PicoBlog

Hi friends - hope all good :)

Last day to pick up the digital of qd19 at half-price - the incredible support continues and we’ve shipped all the UK/world orders as of yesterday lunch-time (new orders since then hopefully going out today, still keeping us very busy - thank you!) - remaining EU orders going from Portugal very soon - don’t forget if you bought a CD and want a download of the physical-only long-form edition just message me x

As promised, here’s the second part of our chat with Loula, this time looking at each track and the making of:

Can we have a quick run-down of each track?

Klangfarbenmelodie is a short sound art performance recorded onto my phone and then arranged in a DAW and processed through ShaperBox and Valhalla Supermassive. (These plug-ins were used to treat the sound recordings throughout, so I won’t keep mentioning them.) I wanted to centre the idea of texture over melody in the album straight away. 

Monolithic undertow

I set up 3 oscillators and my sequencer to create a chord with a bass drone, and a patch stuffed with delay effects, filters, spring reverb, harmonics, and possibilities for bringing elements in and out as well as dialing the intensity up and down, and vibed it out instinctually for 13 minutes. The title is borrowed from a book by Harry Sword (qd - big tip for this book!) on the influence of drone music on 20th century Western recorded music, which I read at the back end of last year.

A beach of little stones

I live on the shingley East coast of England. Here is the sea rushing over the stones (recreated using foley effects, some gravel and a huge metallic bowl full of water, processed and arranged in the DAW). The synth part is made with the Instruo Cš-L oscillator, one envelope, one VCA and a random timing moving a simple looping melody along its pathway. I love this kind of utterly stripped back simplicity: how it mirrors the topography of a completely flat, bare coastline. This time the title is inspired by Moby-Dick (‘a sea of small whirlwinds’) in place of a direct borrowing.

Matter tells spacetime how to curve

Oh how I ADORED leaning into majestic drones in this album! And then … acid!!! I recorded a live session, splicing in a recording of the ticking of my kitchen clock to create a polyrhythmic curve in spacetime for the middle eight.

The stream sent forth such sallies of glad sound  

This is a voyage I recorded on my phone: a walk down to the pipe at the end of the field near my house, a route I take most days. It was winter, a lot of rain had fallen, so much water was coming off the fields. The title is a line from a Wordsworth poem called Emma’s Dell. A man-made network of pipes gushing water into a ditch is about as close to a ‘dell’ as we’re going to get in this modern agricultural landscape – so sail we must! I created a light, ethereal melody using  3 or 4 very simple sequences with octave shifts and a random timing element moving them along, sounded using a sine wave oscillator, a filter, and a delay stuffed with modulation possibilities to create a whole new series of randomised melodies in the repeats. I really wanted to leave space to centre the divine natural swishing white noise of the waters and the footsteps through long, wet grass.

Lie dreaming, dreaming, still 

I wanted to make something nourishing and restful for the closing track: something you would want to take away with you. This is me rustling around in my garden back in early February when I was making the album: birds singing, cars passing, a human moving, lots of texture brought out by processing. The very simple droning synth line is two very slow sequences running in parallel. They have different lengths so they repeat internally but the way they overlap keeps changing; the ebb and flow to their timbres was created using control voltage modulation on filters and harmonics. The field recordings are the central image here, so the dry synths are kept really low in the mix, drenched in BlueSky reverb with some shimmery delay. The title is from Moby-Dick:

“... the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like some slumberers in their beds; the ever rolling waves …”

Thank you for listening,

Loula 🐳

Awesome stuff - massive thanks again to Loula for her beautiful album and everything she’s put into this release x

Now some shout-outs - lots this week, huge thanks as always - support the DJs and writers!

Firstly thanks to Bandcamp for featuring qd19 as New and Notable on their front page, accompanied by a lovely mini-review.

Deb Grant and Tom Ravenscroft on their New Music Fix on BBC6 Music

Neil Mason in last week’s Moonbuilding

Mat Smith reviewing qd18 Whettman Chelmets and qd19 on his Further. blog

Joe Muggs with the lovely comment

Andrew Khedoori on First Impressions

Mike S on KMXT Freeform Radio

Richard Heinemann on E-Lodie

Wendy Morrill over on blank mood.

Minor Fossil on Tide

Stu on Four Larks and a Wren

Bepi Crespan on Music or Noise?

Francis Beaubois on Electronic Therapy

Huge thanks again friends and more very soon!

Alex

quietdetails.com
quiet details Bandcamp
quiet details Substack
quiet details studios - mastering and audio services

quietdetails | Link-tree

My music as Fields we Found

Thank you for reading quiet details. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Share

ncG1vNJzZmippZ6ytbDErZiipKNjwLau0q2YnKNemLyue89oo6itnJZ6urvRpJxmqV2Wu6V5wGanmqqkYsG4u4yapZ0%3D