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:
“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.
I always knew the next track “Leaving” would be the last on the album however as a fairly minimal piece it clashed with the two long progressive and at times aggressive tracks that preceded it. During the mixing stage both Mark Chadwick and myself decided we needed something to break up the tracks and allow the listener to settle into the end of the album.
Out of all the field recordings I’d made but hadn’t used, The clearing up of Tsukiji Fish market in the afternoon was the one I most wanted to use and the correlation with people packing away stores and me “packing away” was rather fitting. I selected one of the recordings and cleaned up the audio using Izotope’s RX to get rid of some of the electrical noises in the recording and then and we then selected a 30 second section to put into the album.
Post-rock legends Godspeed You! Black Emperor are back with a new album G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! It continues their now well established sound. Long instrumental pieces with several acts that trigger raw emotion in thier listeners.
The final track on the album OUR SIDE HAS TO WIN (for D.H) is something new for them. Almost sounding like a Requiem this mostly string led piece features a smattering of guitar and develops into a slow and positive, dear I say uplifitig chord progression at its conclusion. It results in a bitter sweet conclusion the the record that is well worth a listen to old fans and new alike.
Kultara was the track with the most input from other people. The track is driven by this plinky repeating 4 bar melody which originally was recorded on my op-1 in Japan. That version however was a little to simplistic, I loved the jilted rhythm and the melody but the actual sound of the synth I had chosen on the op-1 was a bit too ridged.
To get around the recorded simplicity from the OP-1 I put the waveform into ableton and then mapped it out by hand in a MIDI file to keep its odd tempo. I then sent that MIDI into my modular and tried to replicate a sound as close to the original as I could. Once I had a close replication of the sound of the OP-1 on the modular I had the advantage of being able to adjust many different parameters in my modular to shift the sound slightly in varying directions. I set up a recording and slowly adjusted the synth for half an hour to give myself a large collection of the same melody slowly shifting over time. I selected a section of this recording and ran it permanently throughout the piece whilst I worked on other elements.
Most of the elements on the track were recorded In my studio rather than in Japan with the only exception being the vocal pad sound which was taken from another section of the Geisha recording I have used several times up to now.
The guitars were an interesting part of the track. I used a funk guitar sample library and treated it with distortion to create a really jagged sound. Originally the intent was to replace this with a real guitarist. I spent a few days recording with my good friend and collaborator Adam Wheeldon on guitar trying to track a guitar sound close to the original recording but every version lost that robotic feel that the original version had. Adam finally said “you should just use the original I like it the way it is” and that gave me the confidence to leave the sampled version in the track.
I’d like to thank Adam for his help over the years and on this piece. It takes a lot for someone to spend a couple of days on something and be willing to relinquish that work for the overall feel of the track. That’s the kind of person he is and I will always be grateful for his friendship and insight.
My Favorite part of the track is the string section at 2:50. I have played with string samples over the years in large sample libraries but they always take a long time and a foresight to program articulations and make them sound real. During working on this album though I downloaded the Ipad app ThumbJam which by name may sound like a bit of a toy, but it’s a fantastic players instrument in its own right. The Touch screen on the ipad allows you to make fairly realistic vibrato changes with ease which really enhance a far more simplistic string sample library then the deep and complex ones I have on my computer. I recorded several layers of cello to make the section you hear on the track.
The end of the track finishes where it began with the modular sequence and the sound of a field recording of my footsteps on gravel outside of the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Kultara was the last piece I started on the album and one of the most ambitious but I also think it’s slightly hampered by some musical and technical limitations of the project. Therefore it’s the track I’d most like to revisit in the future.
Past & Yoyogi Park came from two recordings made In japan. A wild track taken in Yoyogi Park in the center of Tokyo and the plodding synth line that I recorded on the OP-1 the night I had visited the park.
Both recordings has a slightly sorrowful and wistful sound that I thought I could continue with on the track. I decided to get away from synthesis and instead use a collection of instruments with sentimental value from my past. Out of all the tracks on “Made In Japan” Past & Yoyogi Features the most live recordings of real instruments because of this.
On the Track the other instruments used were an Old Melodica that my great grandmother left me, A trombone which was the first instrument I played seriously as a child and a bass guitar which was the first instrument I ever bought myself when I started to play in bands.
There were some serious problems with both the Bass Guitar and Melodica which aren’t quite in tune due to damage/age but I wanted to use them specifically for sentimental reasons. This resulted in me requiring to do some slight fixing in post to keep those instruments in tune. I also sampled the trombone and pitched it down an octave with some processing to create the Initial bass sound in the track.
