Tag: voices

  • Voices #35

    voices #35
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Akira Film Script

    answering some questions. We have already observed his drone / ambient work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Autumn’s Dawn” that we prefer is “Capturing The Flag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Akira Film Script: The whole album is built from meditations on my youth – before each session, I’d do an extended meditation on some point in my childhood, pre-internet, then upon exiting the meditation, I’d go straight to my machines and document how I felt, in sound. ‘Capturing the Flag’ was created when exiting a meditation focused on the final moments of actually, finally, successfully capturing and delivering the other team’s flag in an intense game of Capture the Flag, ultimately winning the game. When I was a kid, before the area I live in today had become so built up, there was this incredibly large field, with a large ditch running through it (in hindsight, it may have been a water way for when the rains came through, letting excess runoff out to the bay). The ditch became our midline, and we’d establish our forts on either side of it, then raise our flags. It was a winding ditch, so there were plenty of areas to pass though it and emerge on the other side without being caught – if you were lucky; there wasn’t much coverage up top of the ditch on either side, save a few bushes and overgrown fox tails. If you were lucky enough to make it to the opposing team’s fort, unseen, then the real fear set in – now you had to successfully get back to your fort. This was a nerve wracking experience, filled with anxiety, fear, dread, heightened senses – true fear. But if, and when, you saw you were in the home stretch, guaranteed to win, all the dread washed away for instant euphoria – YOU DID IT! YOU MADE IT! That was the moment that I set out to capture in ‘Capturing the Flag’ – the glory of a successful round, the washing away of the fears, the true elation of victory, and not in hindsight, but in, and of, the moment itself. Harps have always felt heavenly to me, and I love a rising portamento synth or string and how it can lift a movement in a song, so the combination of both were my target for capturing that feeling, that moment, of capturing the flag. Add to it, somehow drone-based ambience has always felt like a moment in suspension to me, so while I could have composed an uplifted, rising musical movement in hopeful keys and progressions, it suited the capturing of the moment – the polaroid nature of it all – to make a drone around these uplifting inputs. 

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #34

    voices #34
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Euan Dalgarno

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / drone work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “uoying” that we prefer is “horrow (feat. Canaan Balsam)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Euan Dalgarno: Canaan Balsam and I first connected while we were both putting out music on Modern Obscure Music. Since we’re both based in Edinburgh, it was only natural that we started exchanging ideas, tracks, stems—and the occasional beer. When this track called for a bit more grit, I gave Canaan a shout and he sent over a few pad layers, some of which had been run through a RAT distortion pedal, giving the track just the edge it was missing.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #33

    voices #33
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    MaTT Robert MCLennan

    answering some questions. We have already observed his quintet experimental / noise jazz / post-rock work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “J’Peux” that we prefer is “tea tide pool”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Matt Robert McLennan: “tea tide pool” was the first track we laid down and it is completely improvised around a guitar refrain that I play repeatedly and, somewhat obstinately, outside of the metre of what the percussion and bass were doing. On this track, you can really hear us calibrating our sound and finding our roles – which I don’t think is at all a bad thing. It’s a fairly optimistic track despite the dark tonalities.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #32

    voices #32
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    The Earl of Dean

    answering some questions. We have already observed his dub / industrial / experimental work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Silence About To Break” that we prefer is “Stardust Cluster”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► The Earl of Dean: Interestingly this was the first track I actually released publicly albeit after getting some feedback from some fellow Edinburgh based artists Tayus and Last Post Society who gave me the confidence to make my music public and just roll with it. The track was me initially thinking id like to create a spacey ambient track and once I got the individual parts across my suite of synths and an inkling on how I’d piece the recording together I just went for it recording live .through my mixer into Ableton before mastering in Bandlab. I think I did 3 takes before I was happy with the track . Bear in mind I’d been playing about with my synths as a novice from September 2024 understanding the functionality and what I could extract sound wise from each of them. Painful at times but great fun!

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #31

    voices #31
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Craig aalders

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electroacoustic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “After the Slow Fade” that we prefer is “Footprints”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Craig Aalders: Footprints came to light in a moment of inspiration based around a particular sound combonation of electric guitar, modulation pedal, and tape delay. Compositionally it began with the opening trem melody that starts the track and continues throughout. 

