As well as pretty standard sampling practices like reversing, pitching, and distorting, I am playing around here with a few extra things:

Phrasal beats: one thing I'm taking from the playing of Irish traditional music is the use of phrases to structure a rhythm track rather than a strict metronomic rhythm. I've layered a number of bodhran samples, usually reversed, to play around with what I'm calling 'phrasal beats'. I'll be experimenting more with this in the future.

Escalation and De-escalation: my philosophical work centres around personal, social, and political dynamics of escalation and de-escalation. In these pieces I often swell towards intensity in the middle of a piece, echoing some of the theoretical models I've been using for change and transformation work in organisations and cultural systems.

Expectational meditations: I think that sonic art, more than any other, is a very immediate and obvious exploration of the currents, dynamics, gravities, and repulsions of expectation. I can't really overstate the importance of this for me, in philosophical terms - I understand our experience of consciousness to be our present and variable experience of structuring of expectation. I believe that the arts, of all sorts, allow us to really bring the poetics, flows, and dissonances of expectation to awareness. My work is a small effort in that regard.

Artistic endeavour: although I am a pretty trenchant critic of the logics of copyright law (and did my PhD on this), I am also keen to ensure that any time I do use a sample I craft it enough to justify its use - sampling as an artistic practice should, to paraphrase a famous literary figure, carry its justification in every sound. Artistic touchstones for me in all of this work range from synthetic cubism and surrealist collage to improvisational theatre and situationism. There are also clear nods to folk and traditional genres, and I'm beginning to experiment with the processing of audio tracks from old movies, which should bear fruit in the next volume. Whatever I make use of, I dive into it, often allowing the activity of sound processing to bring me in directions that surprise me. Creativity, for me, is the engagement with change and uncertainty, in and through which a felt participation in structuring of expectation emerges. If sampling and electronic composition doesn't bring me there, if it doesn't enhance my awareness of my own agency, grounding me in what happens, then I'm not really interested.