At first I struggled to make something from the initial synth part as I liked it soo much. Out of all the instrumental parts from Tokyo it was the first one I attempted to use. But once I decided to use real instruments and not try to overcomplicate the track by making a repeating structure the track came together quickly.
Listening back to the track is quite transportive for me. Making me think of the parts of my life that involved me playing music but also recording these very lines in my cold studio late at night in the center of Leigh. I would often record there at night to reduce the outside noise of the busy street and was recording these in the middle of winter with only a small electric heater to keep warm. These were some of the last recordings I made in that space before I could no longer use it so it also holds those memories for me as well, making it the hardest track for me to listen to from the album.
I’ve just started listening to the excellent “Tape Notes” podcast where John Kennedy interviews artists and producers about the processes behind creating their albums. Based on the handful of episodes I have listened to so far, the podcast manages to balance both entertainment and more technical discussion. This allows for informative conversations that don’t end up sounding to stuffy.
One of the first episodes I wanted to listen to was “Bicep,” as I was interested in learning about the techniques they applied to create their music.
It’s great to hear so many musicians and producers willing to reveal what used to be called “trade secrets.” In the past I used to think that keeping your techniques to yourself made sense, as you built your own sound and protected it from others. But the longer I’ve spent working with audio, the less I find this to be the case.
Everyone has their own way of doing things, no matter how much knowledge we have as producers/musicians. So being informed of other peoples techniques will never end up creating the same thing, even if the desire is to emulate another artist. Listening to how different acts and producers create music shows that there is no correct answer for success, as each one handles it differently and yet still achieves great results.
After listening to the podcast, I went back to the Bicep album “Isles” and have listened to it several times this week. “Apricots” is a great example of their sound, which focuses on lush synthetic textures especially in their pad design. “Apricots” also shows that, with careful sound design, production and compositional structure, you can make music that remains rich and exciting, even when the melodic elements in the arrangement are fairly sparse:
Nostalgia marks a different technique applied to the album as all the music surrounding the field recording was made on my return from japan.
On our second day In Tokyo with jet-lag still fully on us we decided to try and get to tsukiji fish market to see the auction In the morning. As this was to early for public transport we decided to get up in the middle of the night and walk for a couple of hours to Tsukiji Fish Market and experience the city at night.
The Colour Temperature of street lighting in Japan at night is colder (bluer) then that in the UK and from my eyes gives the city a smoother almost mystical feeling as shadows and light play of each other in softer ways. It also allows the lighting on structures that don’t follow the same colour temperature to really pop out of the environment and make the place seem hyper real as if your on a film set. Whilst we walked through the city streets I decided to take out my field recorder and capture the environment as we went.
This resulted in a hour long recording that was interesting in many ways. In the early morning Tokyo was unbelievably quiet. We may have only seen a couple of people and dozen moving cars over the entire 2 hour walk. We talked and walked ignoring the recording so large chunks of it (although great memories for me) wouldn’t work that well when mixed with music. However there was a really good 15 minute section where we had stopped talking and walked past an area with a few bars and several cars driving by which I thought would work perfectly.
I decided to record a piece as an accompaniment around this field recording trying to represent the feeling of travel. Not only through Tokyo that night but also through my own life. I decided early on that I would build it into sections of music as if you walked past a bar playing music on the street. However these pieces of music would reference different parts of my love of music. Early In the piece I would reference the music of Video games (especially the final fantasy series) with Nobuo Uematsu being a huge influence on me as a child. Then it would overtime merge towards the music I was into at the time (Jazz and electronic).
Once I picked a section of the field recording I would leave it running underneath the arrangement and not make any edits to try and fit particular features into the track. Instead I would adjust the instrumentals around the key moments of the field recording. Changing the Instrumentation with each time a car passes on the street.
The opening Synth sound came from Massive by NI. I had chosen to Use this because of Missive’s use on the soundtrack for FEZ by disasterpiece. Although it sounds like a rather simple waveform going through a delay Massive is actually creating the delay effect internally using sequenced ADSR, and LFO on the Amp. For all the other instrumentation for the beginning of the track I wanted to keep it as simple and representative of older video games using simple wave forms and white noise to create the percussion and instrumentation.
