Voices #37
◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
here we got:
karsino kuuni
answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / lo-fi / electronic work here.
[1. IDEA]
■ The A. O.: The section from “und die ganze welt sang mit mir…” that we prefer is “und die ganze welt sang mit mir (thank_you)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?
► karsino kuuni: I started working on this song in september of 2024, a few months after releasing my first album ‘people should get drunk, even if they are on fire…’. That album was my main musical focus for years, so in retrospect this song feels like a palette cleanser. I started by playing around with a sample of an old italian tv jingle from the 80s, not sure yet what I was going to make with it. After a while I just ended up slowing it down a bunch and looping it and then playing a couple of synth pads on top of it. For a while it stayed this way and went by the working title ‘Certified ambient classic’ (hopefully it will be just that one day in the future). As time went by I added some field recordings I had on my phone from times I’d been on planes and at airports. But it was still missing something.
That missing piece came on the 28th of december 2024 when I listened to the song in my DAW while dozing off and the phrase “nothing/everything in the world sang it with me” popped into my mind. I keep a journal for dreams and phrases heard in hypnagogic states from which I draw a lot of inspiration for my music. From that phrase came the name of the song (and the whole EP) “und die ganze Welt sang mit mir…” (german for ‘the whole world sang with me’). I started writing lyrics for the song which I later sang into audacity, recorded with my laptop microphone only. The concept had formed: climbing up and down the sky between time and space, revisiting your own past.
The EP started forming as I realized this song went together really well with two other ambient pieces I had made earlier but didn’t know what release they might fit on. Together they tell a story of living in the future with a new found confidence and then traveling back to the past, back to your lowest moment and saying one last goodbye to your childhood, then seeing yourself from a distance before returning back home. The EP works as a companion piece to the album released prior. Going over a lot of the same themes and events but rather looking at them retrospectively, instead of expressing something felt in the moment.
One last sample on this song, which I added as I put the EP together to create a transition between this and the next song, was from a noise session with my stylophone gen x-1. In it I had fed the drum track from Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ into the synth and then messed around with the delay. The section I sampled I had actually already used once before on a track called ‘mää lähestyn taivasta’ (Finnish for ‘I’m approaching heaven’). That track was more in the style of vaportrap but thematically centered around flying as well so it only felt fitting to repurpose it here.
[2. CREATION]
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