(by CSP)
“So often in this room the wind or the birds or the rain just fit right into the music and I have to get a mic up there to record them cause I realized part of the way I’ve been thinking about the music has involved whatever was going on outside the window.”
- Brian Eno
Premise
I paused the Brian Eno documentary I heard the above quote from after hearing this because I thought it was such an intriguing insight. I still haven’t finished watching the film. I was checking it out because I had a bit of free time on my lunch break and I had recently received a newsletter from one of my favourite artists that highly recommended going down the Brian Eno rabbit hole.
It’s no secret that I make a majority of my music in my studio. I made a recording on my balcony one time. I did some recordings in a studio downtown for a couple of days earlier this year. Aside from those instances I don’t think I’ve made music in any place other than my studio since 2022 when I worked on the first recordings for Heavy Herb with Jinxz in British Columbia.
I’ve grown overly accustomed to being inside since 2020, especially after developing my home studio and trying to put more focus on making art. I need to get outside more. There’s a world out there filled with life and activity. In the season of change I feel a deeper yearning to engage with the world than I have in a long time.
Keeping what Brian Eno said in mind I decided that it would be a fun exercise to take a field trip and make some music outside. You can check out the recording I made here on SoundCloud.
Making the Recording
The story of how the recording came together took an immediate turn because it was pouring rain outside for the date and time I had scheduled to make it.
There was a nice hill I had recently discovered. It’s right next to the highway, so even though it sits above a large rolling field, no one really comes to visit it, except the occasional dog and it’s owner. I was walking around one day when I realized it’s a peaceful place to sit and watch cars and clouds go by.
When I realized my plans had been rained on I thought about postponing the exercise, but I still really wanted to do the experiment. This is how I came to decide that I would make the recording on my bed, which is something I’ve never done once in my entire life. It was exciting. I opened the curtain and the windows, grabbed my OP 1 and a pair of headphones and I got straight to work.
I really loved the idea of capturing the room so the first thing I did was make a synth to simulate the sound of my fan.
While trying to come up with a complimentary sound I heard some car honking outside the window. I tried making some synths that had that car horn quality to them. I was finding some stuff I liked when I had the idea to use a string synth instead. It was an intuition sort of moment. I thought maybe the strings could represent the outside world. It’s calling to me from my window. I placed this sound to the left (where my window physically was in proximity to myself) and the low “fan” hum in the center since the fan was pointed directly at me.
While trying to write the next part I saw my books on the shelf and I thought it would be fun to use one of those for word ideas. I’ve never experimented with the OP-1’s vocoder synth so I thought I would take the words and make a cool vocal synth part. I thought maybe this could represent my books, sticking with the concept of the sounds representing aspects of the physical space I was occupying.
I pulled a book about Buddhism and skimmed it for words that popped up. I experimented with a passage on suffering for a while. It wasn’t working, so I tried the noble truths. Also didn’t work. Then I saw the word, “otherside.” Something felt good about it. I decided to build my vocoder synth part around just this one word.
The OP-1 only has 4 tracks so I knew that I could only realistically add one more instrument before I had to start getting creative with my tape space. Drums seemed like an easy choice because I was missing a strictly rhythmic sound. I quickly flipped through the system’s default drum samples, picked out a kit, and programmed a fairly basic drumbeat. Since I knew this composition was a sketch I didn’t get too hung up on making anything super fancy. I was aiming for efficient writing.
Now I had a full set of parts. I didn’t want this to just be a simple loop so I tried arranging everything. This involved a lot of trial and error. I’d see how the drums sounded alone, or maybe the fan. There were a lot of iterations until I arrived at something I liked.
The Lyrics
At some point I stopped feeling the vocoder part I made. It wasn’t terrible. It just didn’t feel like it was correctly capturing the vibe. The drums as well. I ended up deleting these parts.
I decided to write and record some lyrics. This wasn’t my original intention, but in general I feel like this is an area of my music creation that could use a lot more work. I thought this would be a great opportunity to make something low stakes and practice my writing and singing a bit.
Unsurprisingly, this took way longer than I hoped it would. I found it hard to settle on a topic or capture those first words that would make the next part I had to write clearer. It was a lot of writing lines, deleting them, humming, writing some more stuff down, rinse, repeat.
I eventually settled on a theme / topic. I had recently had a night where I had a lot of anxiety and was having trouble sleeping. This was a really stressful experience so I thought it would be interesting to try to contrast the experience with the room, which is quite cozy. I placed my voice in the center of everything; it would solidify that idea that the song's elements represented things from my physical world.
Lost in a thought
I shouldn’t do that
Always getting caught up in the webs
Spiders spinning in my head
This first stanza was meant to represent how that night I was overthinking everything about my life. I was laying in bed, trapped in my own thoughts. I used spiders creating webs as a metaphor for how tangled I felt in my own thoughts.
Take another moment to compose myself
You’ll never see me with the eyes you use to see someone else
This was meant to be a sort of counter to the first line. I do know that I’m prone to overthinking so I often have to take a second to breathe and remind myself that thoughts are just thoughts. I wish I had something more insightful to offer about the second line. It’s just something I came up with that sounded really cool.
Never thought I’d be here
Living in a box
Living a hell
Living in a world where you never hear from someone
Unless you call them first
It’s ok because in the end they always get what they deserve
This part was the bad thoughts winning. They’re taking over. I’m questioning everything about my life. All the motivations of the people in my life. I’m not thinking positive things. This results in the next / final stanza ;
Now I become one with the ceiling
I’m in a place of hurt
In a place of healing
My heart is cold
I think I’ve finally lost feeling
I’m ready to pursue a life with more meaning
I can’t sleep and I’m staring endlessly at the ceiling. I’m so tired from overthinking that I can’t think anymore. There’s just a dull white noise and a loss of emotional energy. The place of hurt is my mental state. The place of healing is the room.
I wanted to end it on a positive note, so I included the last line “I’m ready to pursue a life with more meaning” to symbolize how these states can sometimes lead to profound realizations. This was also a convenient way to add a “period” to the end of the song because at this point I had spent several hours trying to write it and wanted to move onto something else.
Bringing it All Together
At this stage in the song’s creation I felt I had a solid piece of work together that I could share with the Heavy Herb community. I started experimenting with the drums and realized they would sound really good on their own with the vocals during the second half of the song. This would also make the song feel like it has two parts instead of just one long one, which I think makes the listening experience more engaging.
The drums lend a bit of a coldness to the second half of the recording. The sounds of the window fade away as the world goes to sleep. I’m alone with my thoughts at the moment they’ve brought me to my physical and mental limit. There’s nothing left to do but look forward.
Unlike the last drums I used, I manually played this part in one take on the OP-1’s drum machine. It was the easiest and smoothest part of making the whole recording. I was a little surprised, but certainly not disappointed.
I exported the recordings onto my computer. Did a really quick mix of everything in Logic Pro, exported it and immediately posted it to SoundCloud. I used a picture I took of myself at the beginning of the process as the cover.
The End
The hardest part of the whole process was actually writing this article. It took a lot longer than I expected. I think next time I do one of these projects I’ll bring a notepad with me and keep notes as I go along with the writing. Or maybe a tape recorder and I’ll record my thoughts? There’s a lot of possibilities.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this experiment. The room change definitely gave me a different well of ideas to pull from when trying to write. It’ll be interesting to see what future spaces have in store.
