With this piece, I aimed to invoke a romantic yet surreal feeling of floating in the space. The main theme played repeatedly by piano brings in warm, romantic image to the dreamy soundscape created by heavily reverberated and panned-out synth sound. Another theme I explored in this piece is dialogue between digital and analogue. I chose particularly analogue sound sources to compose this track, such as piano, analogue synth lead, noise from vinyl record, and so on. But these sounds are mostly generated and manipulated with digital technology. For us living in the digital age, everything became so easy. We can even book a ticket for space travel; maybe we are losing our capacity to dream. I would define this track Analogue Spaceship as a nostalgia of the analogue days -- of the days when soaring up to the space was nothing but romantic, surreal dream you can only see through black-and-white TV. 

Analogue Spaceship (Final project)

This project is a mash up of Amy Winehouse's You Know That I Am No Good and Beck's Where It's At. Through this assignment I aimed to explore the element of "groove" and blend different interpretations by two artists of discreet genres. The two artists used different instruments and sound recording schemes -- Amy Winehouse, on the one hand, employed rich, raw, acoustic sounds; Beck, on the other hand, built the song upon simple organ sound and added synthetic filters and distortion to various sound samples. Despite such different approach the two tracks share soulful groove at core. In order to demonstrate the universality of groove, I extracted the drum line from Winehouse's piece and used that as a rhythmic skeleton of the project. Then I transposed down Beck's keyboard line an octave to mingle it with brass part of You Know that I'm No Good. 

mu200_yhong