I liked this track on Porter Robinson’s album “Nature”. It manages to blend the saccharine production found throughout a record with an experimental edge.
It keeps you guessing as it jilts between instrumentation and elements of sound design all with the glossiest forms of production that verges on an almost hyper pop aesthetic.
Give it a listen Here:
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Surfjan Stevens latest work “Convocations” is a large collection of instrumental music over two and a half hours long.
It could be a lot for many to listen several hours of melancholic instrumental music but this stuff is right up my street. It works well as an ambient collection of forlorn tracks you can have on in the background sound tracking your daily activities as it amorphously shifts between instruments and styles.
Celebration III comes about halfway through the work and gives you a good idea of what you’re in for if you listen to the whole thing so I’d recommend it as a good place to start.
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I’m always going to listen to anything OPN puts out and more often than not its going to end up as my track of the week. His ability to have a unique style and yet keep it fresh with rampant experimentation have struck a chord with me over the past decade and then some.
His latest track “Nothing’s Special” uses the same sounds you’ve heard in his work before, It exited previously in a different form on his album “Magic Oneohtrix Point never” but this time the changed elements are collaboration with Spanish singer Rosalía.
Her vocals create a powerful organic counterpoint to the colder electronic circuitry that makes up the instrumentation of the track. This results in a strong and mournful feeling that’s extenuated by the tracks tempo:
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The first time I heard Kölsch it was on his fantastic double single “Speicher 93,” which I have already brought to your attention on a previous track of the week. Gray was one of the tracks on that record.
However, it’s far more aggressive a version than the one you will hear on his album “1989,” which I’ve decided to highlight as my track of the week.
The instrumental elements are found on both versions of Gray, but the aggressive leading brass sound, found in the single version, mixed beneath a collection of woodwinds, gives the track an airier vibe. This continues throughout other production decisions, including a slightly less compressed kick drum and stripped down piano in the breakdown, with fewer chords and larger reverb tales.
The two versions show how much a track can change with a few production decisions; both great in their own right but each with its own atmosphere and direction. Listen to both below:
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Unfortunately this week has been a busy one for me and I’ve got very little time to post about the track. My TOTW is Don’t Shoot Up The Party by BROCKHAMPTON.
Give It a Listen below:
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It may not be their most critically revered album but The Bends is probably my personal favorite Radiohead album. It may be because it was the first of their records that I heard that it has such a connection for me, but I don’t think it’s the main reason.
Looking back at historical reviews, you get the sense that many critics at the time believed that this was the work of an Indy band trying to move into “stadium rock” and follow along the likes of U2, who are mentioned in several reviews at the time. In hindsight, I think they were both right in the sense that it elevated Radiohead towards the the huge success they are now, but also wrong in their assumption that this album marks a turn towards “stadium rock.” Instead it shows a band who are starting to experiment in ways that they develop a lot further on their next album “Kid A”.
“Fake Plastic Trees” is my favorite track from the album and a great example of the experimental elements starting to push through in their sound. You can hear clearly that the origin of this piece comes from a singer songwriter approach, with acoustic guitar and vocals forming the center or the track. You add to that electric guitar, bass, strings, organ and percussion, and it has the basis of what you would expect to hear on a “stadium rock” track of the 90’s, but their implementation and compositional structure is far from it.
Initially, the mix on the majority of the track is fairly space with many of the elements of the track mixed so low in the mix that you can only sense hints of them.
When they are all brought to the front and center of the track in the second third of the track, they have the sonic signature weight of what you would expect from stadium rock. However, they are doing things very differently to what you would expect from that sound.
The lead guitar sound is a great example as it distortionally falls over itself compositionally far closer to a “sonic youth” or “MBV” then anything you would expect to see on the closing act of a main stage at Glastonbury at that time.
It’s this experimentation that has marked Radiohead so far apart from other bands of that time on the same scale. Although the critics didn’t seem to bite onto this part of their sound at the time, its clear to hear now that Radiohead were sharpening their teeth – all be it subtly – on this record for their later works.
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The Latest album from Floating Points entitled Promises is a collaboration between Jazz saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a complete work, broken up into 9 movements on the record. It focuses around a singular motif that repeats throughout the entire album.
