colleen

It’s the first time I’m recording an album so soon after completing the previous one (I finished The Tunnel and the Clearing on 1st December 2020) and it is so exciting to be riding a creative wave stronger than any I’ve known so far. The way I’m feeling right now is that I have the enthusiasm of a 15-year-old coupled with the experience of a 45-year-old: it is not something I expected to feel at any point in my life, and I can’t quite believe it’s happening right now, but it is. Recently rehearsing Captain of None also gave me a nice sense of continuity. And it helps that I live in a vibrant city ❤️

Earlier this week I reorganized my studio to accommodate the Grandmother-and-Fooger-centric workflow I’m digging deeply into right now: I wasn’t expecting to go down that particular rabbithole for LP8 but I am 100% in love with what I’m finding out every single day through patient studying and experimenting. I also love Sol’s face as he discovered the new setup! The orange hue is not a filter by the way, it’s the color of the studio’s overhead lightbulb :-)))

As usual when I start work on a new album, things don’t exactly go the way I have planned them, and this is usually in the best possible way. I thought I would dive straight into an Elka Drummer One + Space Echo extravaganza (and I *will*, at some point), but because the Space Echo had to travel to the UK for a revision with Soundgas (it’s on its way back), I ended up focusing on the other side of the album’s sonic equation: the Grandmother and the Moogerfoogers. I thought I would keep on feeding my Yamaha Reface YC into the Grandmother for processing, since I was so happy with the results on “Revelation” and “Hidden in the Current” on the last album, and indeed I even made a complete song with that setup, but… but… I started using the Grandmother as what it really is, a synth, and it’s official: I have totally gone down the synthesis rabbithole.

When combined with the Moogerfoogers, the possibilities just seem endless, and that’s even before any patching happens… I am also so happy I’m finally having a proper go at the Moogerfoogers I was so kindly gifted with by Moog after my 2017 Moog Soundlab session: I worked a lot with the MF-104M delay from 2014 onwards, and the MIDIMuRF played a huge part in 2017’s A Flame my Love, a Frequency, but I only used the Lowpass Filter once on the last album (“Implosion-Explosion”), and I had yet to use the Ring Modulator and 12-Stage Phaser. Now is the perfect time to finally honor that gift.

As I go through this crucial learning and research phase, there is also a voice at the back of my head that says “But these aren’t your songs yet”. It also says “These aren’t even songs yet”. And that voice is always right. Because one thing’s clear to me: I am primarily a song-maker, and I personally am convinced of the fact that it is up to each individual creator to try and offer something unique and personal before putting it out on a totally saturated market. In other words: I don’t think you should listen to me unless I have something that only I can say. So I am excited at the thought that pretty soon the next phase of LP8 will naturally start to unfold, one in which life itself begins to seep into the machines to dictate what sound transformed into songs will sound like.

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