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #30

    voices #30
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Jashiin

    answering some questions. We have already observed his electronic / soundscapes / Glitch work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “A Walk Through Dark Places: A Photographic Record” that we prefer is “Hipparcos Catalog”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Jashiin: There were several “catalog” tracks, all named after astronomical catalogs of stars, nebulae, and such. They were all made using a free pipe organ sample set I found online. I created an algorithm to process the samples: applying several effects with parameters randomized, then changing the loop points, also randomly. I had no idea how it sounded until I connected it to a midi keyboard and started playing, discovering the sounds as I went along. It took a while to learn which keys do what, which loops I like, if and how the pitch changed. I recorded many takes and kept the ones I liked best. “Sharpless Catalog”, from the parent album “A Walk Through Dark Places”, was the one I fell in love with the most and kept tinkering with. Two more catalogs, including Hipparcos, ended up on “A Photographic Record”, and there’s a couple more, either unreleased or hidden in the tracks of “A Walk”.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #29

    Voices #29
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    David Aimone

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / new age work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Changes” that we prefer is “RainSong”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► David Aimone: Well, about half way through making these tracks I realized there was a theme that was loosely about seasons.  I love a nice rain storm, just like waves at the ocean, and can zone out on these sounds.  I decided to create an atmospheric piece, fairly straightforward, to end “Changes”. I used two guitar like arpeggios, left and right, to emulate the steady rain through phases of harmonic changes.  I backed this up with actual rain sounds, and some contained but expressive musical motifs in the background.
    I ended up using environmental sounds in most of the songs on the album, not always depicting specific seasons or weather events, but also atmospheric sounds to place the music into a place and time.  Meadow sounds, distant church bells, thunderous synth recreations, and so on.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #28

    Voices #28
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    cinchel

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / drone / atmospheric work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “A Marble Sentiment” that we prefer is “this cloud won’t rain on me (thankful)”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► cinchel: I had to go back to the ableton session to figure out what parts made up this track. It looks like I had this nice slow, almost organ like chord progression on the guitar that I looped. I do remember thinking that I really wanted to make more pieces that are not mostly guitar. So I listened to this chord progression and tried to find some chirpy and rhythmic settings on the Moog matriarch. From there I still felt it was a bit to dark so I moved over to the Rhodes piano and banged out some ghostly higher register intervals. I took some of the Moog improvisations that I liked and slowed them down by dumping them out to reel-to-reel and playing it back at half speed. I love the kinda warm bass tones that come from slowed down tape. The organ like sound from the guitar really guided me through the mixing of this piece, I like the cathedral like reverb and the resolution in the chord progression that had a feeling of a church choir. 

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #27

    Voices #27
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Paul Beaudoin

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / drone / noise work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “station” that we prefer is “they all agreed, it was harmonic evidence”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Paul Beaudoin: For the past year, I’ve traced how sound holds memory—personal, cultural, and inherited—and how those memories can be altered, overwritten, or erased. While I work across media—painting, text, and video—sound feels uniquely attuned to the workings of memory. Most of us experience sound in sequence, gathering what comes forward while continually referring. Retrospectively.   It’s a remarkable human act.
    My earliest sonic memory is the piano. My mother aspired to be a cocktail lounge pianist in the 1950s and 60s. After school, she’d gather us to sing while playing a familiar rotation of classical and popular music. That daily, participatory listening shaped how I understand music. The piano was the first instrument I “learned”—not through formal lessons but through experimentation. I still remember plucking a string too hard and snapping it in half. That accident stayed with me, not only because of the sound, but also because it sparked my impulse to explore the instrument physically, conceptually, and emotionally.
    station is a collection centered on memory and trace. Each track is a “station”—a place or time where something sonically residual remains. they all agreed, it was harmonic evidence draws from childhood music and my earliest encounters with music theory around age 15. That’s when I began composing seriously, fully immersed in theory—an obsession that lasted through my PhD dissertation on a Beethoven cello sonata. (So yes, I suppose you could say I’m legally obligated to find harmony wherever I go.)
    My music isn’t linear; it rejects the formal narratives many listeners expect. This shift toward non-narrative listening came from conversations with John Cage. He taught me to hear sound not as a path but as an environment—something we enter, inhabit, and exit without hierarchy. I was especially drawn to his idea that each sound is a living object, a notion he borrowed from painter Lyonel Feininger, who believed every line or form had an independent life. That idea stayed with me. It changed how I hear, compose, and remember.
    The phrase harmonic evidence holds several meanings. It nods to early theory lessons—the desire to name, analyze, and prove—but also points to sound itself as a form of evidence: a rarely accepted proof, yet deeply tied to memory. The track layers these tensions—between analysis and emotion, structured harmony and personal trace. I think of it as a sonic self-portrait: part archive, part analysis.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #26

