FRONTIERS CHAT
On Monday Sept. 4 I did a livechat on Bandcamp during the FRONTIERS listening party. I’ve edited it for coherence. I hope it sheds some light on the music and me the music maker.
I will talk a little bit about what FRONTIERS is about. I'll split it into the meaning, then the music, then the recording unless it's still just me. Okay, so about the music itself. What I wanted to do was gather newer music I've been working on. My last 2 releases were of older - but still balls out awesome! - tracks. Since Jan '23 I've been working on both my recording and composing skills. Both have improved I believe.
I guess FRONTIERS is about 2 things: expanding your horizons and letting yourself groove. By that I mean allow yourself to explore and learn, educate and illuminate yourself. FRONTIERS for me encapsulates one of the few resolutions I've made at New Year's Eve and kept. And that was to get out of my own way. So that I could explore the frontiers.
With SUBTLE DISTINCTIONS I created something a bit lighter and peppier than my usual stuff. I hope. I think that's what the EP is about to be honest. HOPE. It's something I've not had a lot of lately. But over the course of this year things improved immensely and it seems like maybe there's some sunlight up ahead.
What the songs on FRONTIERS have in common is they're all pretty upbeat, brighter in sound. I've been working on more space in my recordings and FRONTIERS is the newest and best example of that.
My tracks have always had a lot going on tho I came to realize they were sometimes muddy and unclear. I actually discovered that driving back from my sister-in-law's funeral in February. I was playing tracks for my wife on the drive back and half of them sounded muddy with a lot of the highs lost.
Of course a 2018 Subaru Forester isn't a great listening environment but it still sounded blech. When I got home I listened on my studio monitors and read up online and came to realize that I needed to up my recording game. So I did and I'm happy to say that not only I think they sound better but my beta listeners all agree they do.
"Modal Auxiliary" is a great example of a lot of soundscaping and sound bed taking up space while the actual melodic/harmonic/ percussive stuff is up front. It was fun to craft it to mix the more ambient soundscape parts with the melodic ones. I reeeeeaaaaallly love how the last half of the song is pretty much just audio sludge.
SOMETIMES I do wonder if my outros are too long but that's what my beta listeners are for. They'll tell me if it is too long. And you can blame Autechre for that. After decades of their long, deconstructed endings it's one of my favorite things to do. Oh man that ambience at the end always gets me.
"So CRT what's up with your titles?"
Great question! OUTPATIENT is sort of about my time in an outpatient program. hence the name. Now that was a fun one, too, because the main synth parts are almost all Arturia plugins. The Buchla Music Easel is especially wild.
This and INSECURITY can best be summed up as inspired by Meat Beat Manifesto. I got sick of A/B comparing my songs to MBM songs. I thought I was doing everything right but they still sounded weak. So I went to the woodshed so to speak (the real one is full of spiders), studied and I think this track and INSECURITY both slap about 60% as much as an MBM track.
Okay 50% but still I just want to make big bangers sometimes ya know? Boom bapp beats, dub delays, noisey shit! What's funny to me is how all it takes is a little extra time and a little tweaking and then BOOM the track just opens up! Long ago a friend said it's all about panning & EQing which I came to find is 2 out of 3. I'd say the 3rd part of that is gain staging.
It's more technical than I want to get into now but it's made all teh difference in my mind. About 1/2 way through OUTPATIENT there's a big long ambient part that I sometimes wondered was too long. Now I think it works as a break between the two parts. A… frontier if you will. After 6 minutes in the track is basically a long slow fadeout lol I love how it all combines into this weird, glitchy thing where all the loops go in and out then come together. The noise gets big and brash then slowly washes out. The last 2 minutes are a nice bit of ambience themselves. I even thought about breaking it into 2 tracks but they don't work either alone or as a shorter track. You need to hear the whole damn thing to get the entire idea. Imagine being only shown one square foot of the Sistine Chapel at a time? Okay my work isn't on the par of Michelangelo but you get what I mean.
Now INSECURITY was actually never supposed to be on an album. It's a track I started then used as my guineau pig for teaching myself about recording. And in the end it ended up sounding pretty dope. When I sequenced this ep I was surprised how well it worked with the other tracks.
And that beat is straight up MBM. Boom boom bapp! Well kinda. I have become obsessed with one section of this song at about 4:15. This break came out so smooth. Last for almost a minute. Almost as funky as Funky Drummer! And the buildup after works nice too I think.
I will say I'm considering 2 followups to FRONTIERS. One will be a remix and the other will be an ep exploring what separates frontiers... Well I hope I've enjoyed learning a bit more about FRONTIERS and my methods. Or madness.
- CRT