SCRUNGERUBLE / v. (scrungerubled, scrungerubling)

Invented by Steven Furnish, the word scrungeruble means to take something bad and turn it into something good, for instance changing a patch of wasteground into a park or garden. In line with this idea I have come up with a musical genre based on scrungeruble which involves the sampling of rubbish records (or horrible sounds) and turning them into good music. Obviously it is very subjective but it is also boundless. To qualify as a scrungeruble the following rules must apply.

1) You must genuinely feel that the original material (i.e. the scrunge) is bad. However it is up to you how far you take this concept as good sounds and productions techniques can be used in bad records, so you could determine a whole album to be bad even though there may be some good elements, and use it as the basis of a scrungeruble.

2) Only found sounds may be used, nothing can be produced originally by synthesis or recorded especially.

That's all. Clearly things like scrungeruble have been done before for many years but the difference is that scrungeruble specifically requires that the originbal material is rubbish. Below are two examples of scrungerubles and their justifications.

1) - sheekl - The Joy Of Tone

Made entirely using a 1kHz sine wave as used as a reference tone in the broadcast industry. Sine waves aren't generally that unpleasant but when you hear them quite loud for long periods of time (as I had to in a job I had) they become so, so I ended up really not liking the sound. The tone is taken from my old SQN portable mixer so is genuine broadcast tone rather than produced by software (they should sound the same but for some reason they don't quite). I hope you feel the resulting tune is suitably rubley.

2) P T Hazard - Dojuana Tijuana

Made entirely from samples from Tijuana - Sound Of Brass from 1968. Super cheesy versions of pop tunes from the period. Just crap really.

So as you can see scrungeruble is a very individual art form, and a way to change bad things into good things. Today music, tomorrow the world.

Happy scrungerubling.