Since deciding to focus my audio paper on the hip hop sub-genre ‘splayed’, I have had some thought on how to approach this idea. I plan to use excerpts of interview footage that was recorded outside an event Tony Bontana and I run called ‘Splayworld’ (which focuses, as the name suggests, primarily on this splayed genre/ scene). I feel these interviews will give good context and explanations from different perspectives, about their views on the movement and the music. Along with the excerpts I will also use my own voice as main narrative talking through the history of the genre and the basis of its principles and ideas.
For my vocal narration, I have decided to purposefully not utilise the high quality microphones available through uni, or to utilise the facilities for clean post production editing, as one of the founding ideas of the splayed movement is the DIY attitude to which it has always been done. Although the DIY aspect to the movement was not by choice but more so by circumstance, it has been imprinted into the music and the attitudes towards things like professionalism and mixing, and has in turn opened new ideas of things purposely including background white noise and having rough edges. This primarily evolved from the same tree as the lofi hip hop movement and the lofi way of thinking about fidelity.
To explore this in a more literal way than description with words, I will record my vocals in my bedroom studio set up, and occasionally manipulate the vocal recordings in order to show examples of certain sounds and ideas. For example certain parts of the vocal narration may be recorded through my sp404 which is a sampler that has been utilised very heavily in hip hop and especially in the lofi and splayed scene’s, due to its unique sample manipulation and effects.