I generally tend to find writing about the elephant in the room uninteresting; there's no need to add to it unless there's something profound to say. But the last couple of weeks I've found it hard to ignore in my thoughts about music. With these new 6-person restrictions in place for 6 months, live music has never felt further away. In the same way Burial creates music that feels like an echo of rave rather that actually part of it - only hearing about it through his brothers - club sounds that I still listen to day in day out are now becoming more nostalgic of times that have past. Their original context is waning, and yet my enjoyment and interest in the sounds themselves is going nowhere; if anything, they're evolving.
Escapism is as old as the human condition. As far back as there have been circumstances for us to experience, we have used the power of our minds to escape them, even for just a moment. It's a term that's often spoken by a cynical tongue, but I think it's an incredibly important part of how we cope with our struggles. No matter how tough times are, we have the capability to simply imagine better scenarios and transport ourselves there. Now is a time where this utterly human idea is a necessity for many; we can endure these hardships, even as they stretch longer than first feared, by submerging ourselves in our fondness for the past and enthusiasm for the future. Music is a vital form expression in escapism; it's a world where we can indeed tell any story, evoke any emotion, rattle up memories and envision scenes of our lives to come.
As such, while I've always found electronic music to be particularly emotive and meaningful, the sentimental value in it has never been greater. Really, it's the one thing I can rely on to reassure myself that the best parts of life will return, no matter how far away they might seem now. They can shut clubs, but they can't stop you pushing the volume of your headphones to the limit, letting the kick drum's thump pulsate through your skin, syncing with your heartbeat to intertwine with the rhythm of your very body. It is the ultimate form of escapism, you close your eyes and the notes simply take you somewhere else, anywhere you want to go.
For me, however, a sense of nostalgia isn't enough to fill the void left without raving. Instead, I've found trying to create my own music allows me to focus my efforts on something that feels separate to reality in a way. Particularly, in something I just made which I'll link here, it was this very feeling that I was trying to emulate; that euphoric momentary escape, lifting gently off from the ground and floating, suspended in the clouds. I thought it would be fun to share some of the ways I tried to do that in the music, maybe to give a bit of an insight into where I escape to.
First of all, the track is washed in reverb, it's constant from start to finish. If I want to achieve this, normally it's only in the reflections - while the original sound is still playing - but here I wanted to intentionally exaggerate the echoing tails of the notes to give that feeling of impossible grandeur, like being in the halls of the gods on Mount Olympus, a fantastical sense of beauty. You can really hear it on the toms and vocal samples at 3:20, but I passed it around all of the percussion throughout the track. Rather than feeling muddy though, in the denser parts of the track, I feel like it mingles with the choir voices and steel drums to create a shimmering glow that envelopes the more distinct sounds in the mix.
Harmonically, the chords I used were almost all 7ths or had suspended notes; typical in electronic music regardless, but by adding an additional voice/note at the top of each chord per bar, they literally rise up gradually, giving a sense of ascension. Together with this I'd use a rich, fizzy chord sound that starts off with all the high frequencies filtered off, giving a deep hum, and releasing the filter as slowly as possible. You can hear it most obviously in the intro section, where the chord starts in bar 5, reaches a climax and then drops to silence, but it happens twice again. The tension it causes allows the story to really carry you away, engaging you in the world created by the music rather than the one you exist in.
To touch on the instrumentation used, steel drums are in there a lot. They have a celestial tone to them no matter how they're used, and I also used a plug-in called Paulstretch to stretch out a single steel drum note for over a minute. It created this pad sound, almost like rays of light extending out of thunderclouds, gradually coming in around 00:37 as a delicate texture in the high end. For the foundation of the harmony, though, I used piano for its purity of sound, which I wanted to set as a baseline. Some of the vocal samples, as in the opening, are runs from pop music, pitched down heavily to give an airier sound that fitted better with the track. However, I also used some samples from a video game from the 90's, Legend of Zelda Majora's Mask. You can hear them either at 2:31 or 3:36, and here's where the audio comes from. I added a huge echo to help it fit in the context, but it's more the idea than the actual sound; when I was younger these video games were a massive escape from me, I spent half my time either playing these games or pretending I was in them inside my head. While using these sounds, creating a sense of fantasy came more naturally.
Other than that, simplicity allowed the space for it to feel blissful. The basis of the beat is a constant four to the floor, clap on the second beat, hihat on the offbeat, no swing whatsoever. Parts come in and out, but they never break that pattern, grounding the track in familiar territory. The final melodic motif on the steel drum from 3:50 onwards is similarly straightforward, just three notes in a basic rhythm - the idea being to emulate unadulterated joy, without the need to convolute the feeling.
Anyway, that's about enough. Here's a new playlist of some tracks that really create an alternate reality. Hopefully will be able to write some similar bits in the future, although I'll usually stick to analysing the music of others! Stay safe xx