At this point a car passes by on the recording and we shift to a more Jazz based section which I improvised over several attempts starting with the keys to get a basic structure and then going back to them to tighten them up after I had recorded the rest of the instrumentation. I wanted the instrumentation to feel “off the grid” like it was drifting about to match my feelings during the recording of the walk through Tokyo.
At this point I faded out the music at the 3 minute mark and we are left with the busiest part of the field recording with multiple cars crossing the stereo microphones. I wanted to leave the listener In soaking up the environment of Tokyo at night for a while. This section started a lot longer but over time shifted down to just under a minute as I wanted people to start hearing music as soon as they felt comfortable with the field recording and it just felt right to me to start the music again at this time.
The third and final piece of music mixes up elements from both the Video Game and Jazz inspired sections. I also wanted to hint at my love for electronic music especially one of my favorite groups Boards Of Canada and by adding more reverb to the synth line and playing chords instead of arpeggios I felt like I achieved this effect.
Finally I wanted the track to not stop, but drift away into the distance. Like you were walking out of the city and the nostalgic vision of the past and into the countryside and the future. I fed the whole track into the reverb that I had placed on the Synth part and made it larger over time whilst removing the original signal so only the sound of the reverb remained fading into the distance.
For me Nostalgia achieves the goals aimed for when I started to listen to the original field recording better than any other track on the album. Following the field recording made me approach the track linearly which focused my attention on each part as it came allowing the track to morph and evolve organically. If I’d come up with the three separate sections in a random order and then tried to add a field recording at a later date it would have lacked the synergy between the two. For that reason its one of the tracks I return to the most when I now listen back to the album.
I owe Mark Chadwick a lot for putting collapse on the album. This is a small clip of a fairly brief recording I made in Japan of my OP-1 low on battery’s playing a sequence I had made. I had set up the sequence to record it but must have left my OP-1 for several hours forgetting to switch it off. When I plugged my headphones back into the OP-1 again I was quite fearful that I had broken the device listening back to the audio it was playing out but decided to record it into my field recorder before powering the OP-1 Down to charge it back up.
I genuinely thought that the OP-1 had come to the end of its life or something had damaged it during transport. Luckily charging it back to full fixed the issue and I haven’t come across it since. I found these odd sounds fascinating. They sounded like a synthesizer breaking and seemed so random in their nature that they were almost natural as if coming from a living creature.
I tried to make a deeper track out of the longer recording but it was far to erratic to control or put into something more structured so I left it to one side.
When we had finished the mix of all the music on the album and Mark was looking for things to fill over the transitions he asked me if I had any suggestions and I pointed him to this recording but I wasn’t sure if it was usable.
He took the section of it you hear on the album and treated it with a bit of reverb to create the track now. It works well as a marker between the previous tracks that were OP-1 lead and the next collection of tracks that use a larger collection of synthesizers and instrumentation.
This week I’ve been going back to a few albums from my past. Shout Out Louds were one of the bands that I felt like I “found” myself, years ago. After hearing their first single “The Comeback” on internet radio, I got their first album “Howl Howl Gaff Gaff” and have been a fan ever since.
Looking back at the blog, I was surprised to see they have only made my TOTW twice. What is unsurprising though is that both their pervious entries and this week’s recommendation come from their second album “Our Ill Wills.”
Partly this is because the album came out at the very end of my teens; an impressionable time for anyone and for me the time I finally had enough money to be able to buy albums and go to gigs regularly. However, in hindsight my love for “Our Ill Wills” also stems from the production of Björn Yttling of Peter, Björn & John fame.
Although I didn’t become a fan of Peter, Björn & John until a few years after I’d first heard “Our Ill Wills,” it’s clear that the pop sensibilities heard on their records are also implemented on this one, taking some of the Lo-Fi edge of their previous record and giving it a shiny counterpoint that really helps the music pop.
Because of these factors, “Our Ill Wills” Is a record I will always love. It’s chock full of great and under appreciated Indy gems that make the whole record an easy recommendation in my book.
“You Are Dreaming” is a track that exemplifies what works so well about it. The deadpan vocal delivery underpinned with crisp instrumental production has and will always work for many artists. Shout Out Louds continue to pull this off with aplomb to this day.
It was on “Our Ill Wills” that a real production sheen was applied to their sound, and in many ways is when it worked best. The strings on “Are You Dreaming” are a perfect example, creating a weight and a quality to the piece that enhance further the bitter sweet style that Swedish bands like “Shout out Louds” and “Peter Bjorn & John” create so perfectly.
Spotify:
TOTW Playlist:
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