#switch crooks

Another track from the two man collaboration Switch Crooks. 

This song is primarily based on a noise sample that I created by taking the data from a GIF image file of the logo of a BMX shop called "Trend" and inserting it into a WAV file. The resulting sound had some kind of a tempo of it's own that we crafted drum loops around.

I also created a short Flash video / slideshow for this track...

Switch Crooks was a project I started in 2001 where I worked together with my friend Casper to manually edit together sound samples into drum loops that were used as the basis to create these songs.

We built up most of the beats manually in a waveform editor from samples pulled from songs or records which gives them a more natural cadence and then those larger loop files were looped together again to create songs.

The piano in this, and the drums, are both distressed, suffering from an ultra low bitrate sampling that gives them their distressed sound. 

For a few of these songs I also created videos mashed up out of archival photos and sometimes with line drawings sketched over them. Here is the video for sixteen:

Switch Crooks is an electronic, instrumental hip-hop duo project from 2001. All of the music recorded for this project was lost by me in a hard drive failure but luckily we decided to share most of the completed songs on our website and I was able to access the files from there.

This project followed a common trajectory for musical projects, we started out strong, created some good music, named the band, then one of the members lost motivation and the project coasted along for a little while until the second member also lost interest and that's the end of it.

All of this music centres around drum loops, but instead of pulling full beats from records Casper and I would pull individual samples together and collage them together layer by layer in a waveform editor. Placing the sounds together by hand gave the beats a bit of an off kilter sound as we were never locked into the strict timing you would normally get from a sequencer or drum machine.

The old website we created and uploaded to a free website space from my ISP is still up and running 12 years later: