Late in 2019 I had a choice of continuing down my chosen career path of engineering or trying to achieve what was always my passion, making music as a living. I decided I would try to make and release music and commit myself to it fully, either until being forced back into my previous career due to failure, or making some progress towards the dream and enjoying it as long as I possible.

“Contraflow Continuum” is, for me, the highlight of that decision. It’s named as such because I have always felt that I was/am going against what the natural flow of the life I was living and, I am somewhere along that path/continuum, exactly where I do not know.

Since I started releasing music I have met so many amazing people, all almost exclusively remotely/online and I have made some real friends in the process, many of which are amazing artists and who I look up to greatly. I have been privileged to receive some beautiful messages from listeners who have enjoyed my music and shared how it has helped them in one way or another and because of that I have never been more happy or proud of any work I have done to date.

Thanks so much to all the listeners, to Stratford Ct., and to all the community who have helped me get to this point. It’s a small world but sometimes it can feel like a huge and empty space and without you all it could easily feel that way. I hope you enjoy the music.

Written, produced, mixed, and mastered by NiElsir.

Artwork by Andrew Walker @designsince86

Spotify

Contraflow Continuum

I was really fortunate to be able to work together on a song with the very talented @johndunder earlier this year. We were casually chatting about music goals for the year when the idea of working on a collaborative song came up.

Initially, I was a little nervous - having never worked with another artist in the past but having spent some time chatting with John over the previous month's it seemed like it could go well and that we would work well together.

The whole process went so much better than I could have imagined - the demo I sent John was extremely rough and nasty - something I had put together on the OB-6 synth very fast one evening, but John mentioned that he had some guitar ideas that may suit it and wanted to work on it....so I sent him on the files.

No joke, a day later he sent back a near-masterpiece, completely transformed and fresh with ideas and layouts. We spent a little more time doing some small tweaks but what John did to this sad little demo was astounding.

I think the collaborative process went so smoothly it spilled over into John and I working on the artwork for the song together too 😁.

The track title - "Altostratus" is in reference to a type of cloud, totally inspired by the use of "Cloud" based storage that we utilised to share files back and forth to ease the song to completion. 

I hope you enjoy it half as much as I enjoyed the experience working on it. 
Thanks 
John Dunder & NiElsir

Altostratus

John Dunder and NiElsir - Altostratus

"Dulcitone Trip" is and was inspired heavily by an instrument called the "Dulcitone", a keyboard from Glasgow, Scotland from the 1860s that used Tuning forks to produce notes ( the meant that it was great at staying in tune and could be carried around the world easily) - I even read that the Dulcitone was a big influence for the Fender Rhodes. Regardless of its interesting history - its sound is absolutely beautiful - though normally you hear it playing old religious tunes and melodies. 

I started experimenting with its sounds - and tried to imagine what such an instrument might like to achieve if it were sentient and able in today's world. I used the DSI OB-6 heavily to create a sort of electronic futuristic backdrop on which the soft metallic melodies of the Dulcitone sits. I think I felt a sort of connection to the instrument whilst making this song - that somehow the Dulcitone was being set free to make its own choices and mistakes in life - a feeling we all experience. 
In the end - something quite different to my usual sounds resulted from this but emotionally at least - I felt connected to it. 

I hope you enjoy the sounds, and a little history of such a curious and beautiful sounding instrument from days gone. 

Respect
NiElsir

Dulcitone Trip

Late in 2020, @mezhdunami and I exchanged some messages here on Soundcloud and spoke about potentially working on something together. Though, as life has a way of speeding along pretty quickly not much progress had been made for the first part of the year - that was until Mezhdunami sent me an email one day with a demo track he had worked out and as soon as I heard it I was immediately inspired by the sounds and melodies and I had a bunch of ideas so I to dropped what I had been working on and started putting together the amalgamation of ideas that a collaboration inherits. From that point on, everything just fell together. It was great working with Mezhdunami on this and we are really happy with the result.
Hope you enjoy the sounds. 
<3

Glimpse

Free Download

NiElsir And Mezhdunami - Glimpse

Out everywhere: Aug 25th : )

The DSI OB-6 was a big reason I made this song, I recorded a 32 bar loop of a patch I made on the OB-6 6 or 7 times (each time I played slightly different and adjusted the filter and mixer settings, I was looking for the perfect combination to get the patch right but what happened is I ended up chopping these recordings together into the structure of a song and over the course of a few weeks the song just wrote itself. I just went with what I felt was needed along the way. To be honest, it was a pretty stressful time in my life - I was trying to organize seeing my family again for the first time in almost 2 years and the temperatures where I was living were extremely hot and made working in my little home studio very uncomfortable but the time just passed by smoothly when I was working on this song - I think it helped me more than anything. 

