a solipsistic explanation of my creative process, in which my drum and bass composition becomes a sonic depiction of emotional volatility. the song journeys through the ache of detachment, the surge of catharsis, and the quiet void that remains. it tries to emulate the emotional chaos i experience when someone i love is slipping away: an amalgam of panic, anger and regret, spiralling in my head and making room for nothing more.

the track builds around a sense of desperation and fear of being disregarded, expressed through faye’s plea for spike not to leave her. this all-consuming fear inevitably breaks (“breaks”! get it? ;D) into full loss of control, of both yourself (me; faye) and ultimately the other person too, whom you can’t bear to lose but manage to care way too much about and end up losing anyway. (beloved; spike)

and then… breaks. everything’s just background noise, because i’m too in my head, and ALL the DIFFERENT THOUGHTS ruminating in my head ALL AT ONCE sound like the fuzzy din of a party; you can try to tune into one voice and hear what that person says, but it inevitably gets cut off by another, because there are just too many sounding at once to perceive each distinct one. that’s how my brain sounds during these moments. i’m not really thinking. just feeling.

the breaks are all original samples, got super into slicing em up and moving em around. looped the pads within kontakt so the midi would still play if i held down a key. sampled a bass note,, mapped it to the keyboard, wrote and recorded a bass line, layered a distorted bass line over it, sidechained the bass to the kick. f’d around with the knobs a bunch; really just fucking around and finding out. the think break i downloaded from a mAssive jungle sample pack i found online. i sliced it up and rearranged it. shoutout sewerslvt. i was going for atmospheric drum and bass, not jungle. the automation lanes look like an ECG. isn’t that ironic? unintentional metaphor for faye’s heartbeat during her psychological disorientation?

the break fades into static, which is a Voice Memos recording of some fuzzy AM radio junk i stumbled upon in my car while i was sifting through the radio stations. i sampled that and pitch shifted it up and down. it represents my extremely skewed, perpetually shifting view of reality. it’s also a nod to my mood; always up and down, yada yada yada (typing this from the ‘looney bin,’ as you may). 

that i actually recorded and made a sample out of the radio fuzz was because it sounded exactly like what the external world sounds like after your own internal world feels like it just exploded. i retract into myself, no longer part of it. (once i heard the sample within the context of the whole song, i was reminded of billie eilish & finneas’ production on “bitches broken hearts”), wherein the ‘walla’ of a party is chopped up in the background. this inspired me to chop up my pitch-shifted radio fuzz.

my splitting the track into fragments, as billie and finneas did on bitches, mirrors faye’s fragmented psychological state and fragmented sense of self identity. spike’s view of past and future is fragmented; he feels like he’s watching a dream he’ll never wake up from, hence, “fragmented dreams.”

in “fragmented dreams,” the radio fuzz is supposed to convey the emptiness that follows the catharsis, when your mind is blank and you’re just left in the aftermath of your own shitty reaction. i wanted to capture the shift from intensity to that god-awful emptiness, where all that’s really left is the quiet, echoey static in your head, ruminating on what you just destroyed.

it’s how i imagine faye valentine might have felt when spike left her. i think she loved spike, and a part of me wants to believe that maybe deep down he loved her too. i relate to faye a lot, so even if my interpretation of that scene is way off base, it still made sense to me to sample their dialogue from it. 

i hope u enjoy :p 
thx for listening!

fragmented dreams

self (?) i den ti Ty

in this heaven,
my carcereal haven,
safe at the cost
of isolation

fragmented dreams

sweet fangz