After being involved in many underground sound collage projects, Chris and Dan Burke have now taken their musical skills in a new direction. As Glorified Magnified, the duo is creating more structured, sometimes even vocal-driven music. But they are still employing non-traditional techniques to create their songs.
“Glorified Magnified is sort of an extension of all of it in the sense that it’s sound collage and digital sound manipulation,” explains Chris. “But the difference is that it’s more song oriented. They’ve all been somewhat song oriented, but this has vocals on two of the tracks. The thing that I like about it as opposed to the rest of the stuff is that we’ve managed to focus it a lot more. All of our other stuff was very experimental, we were sort of finding our footing and I think that we’ve begun to develop a style, although it is still pretty eclectic.”
In starting Glorified Magnified, the duo was simply looking to try something different, as they both have very diverse tastes in music but really like pop. While the style does seem more limiting, that’s just what Chris and Dan wanted.
“I think it’s good to put boundaries on yourself because it makes you more creative, because you have something to sort of work towards,” says Chris. “Whereas if you leave everything totally open, you don’t really accomplish anything. You come up with pretty cool experiments that are pretty cool to listen to, but I think it’s helpful for a the development of an artist to sort of set goals and put boundaries on your music and aim at specific things. So that’s what we’ve done.”
The duo had no set way of working together. Chris is more skilled in the technical side of things, while Dan is a DJ. Some tracks are co-written, while some are composed entirely by Dan and then produced by Chris.
In putting together the sound collages, the band uses both MIDI sampling and Pro-Tools. The vocals on the EP were sampled and sequenced on an EPS sampler, and then added to the final mix using Pro-tools.
A full length album by Glorified Magnified probably won’t be out until early next year. They continue to create more experimental music, the latest of which is a long-form sound collage about the media’s dealing with the “Information Super Highway.”