Stray wool is a project by Pedro Figueiredo, a musician and software developer living on the southeast coast of England. His work embraces imperfections, repetition, and stillness, creating pieces that hover on the edge of dissolution.
Beyond his solo work, he is half of improvisation duo Listening Service (with Ollie Briggs), and helped establish the Ramsgate Noise Institute.
There are two parts to this. I started with fairly simple improv setups, which is why most of the track here were recorded with a small Mackie mixer and a Sony D6C Walkman. As I accumulated tracks and ideas started to solidify, I moved to writing some parts beforehand, sampling, mangling, and arranging. In any case, we're still talking about 3 or 4 voices, I am not comfortable with a lot of things going on as I record everything live (which is handy when you then play live).
I haven't released a long-form work since 2022 I think, this particular release was very therapeutic - record everything (which I don't usually do, I know) but at the same time find the common threads and put together something cohesive.
1. Caroussel
I bought a music box in a junk shop. Had a lot of fun fixing and cleaning it. The spring mechanism gets stuck sometimes, so when you think it has ran out of puff it still has some, and just starts randomly when you bump it. I sampled it into Concrete (Norns), made a little composition, and played the grid and Cocoquantus. Recorded to 1/4" tape with BIM and BAM on sends.
2. Box
Getting a lot of mileage out of that £10 broken music box. I sampled several phrases then played them with Graintopia.
3. Old tape
In a nutshell, bottled nostalgia. OP-1, Mood MK2, Gen Loss, Sony D6C.
This was the first track I recorded with the CBA pedals, which I'm sure is obvious - went very hard on the Gen Loss in particular. It's made up of a few hand-played loops recorded at different speeds to the OP-1's tape and performed with the filter FX and the pedals.
4. A walk
I met a friend who is a Deep Listening practicioner. We went for a walk on the beach and performed a couple of Pauline Oliveros's scores, ending up on "Extreme Slow Walking". After a few minutes I had a rhythm and some notes floating around my head, and recorded it at the piano as soon as I got home.
5. 2 steps back
Depression.
Felt piano on the OP-1, and several short field recordings.
Processed and sequenced on the Octatrack, performed with a 16n (levels and FX). BIM and BAM on sends, Cocoquantus with random recording enabled. I knew what I wanted it to sound like very quickly, but it took me 3 days of listening to the loops to decide how to structure the performance (with my partner listening to it almost continuously as well). In the end I was in a ditch of self-doubt but ended up recording in 2 takes.
6. Here
I had planned to record some music between Christmas and getting back to work - instead I got Covid. I managed to record some piano toward the end of it, but didn't have the energy to turn that into a track.
I went back to those recordings a few weeks later and after a couple of hours of arranging and trying different mixes this was the result - I was actually happy on the first take.
Octatrack, Here-There (Norns), CocoDuber (Cocoquantus + SuperDuber), and OTO machines, recorded to 1/4" tape.
It would be the morning, but as I struggle with poor mental health, it's whenever I get in there.
I use to joke that I'm going to sell everything, well, except the Cocoquantus, obviously. I don't think there's a single recording I've done since getting the Coco some 4 or 5 years ago where it doesn't feature. So that and all the microphones.
I tend to start on the piano to work out the melody and structure and test out ideas. I record this on Walkman or dictaphones, and a big part of my "sound design" is just slowing that to half-speed and maybe filter out the rough edges.
Once the music is clear in my head, it's a matter of routing to the appropriate loopers and record a few takes until I'm happy with the interplay of music, sounds, and arrangement. If I get to take #5 or #6 it's probably a sign I'm doing something wrong, and I either take a break for a couple of days or abandon the track altogether.
I use a lot of field recordings, so there's a lot of listening, cutting and processing to make them play nice with the instruments, when the field recordings themselves are not the focus of the track - lately I'm much more interested in listening than writing music, and I want to make work with even fewer moving parts, more focused on what I hear when listening.
So much - I am not very patient with myself.
I find it impossible to answer this, there are so many, and they have changed with age. Fiction-wise, any time there's a new Neal Stephenson on the horizon I get as giddy as a kid on Christmas morning. Sound-wise, I find the Spectres series on Shelter Press to be invigorating and super inspirational.
I'm lucky to have very talented friends who can't stop releasing fabulous art, both sonic and visual. So they are a constant inspiration, and also the kindest people on the planet.The sound of the world. Mud flats, marshes, and forests, but also parks, beaches and that horrible junction in the middle of town.