    Voices #26
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Cells Interlinked

    answering some questions. We have already observed their electronic / berlin-school work here.
    ◦ [Maria and Albert speaking]

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Within (0045)” that we prefer is “Tree of Life”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Cells Interlinked: This album of our project Cells Interlinked became for us a kind of contemplative diary of internal states experienced during the war — the invasion of the Russian army into Ukraine. When the war started, it was a big shock for us. In the first months it was simply unbearable for the consciousness to be “outside”, in the flow of terrible external events — missile attacks, explosions, news from the front line… Working on this material, which we began to record partially a year before, became a kind of therapeutic practice, allowing the consciousness to focus and change direction, to turn “within”.
    The beginning of work on this track seemed to push apart a narrow slot in the wall dividing our reality into “outside” and “within”. At first we recorded a viscous bass improvisation on a vintage analog monophonic dual-oscillator synthesizer Vermona Synthesizer. At the time, this instrument, released in a limited edition in 1981, was a slightly belated reaction of the East part of Germany, occupied by the Russian army, to the stormy evolution of Moog synthesizers. This layer describes quite well the thick darkness of the waters of the unconscious, into which we gradually sank, meeting with the archetypal flow of symbols of war that burst into our everyday life. Then a simple four-note sequence appeared, played on Virus Snow. With its leisurely looped movement, it reflected the movement of the mind, moving at random in the fog of obscurity and searching for the perspective of vision. And then came the moment when the concentration of this meditative work on the composition became an open door leading from the nightmarish absurdity of external reality — to “within”, to the feeling of true reality, to the hidden root of reality, covered with the husk of random external events. This moment became key for the writing of the entire album and this separate track. It was something that in Greek is called metanoia — a sudden illuminating change in vision, in the very way of looking, a fundamental change in consciousness. It was as if consciousness penetrated inside itself, and the problematic of external reality dissolved. The Virus sequence theme sped up, merging with a hand-played bass arpeggio. A vocal improvisation theme spontaneously emerged.
    All of this reflected a deeply internal experience of having found the axis and foundation on which everything external was strung. It was a feeling of discovering an internal dynamic structure that is ever expanding, embracing with its branches, leaves and tendrils everything that appears, lives and disappears in the world of time and space. In the flow of this state, we completed work on this track, which opens the album, is invisibly present in each of its tracks, and ends with a short ambient piece, “Nightfall”.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #25

    Voices #25
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Paul Padilla

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Absent” that we prefer is “Chloral Suicide”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Paul Padilla: I was messing around on a Moog Subharmonicon, a fun and chaotic semi-modular synthesizer. Once I got the sequence that’s heard in the track, I decided to record it, which I did, while haphazardly patching a lot of random parameters to each other. That’s where a lot of the stutters and detuned notes come from.  After I had the recording on my computer, I manipulated it in a few different directions and layered the results. The final track became an interflow of the original recording with its mangled counterparts. I still don’t even really know what key it’s in.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #24

