ben dexter cooley

on sound journals

lately i have been fascinated by the idea of sound journals.

i have been a haphazard paper journaler for the past 4 years. as with most things my consistency ebbs and flows. but i like the tactical nature of it. word journaling helps me to think, reflect, plan, archive, remember.

i think of a sound journal as the same, but for audio. as a musician i put a huge amount of thought and work into my official "releases" (maybe too much thought). but there is so much music that i make, sounds that i explore, which never get published.

and that's ok--not everything needs to "out there". but sometimes i want to go back to a sound, or a patch, that i was fiddling with a few weeks back. it can be hard to remember where to start. a sound journal helps to catalogue and mark the sonic territories that i was once exploring. a sort of sonic breadcrumb.

much like word journaling, it is also interesting to listen to who and where i was at a given time period. what sounds were influencing and inspiring me. over the past few months i have started to track and archive these snippets of sound.

you can listen to them on AloneTone, a website similar to soundcloud. but unlike soundcloud (acquired in 2017 by hedge fund), the code is open source and it is free to use. i settled on alonetone as a hosting solution because:

"sound journaling" is still a loose concept and i am still gathering examples of what i mean here. but here are a few that inspired me, and that i think fall into this general family:

collections as formations

sometimes these journal entires may go on to become a larger object.

last year i put out a collection of tracks which are in this "sound journal" world called FORMATIONS 1. this collection sits in some liminal space between a jam and a traditional "song", and was largely inspired by Jim O'Rourke's Steamroom recordings. i hope to continue putting out these small collections.

in my head this sort of release is in between a "sound journal" and an EP or LP. i am settling on the term "formation" for this object—something concrete and self-sufficient, but not entirely finished or actualized. a vague outline, neither here nor there.

to use a literary example, in order of complexity:

journal entry --> essay --> book

might translate to:

sound entry --> formation --> album

reviewing my sound journal entries to find new "formations" has also been a rewarding creative process. i forget sounds that i once conjured, and this activitiy forces me to review what i did in the past.

if you know of any other sound journals email them to me at bendextermusic @ gmail dot com.