Adam Wiltzie finishes his tape-loop sessions with Jóhann Jóhannsson — Sunday Loop #016

Sunday Loop Links Weekly
Sunday Loop — weekly reading list by Palmetshofer Audio

Why Sunday Loop exists

The week moves fast. Between work, sessions, and everything else, the good reads get lost in the noise.

Every Sunday evening I share a few links — things I found worth reading during the week. Logic Pro, sound design, sampling, the occasional curveball. No algorithms, no filler. Just a few things I’d genuinely recommend to a friend.

Grab a coffee. It won’t take long.

— Ewald

This Week

1. Adam Wiltzie talks about his posthumous collaboration with Jóhann Jóhannsson

Category: Sound Design

Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid went back to the studio sessions he and Jóhann Jóhannsson recorded around 2013 to 2017, several of them for The Theory of Everything and Arrival, and built Friendship Survival Guide from them. In Peter Kirn’s interview he explains how the loops were made: sounds mixed, chopped up and spliced by hand, with engineer Francesco Donadello working on a 16-track 2-inch multitrack and Jóhannsson’s Revox machines. “It’s such a physical thing. You’re dealing with this piece of mass.” Hildur Guðnadóttir’s voice runs through the record slowed down, and Tim Hecker adds a little to “Exceptional Proportions”. Released September 18 on Deutsche Grammophon, with a three-part short film by Jonas Govaerts.

2. Why This Sound Designer Isn’t Afraid Of Generative AI SFX

Category: Sound Design

René Coronado, co-owner and lead sound designer at Dallas Audio Post, is not worried about text-to-SFX generators like Eleven Labs, Adobe Firefly, Ace Studio or Artlist. His test prompt, “Generate a big metal shield ringing out as it deflects a great axe”, gives a result that in his words “sucks and has sucked across all of these tools since inception”. “You can’t shortcut taste,” he says, and describes the actual job as curation: listening through props, libraries, plugin presets and granular or Doppler tools, then layering, fixing timing and levels, editing in RX and adding distortion to separate frequencies, with a generator as one more source on that list.

Sunday Loop is published every Sunday evening. If you want it delivered to your inbox, subscribe to the newsletter.