    Voices #24
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Eir Drift

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Limbic Atlas” that we prefer is “Lirae”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Eir Drift: This is the first piece I made for the Limbic Atlas album. Lirae was ultimately born spontaneously even though it was the result of a long reflection on how to approach ambient composition. My goal was to merge the illustrative music I’ve been working on for years with a minimalist ambient format built around slow progression. Cinematic composition, for me, is about crafting a build-up that tells a story — with a beginning, a sense of tension, and a resolution. The idea was to experiment with that kind of narrative structure in a very slow ambient appropriate progression. I started with a suite of 4 piano chords that I wanted to be both tense and ethereal; I then transcribed, looped and slowed everything down in a sequencer… I had this ambient bass sonic base with a gradual build that you could get lost in and dream within. From there, I added textured layers and smooth one note drone to emphasize the transitions and builds. In the end, “Lirae” runs 16 minutes and holds a surprisingly introspective, experimental dimension that I hadn’t entirely anticipated.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #23

    voices #23
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    EIII

    answering some questions. We have already observed his electronic / noise / experimental / industrial work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Refractions” that we prefer is “Refraction 4”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► EIII: A little over a year ago, I was recording underwater sounds in the river that runs through the city where I live. The bubbling of the water, the trapped air released by my steps, and the occasional jet ski or motorboat formed the foundation of the piece. Later, I added layers of synths to build on that.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #20

    Voices #20
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Susana López

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / drone / experimental work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Materia Vibrante” that we prefer is “Mundus Imaginalis”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Susana López: Both Materia Vibrante (the album) and Mundus Imaginalis are products of a very particular period in my life, a period marked by an existential crisis.  It’s almost as if all the tracks could be combined into a single piece, sharing a common emotional core, instrumentation, and mental state.
    Mundus Imaginalis is inspired by that intermediate dimension that connects the intelligible with the sensible: the imaginary world, where vision and vibration merge, according to Henry Corbin and Ibn Arabi. The most notable feature of this track is that it is made almost entirely with my “sonic triangle”, a sound object that I built several years ago. It is the physical element that initiates the vibration.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #19

    Voices #19
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Risbo Tazeg

    answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / ambient / electronic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Nocturnal Reverie” that we prefer is “Sewer Sea”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Risbo Tazeg: I wanted to create an album that could be a film soundtrack but without being connected to an actual film. I wanted it to be really evocative, to have strong – but abstract – narrative components.
    Sewer sea in particular involves improvisation sessions. I started with one layer of synth, and made a 10 minutes long drone-like track. I had no plan in mind, just wanted to play. I then added a 10 minutes layer of cello on top of this drone. Listened to the whole and got rid of some parts of the cello. I did the same with another synth, listened, carved.
    I repeated the whole process several times with several synths, with the cello and another string instrument. There has been quite a lot of editing and I don’t think there is anything left from the first 2 layers but somehow the structure that emerges organically from the first few improvised sessions is still there.
    The rest of the album has been planned a bit more in advance, but for Sewer Sea I would just play, observe the outcome, edit, repeat. Layering and carving.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #17

    Voices #17
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    lebenerde

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / noise / drone work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “d | d | d” that we prefer is “distanz”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► lebenerde: I was preparing for an upcoming music theory exam and had to learn chord names lol.
    I used an old Yamaha keyboard to play along with the example chords and then I had these two chords that I really liked. Somehow I forgot the exam and just ended up in Ableton, throwing the Yamaha sounds in a granulator and then started just adding effects to find timbres and textures I like.
    I wanted to have this degradation of sound quality over time and really did not want to hurry with it and just let it take its time. That’s true for all three songs on this EP actually. I never made tracks this long before. I think it’s because I thought that nobody would listen to something this long but I figured that’s stupid. The duration allows you to just be in it.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #16

    Voices #16
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Bee Resort

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “The Bee Resort” that we prefer is “A Mind Consumed By Meaningless Data”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Bee Resort: This song was born during a time when I felt quite overwhelmed by work, and at the end of each day my brain would feel drained. One night I sat in my little synth corner and just let everything out, and that’s how that song came into this world, I believe it was created in a single, refreshing session. The title if I remember correctly comes from something a music critic said about Thom Yorke’s style of writing lyrics; that sentence came to my mind while working on this song and it just seemed perfect to describe how I was feeling. 