This blend of classical, jazz and a peppering of electronics took me several listens to get into and yet I have repeatedly returned to it over the past month to listen to the whole thing again, intrigued by its intricacies.
“Promises” seems like the kind of album that is rarely made these days. An indulgent and absorbing work of this nature rarely seems to get a budget large enough to gather a collection of talent this large, and for that risk alone it should be respected.
Yet it has much more to offer. Its distinctive sonic landscapes will be a joy for anyone who is into experimental music that focuses heavily on musicianship and sound design.
By its very nature, picking a singular “track” from the album is hard as the movements work so well as a whole. However “Movement 6” on Promises seems to be the crux of the album. It is the most instrumentally diverse and a great calling card for what the whole album is about when its firing on all cylinders. If you like the way this Movement sounds, It’s well worth listening to the whole thing:
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My French is rusty at best and struggles with the basics, let alone the more cryptic metaphors and references found on this track.
Yet, I was instantly attracted to it’s groove blending drum machines and synthesizers for the first verse, before they add elements of a rock band, which the track tonally interesting. It’s then peppered with compositional moments of eccentricity that turn Écran Total into something well worth hearing:
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Nils Frahm is always a pleasure to listen to. His ability to create such intricate textures out of single instruments makes his music captivating for the listener.
“My Friend the Forest” is a track that demonstrates these qualities perfectly. A closely mic’d piano is the main instrument on the piece. The piano is played softly, and the mic pics up a lot of the mechanical noise of the instrument. This helps enhance the piece, by creating an intimacy and realism in the performance, which gives it greater emotional weight. Give the track a listen below:
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“Leaving” was one of the simpler tracks on the album to make as it came fully formed. Technically it was one of the last tracks I made on the album however I already knew how it was going to be composed as soon as I started to think about “Made In Japan”.
The track features a synth melody I recorded on the last night I was In Tokyo but mixed with a field recording I took of the last train ride In Osaka to the airport. Our flight from Osaka back to Manchester was at 9:20 In the morning so the train journey must have been early morning between 5-6am. I remember vividly the feeling of the stress of trying to find the train on time in the early morning with all our luggage slowly ebb away once we were on the train as the dawn turned into day.
We were all tired so most of the group were having a nap on the train or sitting quietly so I decided to take out my recorder and just leave it on for the whole train journey.
As the recorder was on I reflected on the holiday itself how much I had wanted to do it for many years and was mixed with both a sense of achievement but also loss as it was all coming to an end. These were the same feelings I had on the night before we left Tokyo so I thought the field recording and the synth line would work great together.
I found a segment of the train recording that worked well and aligned with the track and added some reverb to it to wash it out a bit. In some sections it turns the trains breaks into an instrument itself almost sounding like horns in the background of the track.
The only thing I did to the OP-1 was layer it multiple times and treat each one differently with some pitch shifting and EQ to give it a bit of width on the spectrum and stereo field.
The track ends with the train pulling way from the station on towards the airport and with that the end of the album. Looking back on “Made In Japan” with some distance I’m really happy with how it turned out. My original aim was to create an “audio scrap book” of a dream holiday but after finishing the album it feels like it did a lot more. Traveling to Japan marked several large changes in my life. Moving onwards and upwards in my career, and starting a relationship with my future wife all happened around this time period. It very much felt like I was moving into adulthood with more responsibility and obligations for myself and all my friends. The long nights and weekends of sitting in the studio working on music on my own and with my friends seemed to be growing fewer and further apart. When I listen back to the album I can hear those conflicting emotions throughout.
For me “Made in Japan” isn’t just a reflection on a single holiday but my life up to that point and the further I get from the album the more that means to me. I hope those of you who have given the time to listen to it get your own feelings from it and it will mean something to you weather that reflects my experiences for not.
Now the whole album is on Youtube I will use this as an opportunity to move on from it for a while. It’s been a shame Covid-19 has stopped me performing it live, maybe the future will allow that to change. I did record a live performance on Youtube for anyone’s interest here.
I’d like to thank Mark Chadwick for his advise, skills and help on the mixing and mastering of the album and being someone to bounce ideas off. Finally I’d like to thank all the people who have listened to “Made In Japan” and told me their thoughts. Hopefully it won’t be another three years before I have out something new for you to listen to.
CT