In Fight & In Flow EP (2023) Release Notes

19/08/2023

I’m pleased to announce the release of my sophomore EP of explorative, ambient electronic music: In Fight & In Flow, out on Sydney/Eora label People Sound. This latest EP follows my first solo EP In Bloom, In Blend, released March 2019. As I did with my debut EP, I wanted to pen a few words about the music as I’ve come to realise for every album their is a story- and usually a fascinating story at that- and I think it’s worth documenting and sharing those stories, even if only for myself. 

This latest release marks the maturation and flourishing of my electronics-based practice. What began as mucking around cluelessly on Ableton and lackadaisically releasing some of those experiments, has, through the making and release of this second EP, become an important part of my overall music-making practice and musical aesthetic. 

This EP is also a signifier of some personal events. Its nature-based sound palette (compared to In Bloom, In Blends urban-based sounds) is indicative of my move down to the Illawarra/Dhawaral country (aka: Paradise). It also represents a period of working through my own ego and expectation in the creative process, and ultimately reclaiming it. Below, I’ve written about all this, as well as some creative insights into certain tracks.

To really explain all that is behind this release, I first need to paint a picture of how I came to make music on my laptop (for further details on this you can read my release notes from 2019 for In Bloom, In Blend.)

My initial foray into electronic music was a burnt copy of the DAW Ableton I received somewhere between 2012-2015. It was around the time I was studying, or had just finished studying, at the Con. As many instrumental undergraduates do, I was interested in expanding my timbral possibilities beyond that of my instrument and looked to a DAW to do so. 

Over the next year or two I attempted to learn the program, but each time I became quickly overwhelmed by its seemingly endless possibilities. Synthesis? Midi? Recording? Audio effects?? As such, the program ultimately laid dormant on my desktop for a couple of years until I plucked up the courage to ask some friends and heroes to show me the ropes. Note: reaching out to others for guidance is one of the most powerful tools I have encountered to overcome plateaus and troubles.

After these hangs, I decided to fork out the many $$$ and buy Ableton outright, as a way of twisting my own arm to commit to learning it. Doing so allowed me to persist long enough to unearth strategies that constrained the myriad procedural possibilities of the program down to a digestible few, and ultimately got me in a flow of learning and experimentation.

The primary constraining strategy I employed was to only use and effect audio samples I had recorded (either on my hand recorder or phone). Doing so meant I didn’t have to explore synthesising sounds, sequencing midi, or recording techniques- I only needed to play around with audio effects e.g. reverb, delay, echo, compression, EQ etc. (which is of itself a big learning curve!)

This constraint wasn’t arbitrary, but instead emerged from an aesthetic preference; I have long been attracted to electronic music that integrates found and organic sounds, and wanted to prioritise the manipulation of these sounds over the production of synthesised ones. At the time I was particularly influenced by several artists on the (currently hibernating?) Berlin label Project Mooncircle such as Daisuke Tanabe, Kidanevil (plus their joint project Kidsuke), and Submerse. I was also greatly influenced by Chris Abraham’s more outrightly experimental solo release ‘Fluid to the Influence’ (released by Room 40), which is an astounding, textural feast of a record, and still one of my all-time favourites.

And so, from this pedagogical constraint a process emerged: in a complete trial-and-error fashion I would throw in a bunch of my recorded sounds into Ableton and experiment with effecting them using various stock plug ins. As I became more confident, I began experimenting with adding synthesised sounds and exploring midi. At the end of each session I ended up with a monothematic, melodic-less ‘texture’ of effected sounds that would loop endlessly. I began to bounce each experiment out as ‘Texture 1’, ‘Texture 2’ etc. Each texture signified an experiment with a unique batch of sounds and a different audio effect/s. Some textures were failed experiments, while others were surprisingly musical. After a couple of months I had compiled 20 textures. Without much thought, I chose my favourite six and with the help of musical polymath and great friend Nick Henderson, we mixed and mastered the tracks for release. These tracks became In Bloom, In Blend, which I quietly released early 2019.

This practical learning methodology of throwing in sounds, pressing buttons and seeing what happens was a refreshing change to my default learning approach which usually prioritises forming a theoretical understanding of something before jumping in practically (sometimes a blessing but more often a curse). Such a method especially juxtaposed the painstaking slow and considered process many of us employ when composing for bands and ensembles. To me, such a process filled the liminal space between my two contrasting musical practices of composing and improvising: more fast and loose than traditional pen and paper composition, but not quite as spontaneous as improvising. This electronics experimentation often led me to a flow state, which we can all agree is an addictive state to create and exist in. Overall, finding and developing such a practice has become a really rewarding and insightful addition to my overall artistic process.

