On December 1st, I released sleeper, a minimal techno quasi concept album/EP. As of today (12/22/20), I’m still really psyched by it and proud of it, which generally isn't the case for a lot of the electronic music I make. As a nod to that and in a fairly shameless attempt to get you interested enough to check it out for yourself, I’m going to give a brief overview of how sleeper came to be and a quick track-by-track run-down. Like what you hear? Pick it up here!
I responded to lockdown in March 2020 by diving into two very different projects. The first was some really driving techno and the second was an ambient EP. I finished up the ambient one pretty quickly, motivated in part by the fact that I’d told my wife for years that I’d make her some ambient music and hadn’t actually done it yet. I got five fairly complete sketches down for the driving techno but then shelved it because I wasn’t feeling particularly confident about my mixing. I decided to make some minimal techno as a way to work on mixing but also just to make some minimal techno.
This eventually became sleeper. The tracks evolved together and I kept shifting the order around as the overall shape became more clear. I’m not going to touch on all the thematic and large-scale things that are happening—knowing about them isn’t essential to your enjoying the music, and maybe the knowledge that there are more easter eggs in there will help to encourage multiple listenings.
Here are a few quick bites: the album progresses from a more minimal, percussion-focused soundscape to one where pitch becomes increasingly important. Vocals become more important in tracks 3 and 4, in part as a way to set up all the pitch stuff in 5, 6, and 7. Lots of flanger early on that fades out as the album progresses. Lots of bongos and congas across the tracks, mainly programmed, but some chopped up samples.
1) delivery: bassline is made from reversed kicks and pitched-down percussion hits. Vox sample is from some NASA media that’s publicly available. The beeping material comes from a delivery truck backing up that I recorded through the window (five stories up) and processed a bit.
2) hello: kick pattern has a bunch of reversed reverb-drenched kicks as a way to make a four-on-the-floor less four-on-the-floor.
3) are you there: pretty sure I grabbed the vox from freesounds.org but I could be confusing it with the next track.
4) who are you: I think this sample came from using an online translator, Spanish to English. Not sure why I thought to do this, and why I wrote the phrase in Spanish, but I’m pretty sure this is what happened. Yes, this makes very little sense, but it is what it is…
5) deeper: essentially taking a pattern and rotating where it starts. Probably saw this first in a Steve Reich piece, but the technique certainly isn’t unique to him. Lots of layering of synths that was a pain to EQ and balance.
6) inside: I like the way the melody timbre evolves as the melody unfolds. I also like the drop and re-entrance on this one.
7) mars: This one kept getting longer. Gotta keep that kick out, and when the material that’s delaying it is solid, keep repeating. The melody at the end was coming out of an arpeggiator with some random settings—I recorded it to MIDI and then did some tweaking to get it in better shape without becoming OCD about it.