The artwork is a photo I took in July this year looking out into the Mediterranean Sea, a melancholic view that made me think about what it must be like to be on that little boat out there. The sky is made up of small lines - which are some of the automation lanes that were used on this song, to give a sort of fingerprint to the sky and for me at least are almost a form of language. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it and as always, thank you so much for listening. Best, NiElsir.

Playback

“Anight” was one of the first songs I wrote for Contraflow Continuum, back in October 2021. Not long before I had come back to my flat after spending 6 weeks back in my home town visiting my family for the first time in close to 2 years. It was really great, but I had subtle constant stress that I wasn’t working on any music during that time and mentally - that was a challenge. When I got back to “daily life” I tried to force myself to complete music as fast as I could (something which I am not good at) and I struggled. Starting endless demos - trying to keep a particular feel and sound and feeling like every day was another 16bar loop. I was staying up later and later at night trying to make progress, cycling more and more every day to keep myself sane, and just hoping for something to fall together. Eventually I “gave up” and settled on working on a demo that was, at the time, called “house feel”. 

I knew it was a little bit different than my other work, using more acoustic sounds and a big portamento chord sound I made with a Prophet 5 emulation but I just wanted to finish something. I finished it over the next couple of weeks I called the final revision of the project “Anight” as I made much of the song at night time and I moved on. This song helped me get back to finishing music and I quickly moved on to work on some other songs for the album. 

A few months later, I had a lot more music completed for the album, and all that time I avoided this song, feeling as though I did not connect with it and due to that, I avoided listening to it all that time. 

Eventually, in early 2022 I sent the unreleased songs to Stratford Ct. and to my partner and asked what they liked and what single I might release...to my surprise ”Anight” was their answer. So I listened again that day having not heard it in a while, I had butterflies in my stomach and by the last section I had tears in my eyes, and I felt as though that last 1 minute might be my favorite part of any song I had written to date, it was definitely the first to bring a tear to my eye.
 
I hope you enjoy and thanks so much for listening. 
NiElsir. 

Written, produced, mixed, and mastered by NiElsir.
Artwork by Andrew Walker "designsince86"

Anight

Aeon

Holding On

Still Fading

Timeless

Mercurial

Ephemeral

Voyager and I started working on this song earlier this year and it was a great experience to blend our two styles together - Airmail is the result of that process. Hope you enjoy the sounds <3 

Voyager
https://soundcloud.com/user-35853073

Airmail

NiElsir And Voyager - Airmail

Hope you enjoy this collaboration with World Complete: https://soundcloud.com/worldcomplete

Ecosystem

NiElsir & World Complete - Ecosystem

Could Life Ever Be Like This

"Lotusland" was created to feel slightly otherwordly. I worked on this song over an 8-month period and I was trying to capture the emotional state of joy and wonder but with a subtle hint that overindulgence in such is also not a good state.
The last minute of the song has a shift in feeling, slightly more blissful and dreamy, but with subtle deliberate changes in the sound quality to reflect this hint that more is not always better. That is where the title "Lotusland" came from - a term meaning "An idyllic realm of contentment and self-indulgence".

Hope you enjoy and thank you for listening.
NiElsir

Lotusland

I have been trying to focus my mind more this year, to try to counteract the ever-increasing stimuli of today's world. To try and help this difficulty with focus, or feeling as though my mind never switches off I started meditating and focusing on my breath each morning, before going to the studio, and during this period of time, I wrote this song. Hope you enjoy it <3

Huge thank you to LINSKI101 for the classy artwork, she really summed up the song and some of me in visual format <3 - check out her work here - https://linski101.com/

Breath Focus

Watch the video recording here: https://youtu.be/mlFXyLZRgEI

VSTV / Virtual Synth Television - Originally Aired on 6th April 2024 via Stratford Ct twitch.tv/stratfordcourt  @stratfordct  check out the full 4hr+ show on their channel :) https://youtu.be/YCEZAA45wtE?si=rn81fiB6p07ZsWsG

