hello. below is a question submitted to my ask page about a week ago. i thought it was a really good question, so good that i wrote an almost eighteen hundred word response. classic me! anyway, i figured it would be kind of a waste to put all of these thoughts down and publish it on a page where it would get buried in a week. so here it is as a blog post.
the question was about how i made last years ambient music album, you can’t impress anyone with normal pictures of the sea. i had always wanted to write in detail about this record, and i guess this was my opportunity. for anyone who cares about the album, or is interested in forming a deeper connection with it, here it is broken down track by track. thank you again to asriel for submitting such a nice question, this was a great one to dive into.
asriel asks: hi. I really like your music. I just recently stumbled upon it. Especially your ambient stuff on your most recent album. How did you come about making those kinda sounds? Is it mostly just synths and samples, or is there more than meets the ears? I'll be listening to the rest of your songs as the days come:)
answer: wow, first of all thank you so much for checking out the latest album. i've been doing music for a long time now, and for some reason as i get older it means more and more to me when someone tells me they just started listening. or especially that they like my most recent work. i'm very grateful that my music has managed to reach you despite me doing so little to adapt to the new social media landscape. it feels even more special to me. anyway, here's more or less what went into every track...
01. a new dream
this was a melody that was stuck in my head for a year or more at that point. i recorded several versions of this song. some very noisy, others complex and much higher quality, but the album version you hear was just recorded onto a tascam portastudio 424 with the tape slowed down. i used this 4-track a lot on the previous ambient release so i thought it would be cool to use it to introduce the next. it never appears on the album again, though.
02. this feels like the beginning
this track includes one of my favorite synthesizers, the polyend medusa. i use this synth a lot out of shot during live streams. it’s what i’m tapping on to make nice noises while i talk. this is completely improvised, and then absolutely destroyed by a plugin called wires, a noisy little plugin modeled after a 1970's soviet wire.
03. granula
a little melody i made in AUM with a synth app called zeeon. it was then tracked to cassette and slowed down a lot. i added the found audio last minute to tie into the other couple of tracks on the album that include found audio, something the first ambient release didn't include at all. it's a woman talking to her son about halloween and children playing on a trampoline. i have no relation to either clips. i wish i could go on about the deep meaning behind this track, but i just put it all together and liked how it sounded. i thought it went with the textural theme of this release.
04. a walk along the waterside
this one is very simple. one of my all time favorite apps called xynthesizr is sending midi to my computer. it's controlling retro synth, the stock analog synthesizer in logic. i wasn't going to include this song originally, but my brother mentioned that he really liked it. some songs have a great deal of meaning, but others exist just to lend themselves to the bigger picture of a release, and in that way those songs are still very important.
05. i listened close, but it never said your name
this is a simple patch i made in vcv rack that i love a lot. if i remember correctly, it's a sampler playing an old and very long recording of me playing the piano, then an LFO triggering the sampler to sample itself over and over again. i’m going to talk more about the significance of this on track 10, but for now i just want to say that this song means a lot to me, and is the first song on the album about grief.
06. forgive me
a little midi melody i drew out quickly in logic, then slowed down. i originally did this for an episode of my podcast, pull away slow, impossible burden. i liked it a lot and decided to expand on it for the album. the sample is brooke saying, "also i'm dressed like this" but to me it sounds like she's saying "i'm sorry i'm dressed like this" which is much more meaningful to me. after the first sample plays once i utilize a plugin called texturize from the company soundghost. it's a wonderful little plugin that i find myself using a lot.
07. a glimpse of heaven, or wherever you are
this is a very special one to me. i consider it kind of the successor to my song goodnight dad, i love you that i did for my project wishing. it's another droney synth piece about my dad using the same keyboard, a casio sk-5. it's also one of the last things that i recorded for the album.
08. twinkle interlude
i vividly remember recording this one. the sun was coming in through the giant window in our old living room, painting everything yellow and gold. brooke and billie were hanging out on the couch and billie was falling asleep. i was sitting on the floor, using an app on my ipad called mirack for the first time. i was trying to teach myself about modular synthesizers. everything felt very warm and still. this was the first thing that i recorded for the album.
