I entered a sort of trance state I became aware that I was making something that might possibly be the best thing I’ve made. He lives in these woods, so I was sending him sounds and he’d play them back on speakers hanging in the trees." My friend Dan who records under the name 7Rays, contributed a lot to the record. I’ve talked about this before because on Diamond Mine, with King Creosote, I used a lot of field recordings. So, you’re hearing a mix of a studio recording and that same recording being played back in a wood.”Ī little bit of open air gives recordings a completely different resonance, doesn’t it? "For example, the first track, Welcome, has got birdsong, which was recorded in Devon and at the same time the synth tracks from it were being played back in the woods. “Yeah… Mendel’s recordings are only used in the Ecuador piece, but the rest of the album has a lot of background recordings too, which I do with a bit of trickery with dimensional plugins like stereo-width and mixing things in. The field recordings add a very binaural quality to things, don’t they? He lugged this pretty high-end Fostex with him, which, if you capture things to the maximum bitrate then you can slow things down and still find loads of usable sounds.” although I don’t think they call it brain-reading really. He’s a Dutch neuroscientist who came along to do some brain-reading type experiments on us. “It was a Fostex that Mendel brought with him. What did you capture the field recordings on? That one drone note was the trigger for the rest of the track.”
So, you’re hearing that through the reverb of the caves as the Bose speaker was 50 metres away and we’d set up the field recording mics. "So, as well as the field recordings that my friend Mendel Kaelen (the founder of Wavepaths) made while we were there, there’s also that one drone sound, which is the first sound you hear in that track… it’s like a crystal bowl that I’d recorded. I took a little Bose Soundlink speaker with me and played a couple of drone sounds through it. "You can hear it, the first chapter is waking up in the cave, listening to the water pouring in from the safety of the tent and then the middle chapter is the meditation deep underground, and the third chapter is emerging back into the forest. “The Ecuador piece itself, which is actually one piece of music in three chapters but it’s very clear that it’s meant to be listened to in one go… That’s an example of a piece that does have a specific narrative based on an experience I had. It was amazingly satisfying to never once even look at the part of the screen where there’s a tempo Everything you’ve been through and everything that’s going on in the world is all going in there. It doesn’t just have to be cosmic or mystical, it will absorb your relationship experiences, your break-ups. Then, when you start writing, it’ll be informed by that whether you like it or not. "You don’t have to actually worry about capturing or remembering them in any way as it will all go in. I’ve said this in interviews before so I hope it’s not boring for people to hear but I believe in writing using the subconscious, so I think, essentially, you just have to have a lot of experiences… in my case, as many cosmic and mystical experiences as possible. “Nothing happened over there apart from me experiencing the place. So, I think doing a third album in that vein wasn’t appealing although I obviously didn’t realise at the time that it would end up going quite so far in a different direction.”Įcuador is about as far away as you can get… were any of the ideas for the tracks written in situ whilst you were over there? The names kind of give it away, but the last two albums I always saw as being related. “It’s been really amazing to release that track.
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