Setlist 
00:00 Aurorean (live set edit)
02:37 Subception (unreleased)
06:36 Mercurial 
11:35 Ephemeral 
14:22 Breath Focus 

Thank you to everyone who was involved in getting the VSTV show together and to all those who watched this event live - it was a fantastic experience.

https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/
http://www.nielsirmusic.com/
https://open.spotify.com/artist/7A7IFcjPcVU9swlaIT1wbk?si=cD3Rph44Sfynpv5syCzIfg

Video

NiElsir - VSTV Vol.1 - Full set

This song started off with the rich Rhodes piano sound, from there the original and unedited melody stayed and the rest of the track was built around it.
The lyrics were inspired by what I felt a moth may be thinking as he/she was constantly attracted to a source of light, it became a kind of tragic love story. 
Music, lyrics and Video animation by Niall Mulcahy (NI ELSIR).

Free Download and Lyrics can be found here: https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

https://www.instagram.com/nielsir/
https://www.facebook.com/nielsirmusic/
https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

Lux Like You

www.instagram.com/nielsir/
www.facebook.com/nielsirmusic/
Music Video
youtu.be/YzlUAY2KYkw

Estranged was inspired by the many people in this world who feel out of place and sometimes like there is nobody to relate to. I felt as if this piece of music was the same, I didn't know what genre it was or if it was worth keeping if I should finish or forget about it, because of that I decided to continue and see it to the end no matter the outcome, and this is the result.

Estranged

An instrumental version of the recent released track - Lux Like You. 

Free Download and Lyrics can be found here: nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

www.instagram.com/nielsir/
www.facebook.com/nielsirmusic/
nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

Lux Like You (Instrumental)

I hope you enjoy this one and its mellow feelings along with its touch of "I want to dance with my eyes closed" that it makes me feel. 

Monaluna was born whilst working on another piece of music, it's melodies and emotion were inspired by time I spent around the time of its creation looking into space with a telescope. Even now, having finish the track it's place in musical space is not quite known to me - I feel it is a downtempo electronic piece with inspirations taken from many of my favorite artists in this space (such as Tycho, Tourist, Bonobo to name just a few....) but on top of that many influences from jazz melodies and my favorite pop-rock bands as always have found their way into the musical palette. 

If you like this music, please consider subscribing and following me below for regular music releases.

Free Download can be found here: https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases
Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/nielsir/
https://www.facebook.com/nielsirmusic/
https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases




Music, Video animation by Niall Mulcahy (NI ELSIR).
Free Download can be found here: https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

Monaluna

Cocoro - A song born out of the inspiration found from some new instruments and from the thoughts provoked whilst watching two movies recently;  My Neighbour Totoro and Gravity. Its style is a slight departure from music I have been making recently but It was a fun one to put together. I hope you enjoy. 

Free Download can be found here:
https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

Socials:
https://www.instagram.com/nielsir/
https://www.facebook.com/nielsirmusic/
https://nielsir.bandcamp.com/releases

Music, Video animation by Niall Mulcahy (NI ELSIR).
Moon image provided by Neven Krcmarek on Unsplash

Cocoro

This whole piece originated from a sequence I recorded on the Moog Matriarch - I was running it through a lot of effects (distortion, chorus, delay, and reverb) when suddenly it started sounding interesting and I decided to hit record. 
A different vibe than music I have been listening to/making in recent months.

Drifter

Another synth inspired track here - this time using the Novation Peak for melody, The Ju-06a from Roland for bass, and some pretty noises from the Moog Matriarch / Spectrasonics Omnisphere.

The view is from my windows one evening last week as the sky was in a tantrum - I thought it looked pretty. I hope you enjoy the music. Oh, and the name is inspired by a character in one of my all-time favorite films which I rewatched while I was finishing this track - Cinema Paradiso.

Toto

Theta is another chillwave inspired song that owes it's birth again to the Moog Matriarch and Novation Peak. 