After the release of In Bloom, In Blend I opened up Ableton to continue my experimental texture-making, but something felt different. I found it difficult to create and experiment. After some reflection, I realised that due to publishing these tracks, I had sillily developed the expectation that the next batch of textures needed to be stronger, for an imminent future release. I felt that now I was a ‘producer’ (barely) I had set an expectation to live up to. Effectively, it was my ego inflating and trampling the ego-less process of learning and experimentation I had built, which was quietly devastating. And so began a rocky journey of reclaiming creating on Ableton as an ego-free method of experimentation and education.

This is where the title is derived from: ‘fight’ signifies the wrestling match I undertook with my ego over the next couple of months to reclaim the creative process I had built and lost, and ‘flow’ being the rewarding state I was able to attain in the moments I won that ongoing battle. Funnily enough, I only truly felt my ego completely dissipate when I began mixing these tracks. I think this is because this was the first time I had tried to mix a record myself, and I understood I am very much not a mixing engineer and that I was only doing the best I could. Seems the Buddhists have been right all along about the beginner’s mind as a way to keep the ego at bay…

In Fight & In Flow features selected tracks from textures 20-62. As my compositional process (informed by Ableton’s vertical-focused session view) produces mono-thematic, extended-looped textures, I challenged myself to also create tracks with more sophisticated structures. WooUP (texture 52), Recitation (Texture 36) and Have You Heard the Ocean Chant? (Texture 44) are those tunes. As I felt these are more ‘songs’ than ‘textures’, I titled those tracks. 

The opening track WooUP (Texture 52) is the only groove-based track on the EP. It features a sample of my trumpet playing going through a granulator, which I then played on a midi keyboard to get the chopped effect. It also features a sample of frogs from somewhere in Tassie turned into groove/pulse thanks to Ableton’s warp and beat function. From there I trialled some synth sounds and layered different lines and registers. I find a synth’s timbre often dictates the harmony used i.e., once I start playing keys with a certain synth sound, I seem to discover a harmonic sequence that marries well with the synth’s timbre. I used this approach to find the harmony for this song.

This track sounds much darker than the setting to which I threw it together in; it was a beautiful bluebird Saturday morning in our backyard in Woonona. In homage to that setting, I called it WooUP after Baz (Jack’s dad) stunning mountain biking trail/walking trail which, just a couple of blocks from home, zig zags from the foot of the Escarpment to its mid-level. 

Recitation (Texture 36) utilises a random iphone recording from a solo piano jam many moons ago. I had the vision that between each phrase that a random sympathetic resonance from the piano exponentially builds until it eventually takes over- sort of like chanting to conjuring a genie from a bottle? This track is basically just a bunch of reverbs and a whole lot of automation to nail that journey.

In a similar vein, Have You Heard the Ocean Chant? (Texture 44) also utilises an extended recording, but of the ocean. I spent a lot of time messing around with Ableton’s stock resonator and corpus audio effects on this track, and found a bunch of cool harmonies and resonate parameters. Twisting knobs and different changing resonate parameters was a refreshing way to generate harmony beyond the more well-worn, and frankly painstakingly process of tinkering away at the piano.

The original vision for this track was far more frantic and dissonant than the final mix: I wanted it to cut-jump to different settings on the resonators- sort of like a sequence of slow-moving, random, atonal chords. Unfortunately, yet again swooned by the aesthetic and beautiful, I dropped that idea after discovering a particular lovely, constant chord on the resonator. I decided to radically shift focus from atonal cut-jumping to the palatial development of that single chord. The new vision for the track became to evoke the feeling of sitting at the beach and beginning to hear the musicality in the coast’s many ambient sounds- in a similar vein to our eyes adjusting to the dark. I love how the resonating tools follow the dynamics of the ocean, becoming louder as waves crash on the shore and mellowing out as the ocean goes quiet between waves. It gives the pad an organic and dynamic feel. In addition to those dynamic shifts, this one also features a lot of automation as I tried to nail the imperceptible shift from sample to synth and back, as well as highlighting certain sounds that popped out from the sample and resonators along the way, e.g. what sounds like the tolling of a bell.

To wrap this little thing up, I’d like to acknowledge everyone who contributed to the record: thanks to Jack Prest for mastering the tracks. Thanks to Eddy Boyd aka Lomaloma for the great digital cover (I’ve also included the single and alternate single cover below so they can live on online). Thanks to my partner Jaime Askew for capturing that amazing photo - which I promise has not been drawn or animated in any way besides the purple tint- all those squiggles were in the original photo!! I’ve also included the original photo below as proof. She took it down at the local lake and as soon as she showed me the picture I knew it had to be the cover of a release.

Lastly, thanks to Jacques Emery for agreeing to release the EP on his label People Sound. It’s been great to work with Jacques on releasing this music and I’m very glad the EP has found a home on a label with works by such a creative and luminous bunch of Australian improvisers, composers and sound artists. 

N x