The recorded poem has turned out successfully, and I feel like I have made direct decisions in terms of the words used, how they are spoken, and the sound design/arrangement. In isolation I think the spoken word has a lot of impact – it is full of imagery that sparks the imagination, sounds intimate and has an uncanny discomfort that I feel reflects the nature of self-development within the dense mechanical jungle that is the world we live in. With the future projects in mind, specifically the album, I started to imagine this poem as a possible introduction and began to think of how it would lead in to a drum n’ bass oriented album that sonically communicates the emotional weight, fear, hyper-acceleration and cybernetic realism of the capitalist machine we all operate within.

For this reason, I decided to experiment with blending the spoken word piece into a possible first song of the album. I developed the drum n’ bass experiment I made earlier in this project, adding some extra sound design and adding some bass/sub sounds. I also arranged it in a more abstract way to build more tension, and roughly mixed all the elements by cleaning up frequencies and applying some compression.

My main goal was to juxtapose the amount of space and sparsely placed sound events in the recorded spoken word with a rapid barrage of anxiety inducing sound, using sound to highlight that despite all of the reflection and observations mentioned in the poem, the cycle will inevitably start again. The track aimed to interpret the claustrophobia and anxiety of the fast paced cyclical nature of our society, and also trial some of the industrial tones and textures I want throughout the album.

I think the song overall works well, although the drum n’ bass section still sounds a bit messy. The contrast between the spoken word and intense drum breaks is effective, as to me it feels like the spoken word is set in the mind of a person, and the drum n’ bass section soundtracks the world around them. This parallel of humanity and mechanical systems, both literally and as a metaphor, is going to be central to my work moving forward.