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #15

    Voices #15
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Eleonora Kampe

    answering some questions. We have already observed her vocal / experimental / avant-garde / minimalist works here and here.
    this dialogue follows the first observation.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Breath. Play.” that we prefer is “Inner Peace Collapse Straight Ahead”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Eleonora Kampe: This track was an independent mover in the plot. It presented itself as a result of mistakes in the mix that I didn’t undo. I liked how it sounded both threatening and gentle – it became an outro to the album, reminding me of the passing nature of all things.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #13

    Voices #13
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Ryan Hooper

    answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / concrete / spoken word work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Studies Made on a Typewriter” that we prefer is “Drawing 4’33””. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Ryan Hooper: Inspired by a piece of typewriter art by Anni Albers, Studies Made on the Typewriter explores the typewriter as both a physical object and a conceptual tool – one that interacts with texts in varied ways and acts as a marker of place. It becomes a conduit for capturing diaristic traces, like etchings across different environments.

    Drawing 4’33” draws directly from the ideas of Brian Eno and John Cage. Eno described ambient music as something that shapes the atmosphere of a room – like lighting or wallpaper – while Cage famously asserted that absolute silence doesn’t exist, inviting listeners to consider all sound as potential music. This piece plays with both concepts: an ambient cut-up blending Eno’s aesthetic with Cage’s conceptual challenge of 4’33”.

    this is not music for airports
    still silent
    partially unsighted
    wallpapering the skull
    feedback loops
    between recorder and microphone
    never heard or felt
    a performance of 4’33″ like this

    At the time of recording, I was listening to Indian Soundies by Moniek Darge & Graham Lambkin, and I think some of that influence seeped into the process. The track is structured in two halves: the first built around a processed field recording of local church bells – a specific, locational sound that situates the listener. The second half features the sound of someone drawing – a quiet, intimate gesture that hints at how experiences are stored and later expressed. In this case, the memory of place is reinterpreted through an invisible drawing.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #10

    voices #10
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Alan Graves

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “A Possible Wind” that we prefer is “Atmospheric Drag”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Alan Graves: For more than a decade now I’ve been taking a field recorder with me everywhere that I travel and recording the sounds of the atmospheres that I find myself in. I had been going back through my archive and pulling recordings of wind from different environments to use as the foundation for this record. For the track ‘Atmospheric Drag’  I used a field recording I had taken of the wind while hiking through a bamboo forest in Hawaii. I started the track by running that field recording through a series of hardware filters and effects and turning it into the basis of what I would build the track on top of. I created patches and performed synthesizer improvisations to those field recordings in layers. It was actually the first piece that I made for the entire record, and it helped inform where the rest of the project would end up.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #7

    Voices #7
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    ellipses

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / drone work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “painting the sky” that we prefer is “a bridge above, a river below”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► ellipses: “a bridge above…” came to me while on one of my daily walks. there is a great walking bridge near me with a small park at the end of it. While standing on the bridge overlooking the park, i heard some great bird sounds, wind through the trees, and the sound of water below me. I quickly pulled out my phone to start recording the sounds i was hearing. I had started getting into field recordings before this, having quite a few sitting on my phone for a while. Once i started working on this track, I realized i was really into field recordings and it drove me to buy an actual field recorder. This track and one other (a far pavillion, which was the first track i recorded for the album) are the only once to include the original phone recordings i had done, as a reminder of where i started in my journey.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #6

    Voices #6
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Fletina

    answering some questions. We have already observed his field recordings / experimental / abstract work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: Can you tell us how “Becquerel” came to light?

