I got the idea for this track in one of my morning walks, I have a wee park nearby and during the autumn lockdown I decided to try to pay more attention to my surroundings and decided to not listen to music or a podcast which is what I would normally do and just listen. As I entered the park I kind of regretted this cause I was confronted with the sound of construction as they're building some new houses just next to it and all I could hear was all kinds of bangs and lorries reversing (this is before having a coffee), but as I carried on walking and approaching areas with more trees I started hearing loooooads of birds, like I was shocked and started worrying about my lack of attention for not having heard them in my previous walks (I realised the day after the walk coincided with the dawn chorus so this worry was eased). Anyway, I decided to try to recreate the walk into a musical soundscape.  I didn't have a sound recorder at the time so I just searched in youtube and tried approximating all the sounds that I heard, including someone shouting for their dog really REALLY loudly, yes my walk was as intense and weird as this track.

birds n things

Picture by @jhnnscmllr

This track emerged from recordings I made with a pal in his flat when I first started using a sound recorder. Some of the sounds I don't even remember where they came from! But those that I do include chess pieces moving inside the board, scissors, flipping pages in a book, one of those glass bottles that have a weird opening system (apparently they're called swing top bottles check em out), a lighter, a lamp spring, my pal cracking his knuckles (I actually didn't realise this until the track was kind of finished, if I had known I wouldn't have included this horrible noise), the sound iPhones make when turning the screen off (I also didn't realise this and now I'm scared Apple might sue me), and our voices too.

Inside Field

I started playing around in Ableton about a year ago now, and sound synthesis is possibly what I've most enjoyed learning about, modifying and tweaking a sound wave to design your own sound. Other than some drops I recorded in my bathroom (didn't even have to warp them!), and a field recording of some birds, this track is entirely made of synthesised sounds. Sound design is very new to me and can't wait to learn more about it!

Bathroom Drops

This lo-fi-ish track is one of the 1st I ever made. I've lost the original file and all I have is this audio which I rediscovered recently. In my early days, all I wanted to make was lofi sounding music, but this intention quickly faded once I learnt you could create loops in Ableton's session view and ended up making some intense techno. I've always enjoyed bringing in dialogue and voice into my music, at the end of the day voices are instruments.The speech included here I discovered when I started meditating after struggling with anxiety (you can listen to the whole clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNyJgNjCDuU&t=12s), and I was deeply moved! Whilst the track sounds a bit sad and depressing, it's amazing to look back now and realise how instrumental (literally and metaphorically) this first song and this speech was to me.

Thoughtlessness

I'm actually not even sure what genre this is so I've just tagged it as 'electronic'. This song came about after I learnt about the rotating rhythm generator in Ableton, part of Live's free CV Tools Pack. Basically it allows you to generate polyrhythms that don't fit neetly in a grid, by choosing when you want a specific drum to play within a made up time. I'm aware this doesnt make much sense, so for example, I can choose a hat to play 3 times within a 18 bar loop, maybe a kick to play 7 times within a 30 bar loop, etc. So then you get this weird loop that is constantly changing! I had a lot of fun playing around with it and this track was the result of that. I don't really think about anything when I make music (probably why I make music lol), but I find it interesting that within that mindlessness its unavoidable to channel music that I'm into, for example that gliding high pitched melody was me channelling some Blade Runner, and those hihats that come towards the end made an appearance as this year I've been listening to a lot of trap. Don't know where those creepy dark sounding chords come from tbh, but I can't seem to avoid them...

Zing

Last month I read 'House of Leaves' by Mark Z. Danielewski, possibly the craziest book I've read. I found it in one of my pals flat and flicked through it and had to buy it. The text is arranged in strange ways to mirror the events in the story, to create a creepy claustrophobic atmosphere as the book is partly about this weird impossible house that's larger on the inside than the outside.

Anyway, at one point in the book, one of the characters is trying to remember a melody of a song, and you can see a blanc musical score. When he finally remembers it, the score gets filled with notes, and when I saw this bit (in the pic) I wondered how this melody sounded like. I went on Ableton and played it with my keyboard, and then decided to make a creepy track inspired by this book. I was also very pleased when I saw the track lasted 5:30mins, as part of the book discusses a video taken in a hallway of the house entitled '5 and a half minute hallway'. I didn't really think much about it in terms of tempo so I'm not entirely sure the melody (entering first in 0:47)would sound like this.. but I had a lot of fun making it and trying to capture the unsettling vibes!

House of Leaves, p.479

vibra

I made this track a while ago when I took a music production course at subsine academy (which I highly recommend!!) and finally learnt how to use the synthesisor 'wavetable' in Ableton. One week, we were given a fun challenge: to make a track entirely out of sounds we created with the synthesisor. This is the result! I spent months avoiding the wavetable (and many other techy music things) cause it looked so horribly complicated I thought I could never understand it. But at some point, I realised that nothing is impossible to understand, you just need to find a way of learning that fits you, which might take some time. Learning sound synthesis has massively changed the way I listen to and make music.   It's so fun, being able to tweak and modify a sound wave to create your own unique sound! I specially love the weird alien sound that comes in around 2:40.

Picture by: Johannes Müller(@jhnnscmllr)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDuXlQcaEG0&t=506s&ab_channel=lunattic

I made this live set shortly after moving to Amsterdam earlier this year. A week before moving back to Glasgow, I managed to record it in my slightly empty room where I spent many many hours producing and playing it.

I used samples throughout from female electronic music pioneers that have inspired me since recently learning about them, including:
- 12:45 | A sample from the first movie soundtrack made entirely out of electronic sounds for the film Forbidden Planet composed by Bebe Barron and Louis Barron in the late 50s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diRx8....
- 15:10 | Early electronic sounds by Delia Derbyshire from the 60s, best known for producing Doctor Who's theme (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw7VN...)
- 18:30 | Pauline Oliveros' first track Lear from her beautiful Deep Listening album, recorded in the late 80s in an abandoned underground water cistern with 45s of reverberation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U__lp....
- 30:05 | A sample from a 20 min musique concrète piece (Symphonie magnétophonique) by Else Marie Pade, danish composer credited for producing Denmark’s first purely electronic composition (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFMu5....

Knowing people would sneakily hear these pioneering sounds within my own pushed me to perform this first live set back in May at a wee festival (thanks to Steve, who organised the line up and encouraged me to play it).

A special thanks to Simon for his guidance and constant encouragement, Yosheng for his feedback and motivating enthusiasm and a big credit to Marcie for putting up with me playing this over and over and over, and for helping out with video editing.

And thank YOU for listening!

Figs of Your Imagination

Credit Illustration: https://www.istockphoto.com/portfolio/Bitter?mediatype=illustration

Clamp

Steam

Flask

Conun Drum

Drops

《 lunatic in the attic 》

Read track descriptions if you want to know the backstory of these 🌚

lunattic

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