WTF? Was the initial punch when I properly took in what was written so impactfully in so few words. How could we make something twisted and powerful enough to represent that?
With something so intense, I didn’t set out to have to write a piece of music for it. Instead, Niels and I set out with a collection of different quotes we were searching for musical possibilities for. Being something full of feeling in this instance, the musical form needed to match, as opposed to the more technical quotes with more technical mapping processes. In stark contrast to “I am crushed” and “mother nature” which came from real time improvisations, this one came from many small collaborative steps as we climbed towards the feeling of the form. I find that if there is a strong feeling to start with, such as with this quote, then there’s a clear fitness function, something clear to compare to each step along the way.
First, we found a beautiful patch, I think it was on the prophet 6 with some pedal saturation and detune, but we had a palette. Then Niels found the atom of an idea, and when he went for a break I continued. We had been working all day without much success so by this time we were both tired and taking breaks to eat etc, whilst the other continued fiddling with the structure. After several rounds we had the starting riff to build from, and over the coming weeks and months the rest of the structure slowly and painstakingly took form, always pushing for that intensely troubled, but somewhere epic and tinged with love feeling. It’s hard to describe when the process works without words, but I hope the connection is clear from the feeling of how it sounds.
I put a huge amount of time into the drums and bass in the later part of the process, running simple structures though my pedals and effects over and over whilst live jamming the controls, editing, and repeating, until it took on something twisted enough to fit.