    ► Fletina: I was reading about the French physicist Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel and his discovery of ‘The Photovoltaic Effect’ while I was experimenting with some recent field recordings of mine, and without me being particularly conscious of it – I was soundtracking the story of Becquerel’s early struggles and his eventual scientific breakthrough in my own head, and trying to sculpt sounds to match my vision, so the whole thing happened in a symbiotic kind of way. I wanted to make it a longform album-length piece to reflect the time and patience it must have took for Becquerel to make his discovery, while also keeping everything pretty vague and open to interpretation…
    Through abstract sonic experimentation with room tones and various field recordings I found that I had created a vaguely dark and confined atmosphere that suited the theme of the release. The sound artist Anne-F Jacques described it as ”simultaneously full of sound but with a kind of hollow open space in the middle”. Given how abstract and ambiguous the piece (and my work in general) is – it’s pretty difficult to talk about, but the whole thing makes sense in my own head…

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #5

    Voices #5
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Sunrise 2×4

    answering some questions. We have already observed his field recordings / drone / dark ambient / ambient work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “The Drowning of Guanacaste” that we prefer is “The Blood Spilt From the Lizard Will Return To Wash Over Us All”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Sunrise 2×4: Sure, this track was mostly made up of aggravated acoustic guitar samples, recorded onto a microcassette and fed through various effect pedals. The guitar for this specific track was a fuller recording I had earlier from Jarret Luttrull who did the original sample of my older tapeloop song “music for your dying plants ii”
    The electrical hums are inspired by the constant rain and lightning storms that we worked under, and every day they seemed to show up out of nowhere and drown out everything around us. I remember walking a mile on the beach back to my room from the bar, which would have been blissfully picturesque but in the distance I could see a lightning storm move closer and closer to the direction I was heading. So even at moments of complete peace, being alone on the beach there was always a looming threat of electrical storms. At one point a lightning strike took out all the cameras and electronics in one of the rooms we had set up and fried tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.
    The title of the track came from an unfortunate event with the passing of one of the older lizards that lived on the property. He had always sunbathed in the same spot near the restaraunt we all ate at, and he passed during our residency there. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t collectively our fault for being there.

    [2. CREATION]

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  • Voices #4

    Voices #4
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Auditor

    answering some questions. We have already observed his ambient / electronic / dark ambient / experimental work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “Anachoreisis” that we prefer is “Flooding”. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Auditor: My functional memory was hijacked many years ago. I imagine I was probably teaching myself to play a Gymnopedie or Gnossienne and listening to them on repeat. I have a sampler, an SP-404. I likely fed it things that were then abstractly regurgitated  and reassembled by hand and heart.

    [2. CREATION]

    (more…)

  • Voices #3

    Voices #3
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    House Of Quiet

    answering some questions. We have already observed his experimental / ambient / noise / lo-fi work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “A Crooked Stick” that we prefer is “Ceterus Paribus“. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► House Of Quiet: That particular track was born out of a feeling to add gradually to a simple framework without overwhelming elements. A single looped chord fed by prepared guitar, radio static, staggered delays and predominantly clean work.

    [2. CREATION]

    (more…)

  • Voices #2

    Voices #2
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    Passage

    answering some questions. We have already observed his drone / ambient / dark ambient / experimental work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “gateway” that we prefer is “how to get away“. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► Passage: “How to get away” is the only song on the album that was recorded in separate sections. The first of the two sections has the only original sound on the album that doesn’t come from a guitar or a synthesizer, instead, what you’re hearing is a music box being played very slowly through a pedalboard. In an earlier version of the track, there was a short acoustic song during the intro, and the track was called “waves” in reference to one of the lyrics. Like the rest of the tracks, I came up with the final title while uploading the album to bandcamp. The title “how to get away” represents, at least for me, the existential dread of living under the American regime.

    [2. CREATION]

    (more…)

  • Voices #1

    Voices #1
    ◦ “voices” is the place where we ask, artists reply and you read.
    here we got:

    rsn | N

    answering some questions. We have already observed his drone / ambient / dark ambient / noise work here.

    [1. IDEA]

    ■ The A. O.: The track from “shift #2” that we prefer is “shift #2.2“. Can you tell us how it came to light?

    ► rsn | N: “shift #2” is a collaboration album with the ambient/drone guitarist N. I worked with him a lot with my band [ B O L T ]. We met for a session together in our studio and started developing ideas without any pre-planning. It soon became clear that we wanted to work with just a semitone shift to create different atmospheres. This resulted in 5 songs, 3 of which ended up on “shift #1” and 2 on “shift #2”.

    [2. CREATION]

    (more…)