…feels “done” to me. Furthermore, it refers to my style, which of course is not yet fully developed and will certainly change in the future.
Also, the term describes very well our transience, which the album is thematically dedicated to, because we all will soon be undone.
I knew that I wanted to use the ticking of clocks and music boxes as the main motif in my album as a symbol of transience. So I decided to build it around a BPM of about 120 so I could incorporate it in real time. So then again the house genre turned out to be a perfect choice as a starting point for my tracks. However, I created most of the ticking noises in the album myself from a wide variety of sound sources, rather than recording them.
Likewise, I wanted to use the very catchy and conformity-feeding basic rhythm of dance music as an allegory for the compulsion to conform in relation to life as a whole. Whenever I use that very basic house rhythm on the album, I wanted to musically address themes in the track where conformity, everyday human life, being dependent on the environment and external pressures play a big role.
One night, when I had just started working on the first house track I ever produced (“Long Road, Brittle Light”), I dreamt of a strange apparition, a soul, a ghost, a white sheet floating along next to a road behind the guardrail at night.
This image burned itself into my brain and haunted me again and again, it was the optical representation of all diffuse, intangible emotions in me, of the heaviness that holds me, of the restlessness that drives me, of the transience of being and last but not least, through its completely featureless outer appearance, also a symbol of all humanity and all sentient beings in general. In short, it is the perfect symbol of my transcendental music, which is dedicated to the depiction and exploration of all diffuse emotions and also plays with these diffuse perceptions through musical artifices explained in more detail below, in order to confront an attentive listener with hardly definable and complex emotional situations.
In terms of melodies, I am convinced that a melody is only memorable if I can hum along with it; in my opinion, melodies that are too complex often tend to be annoying and detrimental to a track when it should actually stay in my head. So I decided to use simple, catchy melodic progressions paired with original sound design throughout the album.
Coincidence plays also a gigantic role in all our lives, alone that it has come to our life form, is the result of a concatenation of innumerable coincidences. Others may call it fate or God, but I find these terms dangerous, because then one assumes that everything follows a meaning or plan and already much negative has resulted from such beliefs. Still, I wanted to give chance an efficacy, a creative power in my music, and so I based most of my sound design on effect racks that I put together myself. In doing so, I had several random LFOs modulate the parameters of various effect modules and ran through all sorts of sound sources that I used in my tracks and recorded the results. The results were mostly complete nonsense of course, but every now and then I’d get some very cool, unusual sounds that I could use in a variety of ways in my tracks. It was an incredible amount of work each time, but in the end I came up with absolutely unique sounds that no other producer has used or will ever use because they are but happy accidents (yes, I loved watching Bob Ross in my teenage years) of random LFO chaos. And of course it’s also a perfect symbol for the randomness of our existence and what happens to us.
I also wanted to use rhythmically simple and comprehensible beat structures as much as possible, as they tend to put the listener in a state of physical restlessness, be it just the inwardly perceived stimulating effect of this music or physical movements. A nodding of the head, a bobbing of the foot in the tank, or even dancing to the music.. However, I wanted to abstract this lowest common denominator of all dance music genres with sound design, unique sound selection and combination and atmospheres and track structures that are unusual for dance music, in order to create something new, to break genre boundaries and to generate a transcendental impression on the listener.
The most obvious characteristic of my music, however, is first of all the absence of vocals and lyrics in the classical sense. Although I can sing quite well, I deliberately refrain from it. The highest form of art, in my opinion, is conveying emotion through music and sound alone. If the lyricism in sung lyrics is not a work of art in itself, text in music tends to be out of place in my opinion and only fills the space left open by the instrumentation. Especially since many people don’t understand the lyrics of the music they consume anyway lyricism is usually redundant for that reason alone. A musician who has to explain in words what a song is about and how he feels in order to evoke emotion in the listener is, in my opinion, the musical equivalent of a comedian who has to tickle the audience to make them laugh. I understand, of course, that the human voice can be an effective instrument, so in almost all tracks I also use vocal textures in various ways, created from heavily processed/warped human voices that sometimes serve a rhythmic, sometimes melodic, sometimes atmospheric function in the track, thus performing the same functions that are otherwise realized in electronic music through sterile electronic sounds created by synthesizers and basses. The same is true for my use of classical instruments. If you listen to my music and know something about music production, you will quickly realize that it is rarely possible to clearly determine how I create my sounds and where the origin of my sounds lies. I use almost exclusively organic sounds, field recordings, found sounds, real instrumental sounds and vocal textures. Only for sub basses do I constantly use electronic sound resources, since you definitely need a reliable synthesizer to provide the stability and mono-compability that characterizes a sub. Now and then I used drum samples from old drum machines and orchestral percussion, some of which I processed heavily digitally to make them sound more modern and give them the necessary punch and place them well in the mix, though I also formed much of the percussion from various self-made recordings and kick drums from my heartbeat.