I have learned a lot from working on this track, about letting go of ideas - moving in different directions mid-project and a general lesson on getting from the start to the finish through tonnes of uncertainty, doubt, and frustration. How this song started out is hard to believe, the initial parts are all now gone, they were recorded from the Moog Matriarch, a big 32 bar sequence with a lot of effects on the chain which created this huge synth soundscape that I thought would be the basis of the whole song, but after some time working on it I felt that the accompanying bass guitar lines and counter melodies that I wrote against the original sequence held their own - so I reluctantly considered lowering the main part to the back of the track (and a day later - it was deleted completely) - something which I traditionally would have struggled to do, a guess that is a form of "sunk cost" - but in the music creation sense. In the following days, I tried to finish the track off fast and move on but somehow it just wasn't flowing out of me as easy as normal - it became something different, requiring a lot of ideas and again - further changes of direction. 

Finally, when I felt that I had it to a point of completion and I was fortunate enough to submit the work in progress to a private Chillsynth discord feedback group which was extremely helpful. When the song was playing on the "feedback radio" and the handful of listeners were now listening at the same time I was I started to hear things differently, it was almost like having a fresh set of ears to listen to the song for the first time once again. I quickly make a few notes from my own "fresh" ears, meanwhile, people were giving positive feedback and some suggestions that the song would really do well with an additional change up - a new bridge section or some different chords. I knew they were right, and again reluctantly decided that the "finished" work was actually not finished. The next morning I sat down and spent hours trying to key changes, new chords, a new bridge and finally very late that night I felt I had gotten something - I woke up the next morning expecting to experience that first listen with a feeling of "what was I thinking last night?? Did I actually think this was good yesterday??" - something all too common, but fortunately I was still feeling that it was nice and the song had once again evolved itself into something new. It was a great experience writing this track, it was opened my mind and thought me more than I could have imagined. 

Thank you to all those who gave feedback and suggestions. I hope you enjoy. Once again - the view is from the living room windows in my flat - another overcast evening with a rainbow.

Theta

Decaf was born the same weekend I decided to stop drinking coffee  (after about 10 years and thousands of double expressos - I needed a break for a while). 

This song and my experience in quitting coffee lived almost parallel lives, the first week I had headaches, I was agitated and didn't sleep too well. During this time I was working on this track, frustrated with the ideas, and putting in a lot of hours and making no progress. Things continued like this throughout the week and I considered just putting this song into the "in progress" folder where it likely would be forgotten forever.
 
After that first week, In a last attempt to salvage something from the work I had done I scrapped the core of the track(which at this point was some chord stabs and a big sequenced part from the Moog Matriarch synth) - I removed the tracks and practically started again, keeping the chords but moving from stabs to huge long decaying pad sounds - the sequenced melody remained but now for just 1 bar of the song (before the second verse). Suddenly the track built itself over a few evenings - at the same time, I was no longer feeling so agitated or suffering caffeine withdrawal headaches. 
 
The song, whilst it was so close to being dumped after the first week suddenly started sounding good to my ears again - I guess in some way it was the difficulties and progressions of quitting coffee portrayed into music production.  
Anyway - I hope you enjoy it.

Decaf

Copiloto

Akrasia had a hard start in life, It took me a lot of time to start to connect with this track when I was making it, a lot of trial and error and a lot of time spent playing the OB-6 by Dave Smith Instruments over the basic Pad sounds to try to make its subtle melodies carry themselves in a way that was not too overpowering but at the same time, not too apologetic either. After this stage, some additional sounds fell into place and the structure of the song started flowing together. 

I never realised that this song was about 2 times the length of the majority of my recent music until I first exported it to listen to an early structure. I was a bit worried that the 6+ minutes was too long and that it would result in a boring outcome but somehow I felt that the song kind of moves through some phases, almost blending one song to another, to another, and back again. After some poor attempts to shorten the song, I decided to keep the original length and hope for the best. 

I named it Akrasia (the state of mind in which someone acts against their better judgment through weakness of will), based on the feelings I experienced after trying so many ideas and not arriving at one I liked. The motivation to continue working and finishing the song was hard to gather some days but thankfully a few lucky ideas here and there helped pull it together. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it

Akrasia

Skysix

Soptify

Aurorean

NiElsir - Revert [Secret Selection]

NiElsir / Niall Mulcahy.

I started producing music when I was 14 back in 2004 - at the time free time was all I had and I enjoyed every minute of it - as I got older - life, work, studies all started to take over and for too long I did not have the time to focus on my passion - making music. 

In 2019, I decided to take time off work and focus 100% again on making music - to see if I could get anywhere and enjoy my passion again. I mostly produce electronic music these days - if you want to follow my music journey feel free to follow! 

And if you check out my music, thank you so much!

NiElsir

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