraft, digitization, and experimental digital processing, I altered them. The images, as Nick Francis Potter writes, are “glitched, distorted, and swimming in digital debris, resulting in a noisy-beautiful poetics steeped in granular horror, punk, and bursts of neon vaporwave.”

As I filtered, collaged, and digitally painted the pages, I kept hearing their energetic visual gestures. The dynamism of their digital materiality resonated deeply for me and I wanted to find their music. So I started composing a soundtrack for the book. The trial and error generation of new material consisted largely of collecting field recordings and noise objects from a variety of locations both natural and domestic. Using my brand new LOM Basic Uchos to record the sound of a storm gathering over the zip-zip of my brother’s fly-fishing line at Fish Lake in Utah, or finding that the prongs on our dishwasher rack are particularly resonant. Many of these were filtered through Bastl Instruments Thyme, before making their way into Ableton Live and undergoing a variety of other deformations.

It was important to me that many of the noise objects be used in live performances, reflecting my preoccupation with destabilizing boundaries between digital, visual, and auditory textures. While the relationship between these diverse materials was not always direct, in some cases objects appear in both forms. For example, a 3D rendering of the sharp outer shell of a chestnut is incorporated on the front cover. This same shell is used in live performances to generate the brittle granular cloud that accompanies the galloping melody at the beginning of “Thicket On the Prairie.” Blurring and translating between mediums, in order to translate the source’s unique materiality is one of the guiding concerns for the book and audio versions of HIST.

I am still composing the complete soundtrack, but Matthew and I are performing excerpts from it in the New York area, including a performance at Unnameable Books in Amherst, and a performance/talk at Endicott College. Hopefully we’ll see you at an upcoming show!

I am still composing the complete soundtrack, but Matthew and I are performing excerpts from it in the New York area, including a performance at Unnameable Books in Amherst, and a performance/talk at Endicott College. Hopefully we’ll see you at an upcoming show!