After the quite experimental album intro, I felt that I needed a track that grooves endlessly and pulls the energy level up a bit. I also wanted to have a track on the album that plays to a more conventional approach of a house production, but at the same time shows that you can work with different sounds than the electronic ones everyone uses.

I wanted to create a symbiosis of the conventional and the experimental, and as always, a symbiosis of organic and electronic elements. The latter is what I ultimately wanted to achieve on all the tracks on the album, so I set myself mini-challenges to work on track by track to improve my sound design, mixing and arranging skills. I wanted to use a different organic sound source as a foundation in each of the following four tracks.

For “Souls Tango In Dead Cities” it was vocal textures that I wanted to use to form the main elements of the track.

 I initially followed the convention of a direct rhythmic start into the intro (this was to be the first and last time on the album, as I obviously wanted to explore many other interesting ways to build a track better than via monotonous kick drums). However, I used an acoustic guitar as the main element in the intro because in “Time Pervades Us All” it was the main element of the second drop so I figured it would make a smooth transition. Also there is a fat, saturated acoustic bass alongside the kick drum, which is joined by a hybrid of trumpet, cello and accordion. Finally, a violin joins in, playing the main motif of the track.

The intro should make you want to move and at the same time set a melancholic undertone.

This is followed by rhythmically arranged vocal textures that first speed up, then slow down and finally dissolve. My ex-girlfriend particularly liked this part, she always said it felt like being pulled into outer space. She really liked the track in general and honestly I was about to cut it from the playlist a couple of times, but then I decided to leave it on because she liked it so much and in the end it turned out to be a good decision because it fits very well on the final album and without it a more optimistic facet of the album would be missing.

Conformity and conventions also allow for a sense of community or can reinforce the impression that you belong with other people. They also lead within music to quickly identify with new artists and know how to move to familiar rhythms. The song is meant to capture this given. It should sound like souls dancing together in a deserted city, it should sound emotional, melancholic, but fundamentally optimistic, and it should capture the feeling of wordless cheerful togetherness when dancing barefoot in the mud with others at a small festival outside. The joy and bonding over the music and the moment you share.

Anyway, the catchy vocal rhythm transitions into a more monotonous one, which then provides the main element of the first drop, which is glitched over and over again. The elements from the intro come back in, the fat, saturated acoustic bassline should sound something like those from the stoner rock bands I used to love listening to, driving, rolling, simple, grooving mercilessly.

In the second part of the drop a sound design technique appears for the first time, which should become one of my trademarks: glitchy atmospheres. I create these in painstaking detail work from various organic and electronic sound sources that have similar sound characteristics among themselves, let them play randomly distributed one note each of the desired melody and send everything through a glitch effect rack that I created myself. The end result is 99% bullshit, but also 1% interesting sounds that I can somehow incorporate into the arrangement. That’s how I always work when I want to put some glitchy elements into my tracks. I only came across this technique through a lot of trial and error, because I originally wanted to get something similar to vocals, like in “13 Angels Standing Guard ‘Round The Side Of Your Bed” from A Silver Mt. Zion. Didn’t work out, but paved the way to a whole new sound design technique for me to keep coming back to.

These glitchy atmospheres are meant to give the listener something to disorient them, something you can never really grab acoustically and listen to over and over because the sound is so interesting and unusual and yet somehow fits into the track structure. For the climax of the first drop, the melancholic violins from the intro come again, playing the main theme.

In the intermediate part, in addition to the guitar playing a theme, I wanted to have a similar sound to the vocal textures, sounding as if a large animal or giant was making a long drawn-out, mournful murmur. For this I designed and modulated a bass and placed it in the background.

The second drop also has vocal textures again, but this time fast jumping ones that sound as if they are generated from at least two different sound sources. I wanted to make the drop sound like different colored lights or souls playfully dancing around you. In the outro, this sound comes into its own again, isolated from all other elements, before the song ends quite melancholic with a piano. The ending should awaken in you the feeling you have when a party or event ends and you actually want to continue dancing and celebrating. But the beautiful moments must also find an end and pass.