Andrew: At first, to come up with a composition, we were thinking about word association games but then started to consider collaborations we already have formed. This led us to our shared Spotify and as it was near new year Spotify’s seemingly curatorial algorithm had provided us with our most enjoyed list of 2019. We decided we would record ourselves reading the list, the voice speaking would be the one who laid claim to being responsible for it. Turns out after sharing music for so long it is now impossible to un-pick the tangled web of our music tastes. We did like the idea of working with our shared spaces and expanding the collaboration with the non-humans that affect our everyday lives. This led us to recording the objects around us from our flat. A collaboration with everything from the kettle to the squeaky floorboards by the kitchen door, from the cars outside to wine glasses. These recordings were then mixed and, after realising that the 120 on the mixing program was counting bars not seconds, these noises have been composed/squished into a two minute ambient piece. Listening back to the mix it seems that our flat sounds creepy, perhaps the sound work is an evocation of the house spirits (Rosie’s was a G&T and mine a whisky). We have asked the non-human collaborators for their comments on this process, but they have been finding it hard to type.  

Rosie: We spent a long time coming up with and dismissing possible ideas for how to go about this - neither of us had really worked with sound before and to start with the collaborative aspect made it difficult to settle on any one idea. In the end the idea of seeing what we had in our very immediate surroundings that we could make interesting noises with probably came as much from musical incompetence and unwillingness to record ourselves saying things as anything else. Once we actually started doing this though it progressed into something more interesting and became some bizarre collaboration not just between the two of us but also the place we live as we wandered round shaking things and dropping things and running off with the microphone to catch the washing machine beeping or the floorboards creaking. We (ok Andrew) put the clips into FL studio and after a lot of collaborative failure to work out how the hell to make it fit to two minutes managed to layer up all the clips. Somehow the most mundane of objects, given voices, come together into something quite unnervingly organic and bodily. It was a lot of fun as a process, something neither of us would or could have done individually and I’ve learnt a lot about the musical potential of a roll of parcel tape and the contents of a recycling bin.