No Five Cent Piece

No Five Cent Piece is my re-interpretation/remix/cover of No Quarter by Led Zeppelin. It's included as bonus material on the first CD I made to sell at the HEAR/HERE exhibition and has recently been submitted for a remix project for Sound.

I started recording this song firstly because it's the only other song I know that works using the instrument tuning I've made up and continued to use (Open C#) in a lot of the songs and pieces I've written. The idea was that because the song had already been written, that allowed me to concentrate more on the actual recording of the sounds.

Obviously I wanted to change the song and make it my own, because otherwise it would be a waste of time. The original song, to me, has a very powerful demeanor to it, a lot of darkness and a really powerful emotional charge, so it was these elements I tried to draw upon in my version.

There was a considerable amount of experimentation within the recording process. During the second 'verse' section, there's the sounds of a makeshift talkbox I made, using a very small speaker and bits of an office chair. Scratchy Noise (made by scraping plectrums and various things along the strings of the instrument) featured pretty heavily as well. This is to bring out some of that darkness in a new way.

This version features a lot of 'trademarks' I guess you could say, particularly the use of distorted bass guitar, something that I find myself using a lot. I like the 'growling' nature of the way it sounds. I like the guitars to wail, the guitar solo in the middle section of the song is performed through a tiny speaker embedded in a CD wallet, as the speaker struggles to deal with the levels being fed to it, it gives this kind of 'tortured' effect which I thought worked well. The middle section is really a 'grind'. The percussion solo is there to seem foreign and alienating.

Some of the heavier arrangements that feature later in the track are there because I felt like when approaching this song from an instrumental perspective, it was necessary to address the heavier themes of this song in that way.

The final section is basically about chaos, disruption, it is intentionally jagged and is essentially a mess.

When I presented a part of this to the class, I was asked why my version is almost twice as long as the original, for which I didn't have an answer at the time, it just sought of turned out that way. However I later decided the reason for this is because instrumentation and music is a higher form of language, and this is something that I try to do in a lot of my work - express ideas through sound without the aid of lyrics or speech. As much as it is a higher form of language, it's not one that we, as listeners are as accustomed to. Therefore, it takes longer to express an idea through the use of sound but I believe it to be a far more rewarding experience.