A Souvenir of London [Brooker, Reid]
Sam Cameron  [UK]

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Sam Cameron – sound collage and voice

SC: my inspiration was the remark made about this being the best blues song written by a white man. So I thought, let's imagine it was a real blues song from the era when authentic blues was first recorded. I added various waves of radio static and old record hiss and crackle and finally dollops of rain falling off a roof so that it might sound like a field recording. Obviously I am not going to sound like an authentic blues singer but there wasn't one of those in the house at the time. I decided not to go for any comedic blues vocalising, cf the Bonzos' Can Blue Men Sing The Whites .

This was all done on one Sunday afternoon using the Making Waves sequencer package (a very old version about 2.43) and a Tandy/Radio Shack microphone plugged into the sound card. This is a one-take vocal. The guitar part is all taken from one ten second passage off a Robert Johnson record which I manipulated in various ways on a wave editor. I believe the song was Come into My Kitchen but they all sound the same to me.

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