The First Bike Song Project

Last night, after a sketchy ride home filled with pot holes, dark streets, and fast cars, I finally landed back here. I wrestled with my tires, fixed the tube that popped due the black hole in the street, and started winding down. As my mind recovered from the overwhelming frustration that follows a flat, I took a look at my bike and thought about how I could do something a little more creative than writing lofty generalizations about the similarities between biking and music. Being esoteric has its due place, but this was certainly not the night. Serendipitously, I had unpacked all my recording gear and while my bike was in my room, I decided to sample some various sounds of the bike to see what I could get. After 3 hours of experimenting, chopping, editing, sequencing, and serious head scratching as to how I could make some sort of musical sense of the clicks and whirrs, I came up with the following:

The sounds are completely unedited aside from chopping up into little usable bits and a little bumping around to make it "musical" It's amazing to me that inspiration can come at the strangest times, such as after a flat, or a bad day of practicing turning into a moment of discovering new sounds.

Ryan