09. something green
this is one of my personal favorites off the album. i guess because i'm so inspired by brian eno and this track directly borrows from him so much. it's a nod to classic ambient. it's entirely made in xynthesizr and was mostly improvisational. just before wrapping up the album i decided to process it on cassette for that analog feel. i kind of regret doing that now. i don't think it needed it. i think there was a subtlety in the purely digital version that i mistook for sterility.
10. i haven't stopped looking for you
this is sort of a continuation of i listened close, but it never said your name. to me it means the same thing. it's about looking for the little pieces of someone that might still exist. this has been so much of my experience with grief. compulsively searching, wanting so badly to believe that some version of them is still out there somewhere. in a similar way, a playhead drags across the same bit of audio, scanning through it again and again to the point of degeneration. sometimes it finds a little second of something beautiful, other times it's abrasive and unpleasant, but it never stops looking. i wish i could remember how i manipulated this audio, but i just can't no matter how much i try. i don't think that matters, though. i think anyone reading this far into what I'm typing right now must care more about what the song means than what plugins were used to make it.
11. the romance of the lighthouse
i swear this is the last "continuation" track, but i just have to mention it. this song is and has always been the sister track to one of my favorite ambient pieces in my catalog, a warehouse on the river. it's made in the same way, using the same synth (korg volca keys), and is even in the same key. so if you ever get bored, try playing both songs at the same time. it's a really beautiful experience. as far as significance, i think this is the point where the album stops being about my dad and starts being about me again. i shift my focus to the things in life that still manage to mystify me. there’s something very powerful and alluring about a structure near water, i don’t know what it is.
12. a really tall platform i couldn't reach
like the previous track, this was recorded entirely with a korg volca keys. the growing distortion comes from an experimental reverb plugin called box made by fors. this continues with the introspective theme the album has suddenly taken. the world is set out in front of me, but all i can see are the places i feel too small and weak to make it to.
13. i wish i could come with you
following the same theme, this track is about wanting to be able to make it to those places. this track represents the guilt i feel and have always felt struggling with agoraphobia. i always sort of figured that this would be the least popular track, and i was right. that doesn’t surprise me, it's the least melodic. it's a heavy repeating sound. a soft but persistent noise. it's hard to notice without skipping back and forth, but the static at the beginning slowly fades as the song becomes clearer. this is significant to me. i made this using the korg ds-10 on my nintendo ds, and processed the audio in ableton using a pitch shift stereo delay plugin called reflections.
14. end of the opora
i spent the longest on this title. gosh, where do i even start. in ancient greek mythology, opora is the goddess of fertility. it was written that she had a powerful but short romance with sirius, the dog star. this is why you can hear a dog’s nails lightly tapping on tile throughout the track at certain points. this song also includes a very old audio clip from october of 2014. an ex partner of mine had come to visit me after we had not seen each other in years. the audio is of us hooking up in the fruit grove in front of my old house the night she got there. obviously she knew this was happening. i had asked if it was okay days before she arrived and she enthusiastically consented. that didn't surprise me, we were both artists and i would have felt too uncomfortable even asking if i didn't think we'd be on the same page. we had a very passionate relationship when we were younger, and i just thought it would be beautiful to record the audio of us being intimate as adults for the first time after so long of not seeing one another. opora represents fruit, harvest, and the season of autumn. in fact, the greek word for autumn translates directly to “end of the opora”.
15. as you come up for air
i’m struggling to say something about this song that doesn’t feel too obvious but i’ll try my best. it's a goodbye track. it's contemplative and slow and feels very aquatic to me. i imagine most songs on this release to relate to or exist near water in some way, and this final piece is about finally falling into it. the waves wash over you as you look at all that exists on the shore, deciding then whether you'll try to swim back or let it take you. the orchestral elements were made with a series of really nice instrument plugins by felt instruments, and the texturize plugin coming back and adding that sort of "water" sound rolling through the track. i really like this song, and i think it does a great job at saying goodbye.
thank you for reading.