I have a long and unillustrious track record of playing and releasing music inspired by elections. Grace And Gratitude was all about the 2004 European Elections. Referendum was about last year’s referendum on membership of the EU. And I wasn’t really planning on doing anything about the current election. At least, not until there’s some kind of resolution point, and I make an album of upbeat funk/party music to celebrate the end of austerity… the counterpoint to Torycore…
Anyway, my musical impetus had other ideas, and on Sunday night, I sat down to play – I tend not to divide up my music time into ‘practice’ or ‘recording’ or whatever ahead of time. Whatever happens and happens, and if there are things I want to be able to do that I can’t, practice ideas are developed to help get past those blockages…
What came out was not in the immediate sense reflective of my rather upbeat mood since last Thursday’s General Election. I’m pretty excited about the future right now, and am expectant that things will indeed be getting better over the next few months.
But underneath that there’s still the residual foreboding that has hungover since the campaign – the sense of what might’ve happened had the Tories got the majority they wanted. Had they read it as not only an endorsement of their strategy for leaving the EU, but also an approval of their austerity measures that have been – quite literally – killing people for the last 7 years.
And this is what came out – ‘If They Had Won‘ is a dark ambient piece, all recorded live, just bass and some found sound percussion samples played in via the Quneo, hooked up to FL Studio. One of things I love about looping is that things can drift in and out of the foreground if you create loops that have a strong dynamic arc to them – where they overlap dictates which bits will be foregrounded at any one time. There’s very little extra that I’ve done to the volume of each layer in this in the mix process. It is pretty much as it was played. It’s also a very wide dynamic mix, so will sound like nothing useful at all on laptop/phone speakers. You’ll need headphones or good speakers, and a fairly quiet space. It gets much louder at certain points – intentionally, and the quiet bits are the calm before many micro-storms… So set aside half an hour to listen to it twice and close your eyes 🙂
For reference, here are Grace and Gratitude and Referendum. The sleevenotes will help 🙂