AM: Let’s start with your album! Had such a whirl listening to it, how long was it in the making? What was the the concept behind it & what does your set up look like?

G: Thank you for the kind words! The album was around a 2-year project in total from the inception of the concept to finally being put through production ready for release. The concept originated from the beginnings of a personal spiritual journey that started 2 years prior to when I first started writing it, where I began to delve into philosophy from various periods of time, mostly being the Hellenistic period of Ancient Greek Philosophy, Buddhism and 1920’s Existential Philosophy to name the most predominant things I explored, along with the incredible world of psychology. Through making attempts to understand myself I began to make a connection with something greater than me – a kind of unifying bond that brings all of us and everything together as one, which the album title ‘Pulchra Es Elementis’ alludes to, translating roughly to ‘Elements Are Beautiful’ in Latin, where the elements are essentially what makes us who we are and everything else around us. The general mood of the album is quite uplifting, almost melancholic, which I think reflects the way life is most of the time; an underlying pessimistic, realistic perspective that I have learnt has allowed me to truly understand how beautiful the world can really be. We all experience some form of suffering, and I think that this is an important thing to consider about the human race; we are all bound together by this fact I think, and in a way I feel a powerful beauty around this idea that enriches my experience with the world. The setup during the production of the album was incredibly simple – an Akai MIDI Keyboard, monitors, and interface, my ancient Macbook Pro and Ableton Live 9. A lot of the production techniques I used on the album were sample-heavy, but I did use a specific set of VSTs, including Massive and Zebralette.

AM: Tell us a little about the mix, how and where did you record it? Did ya enjoy it? 

I recorded the mix at home in my studio (my bedroom) using a MIDI Mixer given to me by some friends (Thanks Neil and Jodie!) using Traktor on a sunny afternoon. I absolutely love recording mixes and taking the listener on a journey so the experience was great! When I record mixes I try to make each one different to the last, and this mix was centred around the more slower tracks on the LP, which are all featured throughout. I am a huge fan of slower tempos between 90 and 120 BPM for their more hypnotic, flowing nature and so I drew for a selection of tracks that followed suit with this energy, as the tracks off the album are made to capture this same force. There are a mix of older and newer tracks inside and it is cool to hear how different periods of music history from the last 10 years meld together so brilliantly! It is chuggy, meditative, warped and full of dense low end.


AM: We’re big fans of your label NHS too, it’s quite varied and all the releases are great. Was there a specific idea with it to start with?

Thank you! I had initially wanted to start a label when I still lived in Australia and cycled through a range of idea that didn’t stick. Nostro Hood System finally came to be when I considered my long-term love for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I imagined what it would be like to receive an audio artefact from an alternate galaxy; what would that music sound like? By this time I was deeply interested in the left-field realm of electronic music and it seemed fitting to take NHS down the thematic route. So Nostro Hood System is essentially the name of the alternate system much like our Solar System that occupies the universe and the records are the sounds that come from it. The team that interprets the sound files are Xenologists on earth who receive and transmit the audio into comprehensible sounds that our ears can comprehend.

AM Podcast #50 - Galtier

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info (at) accidentalmeetings (dot) com

https://accidentalmeetings.bandcamp.com/

AM Podcast #50 - Galtier

Accidental Meetings