Over the next 5 days I will be listing my favourite five albums of 2014 with a review of each culminating on new years day with my album of the year. The other 4 are in no particular order. So stay have a look at the site every evening to see what I think are the best 5 albums of 2014.
This week I stuck to the darker sound I have been working on for the past few weeks. The idea was to try and push the Teenage Engineering OP1 into areas I don’t usually hear. Making it growl with a grittier sound then the usual soft melodies I get from it.
Every instrument in this track is the OP1 with the exception of the Drums made on NI Maschine. The track ominously builds to the first Drop at the 2:20 mark, which is a drum pattern at 80bpm before building to a more Drum & Bass style Section towards the end at 3:55. For the final minute of the track I loose control and the whole thing collapses in on itself as the OP screams with delay and feedback:
Anger when directed with thought can be a powerful thing and on close your eyes El-P, Killer Mick and Zack De La Rocha prove this perfectly.
Close your eyes is a call to arms, a militant approach to there philosophy. Anger towards the corruption and lies told by people in positions of power and the methods of control used by capitalism that keep people in thier place . It may be an aggressive and bombastic attack on these issues but it’s an anger that I can relate to:
This track started with evolving synth drone sound from my op1. I was working on another track for the first few days but after making this drone I decided to scrap the rest and just use the drone sound as a basis of the rest of the track.
The one problem was that the drone sound slowly drifts around the 80bpm tempo mark without sticking to a fixed tempo for more than a couple of bars. I tried to make it work in a fixed tempo but it lost its key element of being unnerving and grabbing your attention. Which I believe is partly down to the drifting nature of the sound.
Deciding to ignore the tempo entirely and use the synth as my reference greatly affected the rest of the track as It meant I couldn’t use midi fixed to a grid for any part of the track and everything would have to be played by hand and recorded into the track.
Because everything had to be recorded live I decided to use real instruments instead of samples as much as possible and to keep the dark and rough and ready approach I used single takes of each instrument.
I recorded each instrument several times and picked the take that worked the best, the only exception being the drums which were samples played live from NI Maschine:
Clarks most recent and self-titled album is a really interesting piece of work that manages to blend both alternative soundscapes iconic of the Warp label with the drive of dance floor beats.
Unfurla is just one of the many great tracks on the album and can be heard below:
This week was an attempt to learn my way around my current modular build. The base of this was built around the OP1 with a few samples Choirs I have recorded. I then layered the sounds from my modular into the rest of the track:
The latest album by Caribou is fantastic and I will write about it in great detail later in the year. He’s managed to develop a unique sound that merges ideas from different forms of electronic music into something that feels mainstream with an alternative/experimental edge.
Back Home manages to blend an all out dance track with the kind of grandeur you would expect to hear in a John Barry, James bond title piece.
This week I had more time to work within the studio and on my computer. It’s a rare occurrence I haven’t used the OP1 instead favouring ableton live with FM8 to create most of the synth stuff. The track also heavily features the field recording samples I have taken throughout the past few years:
I’m slowly getting through albums of the year and this track really stood out.
It starts with a stripped down instrumentation which gives room for the vocals to breathe before something more rambunctious breaks out towards the tracks conclusion:
This Weeks track was Made on the OP1 and Ableton Live with Processing. Mostly in my car as I have been waiting for work. The background of the track features field recordings of crowds which i have been collating over a few years: