Never Any Gain
Hello, this is the first official Flowting newsletter
Hello all,
At a time when the world is increasingly becoming more and more distressing, and governments are washing their hands of the ethical responsibility to save lives and stop genocide on top of allowing the rise of extreme hate, fascism, severe human rights violations, life-shattering poverty, and everything else that is going on, it’s practically impossible to simply live our lives how we want to, let alone continue to be creative. However, what I would like to achieve with this new semi-regular newsletter is to share what I can to try and help inspire people to continue to be creative throughout these tough times. I plan to talk with other creative-minded people from lots of different fields to get insightful information about their approaches and how their art fits into their life stories.
For this first newsletter, I wanted to start by offering a long-form piece on my recently released 5th A Taut Line album Never Any Gain, which came out on 8th September. Following this, I will also give a quick rundown on some other music releases that I have been enjoying recently - many perhaps you already know, some maybe you don’t but might like. I hope you get something from this, and please feel free to leave comments below to add to the discussion - and if you did enjoy reading this and are interested in more similar content with regular music recommendations, please subscribe/sign up for the newsletter and pass on the word.
Never Any Gain
So, here it is, an extended commentary on the album — an insight into what I was thinking when writing and recording the album, with some additional thoughts now I have completed it and sent it out into the world. To be honest, on the whole, I believe that any piece of art - be it music, a novel, a painting, or a film - shouldn’t require a detailed explanation because it should either a) convey the message it was designed to convey by itself or b) be left open to interpretation by its audience, flexibly reshapable to fit any mode of assimilation. However, by explaining my creative process behind this album as a whole and the individual ten tracks that it consists of, I’m attempting to offer a little bit of dialogue on the larger concept of creativity. Please don’t misinterpret this candid deep dive into how it was made as some kind of self-indulgent exercise; instead — whether you have listened to the album or not, whether you are into the album or not — I hope that this analysis and backstory fodders inspiration and imagination that you can use yourself in your life, work, and art. The comments are very much open at the bottom, and I would love to hear your thoughts.
Never Any Gain: the title for the album came first. Very shortly after releasing Loss a year ago, the name just suddenly materialised (I think it might have been as I was passing the building that I had photographed for the cover of Loss) and I had an instant strong desire to make a quick-succession follow-up concept album that would function as a yin to the yang of Loss. I wanted the album to share a lot of dualism with its predecessor - so I immediately knew I wanted Shoko Sasano to return as a guest vocalist, and ask author Thomas Kendall to pen more lyrics.
Thematically I wanted the album to be about a general lack of humanitarian progress that parallels a personal mental stagnation amidst all the potentially terrifying technological advancements over the last ten years, marking the decade between my 2013 debut A Taut Line album Nitriding Portrait and this new album. Loss was about the process of grief, the loss of a certain way of life due to the pandemic and other socio-political and interpersonal factors, and a general loss of hope for the future. The concept of Never Any Gain was conceived to be about after coming to terms with the loss, we can’t really see any evidence of anything having been learnt or any sense of moving forward. Even with its sombre subject matter, the warmth of emotion on Loss seemed to resonate with a lot of people. Never Any Gain was supposed to be the bleaker, colder, and angrier flip side of that. However, in the process of making the album, it took on a new path of its own, and the overall end result became slightly different to how dark it was initially going to be, and also unexpectedly moved stylistically away from Loss in a few areas. Some of the initial workings didn’t sit right with the ten tracks that has become the album, so they didn’t make the final cut. One of these, the first track I completed almost immediately after I had decided on the concept, was a gothic mutant footwork track, which I hope will see the light of day elsewhere, but in the end, it was just a little too out of place with everything else to be right for this album. Even if you aren’t 100% sure whether removing something is the right choice to make — who knows, it could have ended up being a universal favourite — but sometimes you have to make these difficult decisions when considering the bigger picture creatively.
Stylistically, it’s not a dramatic sea change from Loss, which was intentional as part of the yin-yang concept of the album. There’s still a sense of disintegrated 4th-world atmosphere that is characteristic of my A Taut Line project as a whole, but definitely marks an official departure from the dot-matrix exotica sound of the first couple of A Taut Line albums. There was very consciously a strong trip-hop influence on this album, though, which is something that didn’t feature at all until on the last album. I first really revisited it properly on Loss with ‘Life Force’ — the first time I worked with Shoko — and as a genre I felt it was a very “honest” way for me to express myself, having a connection to my birth town, but also because it defined my adolescence. Portishead’s first two albums and the Roseland NYC live recording soundtracked my teenage years. I listened a lot to Massive Attack from my early teens onwards — and never really stopped to be honest. Blue Lines, Protection first and then when I was 16, Mezzanine came out, and became pretty ubiquitous in my life — and the lives of many people around me — at that time. I even bought 100th Window on the day of its release in 2003 and listened to it a lot at that time — even if it wasn’t critically favoured very well by the music press and general consensus. (Actually, I went back to that album very recently after a very long absence, and I think there are moments on there that still hold up well - in particular ‘Small Time Shot Away’… I digress…) Mo’Wax was a massive part of my life in the 90s, too - and consuming so much trip hop definitely organically led me to my love of jazz-funk and fusion, where a lot of the samples came from. So, that had a big impact on this album, and created a lot of the nostalgic elements that work as the foundations for the more modern sounds to be built on.
In order to go a bit deeper into the creative process, I have given some background into each of the individual ten tracks.
1.Colour Science (feat. Chocola B)
This track started with me playing a riff with the Yamaha TX81Z Timpani sound in the higher register. Obviously, the lower register does actually sound like a synth timpani, but the upper octaves sound like early 90s ambient - something like a Selected Ambient Works or Sabres of Paradise type sound. That timpani part comes in around 40 seconds, and I tangled it up within the syncopated broken-music-box-esque tuned percussion hits. 90s British ambient was a definite influence on this track, as was 80s Japanese environmental music, and I fused that with influences from Cocteau Twins, amongst others. I played two guitar parts on this, and they are hard-panned left/right. The part that comes in around 1:30 on the left channel works as a harmony to the timpani “melody,” and I think that sound was inspired by Labradford and other post-rock groups. The chorus guitar that comes in on the right channel later in the track was definitely indebted to 4AD artists and The Cure. I think at a fairly early stage of this I knew I wanted to ask Shoko to sing on this track. This was the first track that I asked her to sing on when making this album. In fact, this was the first track that was totally completed, and that was last year, only a couple of months after Loss came out. I really love what Shoko did — her vocals make this track. When she sent them to me, I knew this would be the opener, simply because I wanted everyone to hear this, even if they skipped through or didn’t listen to the rest of the album. But also, stylistically, I think it works really well as an overture.
You know when you hear something, and you get a flashback to a certain location at a certain time? I get that with this track - not just the 2022 autumn-to-winter change of season when I was working on this, but also to my room in the house I lived in during my second year of university just over 20 years ago. This puzzled me at first as it was a very vivid evocation that happened every time I listened to the track. After a while, I realised that it could well be because of the similarities with the Matmos & Matthew Herbert production on Björk’s Vespertine and also Aphex Twin’s ‘Nannou’ and (to a lot lesser degree) ‘Goon Gumpas’, both of which were on the Movern Callar soundtrack that I listened to a lot around that time. Overall, though, this is a track I’m really happy with, and I think it works very well at the start of this album, setting the mood for what happens afterwards.
2. Never Any Gain
The title track. From pretty early on, I had a very clear vision of how I wanted this to sound and asked Tom to come up with some lyrics for me to recite in the same way as I had his lyrics on ‘Is It Creation’ on Loss. I wanted a sense of déjà vu - a synchronicity with ‘Is It Creation’ but with its own distinctive timbre and pacing.
This is something that happens at least once an album, but I’ll sometimes get this very precise and comprehensive idea for something that I then manage to execute so the final track sounds exactly how I intended in my mind from day one of the initial idea. The conception for this title track came early in the process of the album, but actually completing it happened almost at the end. The objective was so explicit and the path so singular, that I actually found working on it rather overwhelming, as there was no room for error or creative deviation.
The chords came first, then the beat - both just as they were in my head. The drums on this track consist of two different instruments and approaches. The main weighty distorted drums that punch holes in the mix were programmed in Ableton using single hit samples loaded into Drum Rack. Nothing new for seasoned producers, but I’ll have each drum sound on a different track, meticulously EQed and with separate compression applied. I’ll usually mono each drum sound or certainly reduce the width. I then group all the different drum sounds and add overall EQ on the Group channel (or bus track, parent track, whatever you want to call it), and in the case where I want really torn and distorted drum sounds, like on this track, I’ll add multiple cassette and vinyl saturation VST effects from Waves and Arturia before adding a parallel Mix Glue Compression unit (parallel in the sense that I set the wet/dry to 50%). I create in Ableton, but I actually do the final mix down in Logic, so I always bounce out all my stems and import them into a Logic project file. This is something I have been doing for about 15 years now. For this level of aggressive in-your-face drums, I will put more compression in Logic on the track with the single exported wav file of all the drums, usually selecting a soft clip and turning the limiting on. The other higher-pitched drums that come in before the main breeze-block beat, playing the different pattern over the top, were from my Yamaha VSS-200. I sampled the Disco Rhythm Select and then chopped it up in Ableton and manually moved the transients of the drums sound of the cut-up wav file in the Arrangement View to play the rhythm I wanted. I also used my Yamaha VSS-200 for the synth solo in this track too. Although it’s a small 80s keyboard that was aimed for family-friendly home use, it utilises FM Synthesis, and many of the 100 presets sound like very lo-fi versions of DX 7 patches. I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to have a really heart-on-your-sleeve jazz-fusion solo played on a really tinny, cheap-sounding preset over the top of such a hard-hitting industrial-grounded song about a relatively serious subject matter. To be honest, I really love how that combination sits on this, the solo adds so much to the track, and it feels like a toy version of that iconic DX7 ROM 3A “Harmonica 1” sound that you hear on lots of solos on 80s tracks from Chaka Khan, Tina Turner, Yamashita Tatsuro, etc. etc.
3. Silver Lake
As the title suggests, this track was inspired by a trip to LA. I went there in December 2022, and was staying in a hotel in the Silver Lake area just off Sunset Boulevard. Lots of mixed emotions about the place, and I had the worst jet lag of my life. But one night, I was sitting by the pool drinking wine, and the hotel had constant music playing in the outdoor area - even at night - and they suddenly switched playlists from one that had disco tracks like Sharon Redd’s ‘Can You Handle It?’ - the Francois Kevorkian mix (which of course I was enjoying) to a 90s UK playlist with Massive Attack and Simply Red etc. Musically, this track is inspired by that moment. Lyrically, it’s about my experience in LA as a whole.
As anyone that has listened to my music, whether as A Taut Line or Greeen Linez will know, I am a big fan of DX7 chimes and electric piano sounds. That was the first thing I laid down on this track. Next was the bass. Although it doesn’t sound like it, the bass is actually a Behringer TD-3 pattern I programmed - although it doesn’t sound anything like a TB-303, or what we have come to associate with the acid sound. This thing where you have a continuous rolling bass pattern under chord changes over the top is an absolute favourite of mine, from Massive Attack’s ‘Safe from Harm’, Sade’s ‘Paradise’ and ‘Ordinary Love’ (this track bears quite a resemblance to Ordinary Love, something I only realised after the album’s release) and even when it’s done in prog tunes like ‘Heart of the Sunrise’ by Yes. I put the trip-hop-style drum break on next, and that instantly made the track sound like it was taken straight off Blue Lines. I did stop and think - hang on, is this too on the nose or a direct rip-off - but I feel the sound as a whole has its own unique vibe, at the same time as borrowing from some of my favourite music. The guitar solo and overall atmospherics of the track were definitely inspired by ‘Hold On to Your Dreams’ by Jah Wobble, The Edge, and Holger Czukay from that incredible Snake Charmer EP (which incidentally Francois Kevorkian produced — maybe that earlier playlist at the hotel had more influence than I thought…).
I don’t know why my voice sounds so much like Neil Tennant on this - which I’m not so happy about really. I actually scooped lots of 1000hz out of it in multiple EQ plug-ins to get the vocals to sound less Pet Shop Boys. Overall, though, I think this is my favourite track on the album by quite a margin. I thought this one would resonate with the listeners the most too, but that doesn’t seem to have been the case in reality.
4. Neutral Buoyancy
So this came about in two separate processes. I had a piano thing I was working on and also a beat that I was making for a more straight-up dance track that I was thinking of putting out under a different pseudonym. I’m not sure how I came up with the idea or why, but I put the two together, and it worked. So I reassigned some of the drum sounds in the MIDI pattern to ones that better suit the “A Taut Line sound” and then worked on the track from there. The piano line has a very floating quality to it, so I decided to go with ‘Neutral Buoyancy’ as a name and theme for this. An object that has neutral buoyancy will neither sink nor rise - it remains suspended in the same position, and so fits with the general theme of “Never Any Gain”. In the process of working on this track, I saw some Instagram stories of a set that Benny Salvador and Sam Fitzgerald played at RDC Sound Horizon, and the tunes they were playing sounded very cool, so I decided I wanted to make a track that would hypothetically fit into that set. That motivated me to complete this track and also dictated some of the decisions I made in terms of the direction it took.
I also wanted it to have a kind of new-age, self-help relaxation music vibe to it that fit with the title and concept. I went looking for vocal samples that would work to achieve that, but I couldn’t find anything, so I ended up writing some words and asked Shoko to record them. I didn’t credit Shoko on this track, which I feel a bit bad about, but I wanted it to feel like a sample, and thought that if it credits her as a collaborator in the track title, it puts more importance and expectation on the part she recorded, which isn’t supposed to be the central feature of the track at all. So for that reason, I decided not to.
I’m not sure if I’m happy with the mix of this track or not, to be perfectly honest. I think it sounds as I wanted it to sound in the context of the whole album, and sits right balance-wise when you consider the 10 tracks as a complete piece of art. But, yeah, as a stand-alone track that would be played in a club setting… I’m not sure. I think it’s very difficult to be able to judge your own music objectively, but when I think about playing this out in a DJ set, I choose not to, as something about it makes me cringe a little - like that feeling like hearing your own speaking voice on an accidental or non-consensual recording. It’s not something that is exclusive to this particular track of mine; it does happen from time to time, but on this album, this is the track that I feel it the most with.
5. Carmine
With all the intensity on the album, I wanted a track that took a step back from the more emotionally-charged in-your-face energy across the other nine. With ‘Carmine’, my plan was to create something that sounded like a lounge track, but with a slightly fucked-up feel. I think my initial point of reference was ‘Caralho Voador’ and ‘Evidence’, the more atmospheric R&B numbers from Faith No More’s “genre-shuffle” album King for a Day... Fool for a Lifetime — and at the same time, ‘Bob's Yer Uncle’ from Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches.
‘Carmine’ is based around a rhythm that sits somewhere between traditional Cuban music like son cubano, danzón, and mambo, and more modern African styles like amapiano. I incorporated some timables into the beat as well. I love timbales, and I was lucky to have the opportunity to play the Cuban-originated shallow single-headed instrument in orchestras and bands when I was a percussionist in my teens. I really like the sound of them in a lot of Latin music, and also the colour it brings when incorporated into jazz, funk, and disco. As well as of course being a fan of slightly more contemporary players like Sheila E and hip hop percussionist Eric Bobo, I’m possibly most into their use by the post-punk acts that sit on the funkier spectrum — take Konk’s ‘Love Attack’ as a perfect example of this. So I wanted some timbales on this, but while I might not be fortunate enough to have my own set, the Korg Wavedrum — with its PCM sound source, multi-pick up pressure sensor, etc. — lets you really authentically simulate a lot of percussion instruments, especially when you are playing it live with drum sticks. So the timbale on this track is a recording of me playing the Korg Wavedrum using program #23 “Timables Lo/Hi + Paila (Rim)”, and I don’t think that most people would be able to tell the difference, to be perfectly honest. I played around with the panning of these in the mix so they swirl around the head, creating a bit of a dizzy feel, as well as running them through a delay pedal to give them a bit more ebb and flow.
I sang the vocal line on this track. The lyrics are deliberately really shallow, simply about drinking wine and dancing, but then I wanted to sing them in a very anguished way that sounded like someone really drunk and fucked-up attempting to put on a positive front to hide the fact that they are actually overwhelmed by despair. To further give a sense of the intoxication and the masked expression, I overdubbed the vocal line with different takes, but intentionally left parts out-of-sync to give it a swaying/staggering effect, and I also put in slight gaps or volume dips in the vocals that sound like I’m catching my breath, taking a swig of a drink, or have simply forgotten the words. I think that contrast of the smooth, dreamy, slow-dance music and the unhinged dysfunctional vocals works really well.
For me, I think the highlight of ‘Carmine’ is the synth solo. This was very much influenced by the mother of all synth solos — an archetype I keep coming back to time and time again — Kool & the Gang’s ‘Summer Madness’, particularly the 1976 live recording of their performance of it at the Rainbow Theatre, London. The rising octave-jump portamento and delay-heavy glides in the solo is something I often use as a trick to build tension and excitement into the climax of a track — even if I put it really low in the mix. You can actually hear this a lot in Greeen Linez tracks, right from the first releases. On this track, I use that device between 3:15-3:20 when it goes into the final refrain from the middle-8 section. Although I have done this trick with various different synth sounds on various tracks in the past, for ‘Carmine’, I wanted the synth solo and the octave jump to really reference Summer Madness and have a similar sound to the ARP 2600 that Ronald Bell played on the record, but also balance that with a sound that fit with this and my vision of it. Something I do very often when I’m trying to find the “perfect” sound is that I will combine different synth sounds together — or to put it another way, have the MIDI triggering different synths simultaneously layered on top of each other. This is something that I’ve been doing for well over 10 years, or at least since when I was working on the first Greeen Linez album in 2012, because I definitely did it on that. What I’ll do is find some sounds that are close to what I want and then have them each on separate tracks, and then I will group them in Ableton. For ‘Carmine’, I blended a Yamaha CS-80 lead, a Solina String Ensemble lead sound, and a Mini Moog lead sound. A key lesson that I have learnt in the process of doing this over the years is that it is important to have separate EQing on each of the different synth parts to cut out the frequencies of each synth part that you don’t want, and to make sure that you don’t have too much overlap of certain frequencies - particularly around the 1000hz mark. The second key lesson is that on the Group track itself, on the output of the combined sound (before you put effects, reverb, delay, etc.,), I put a Utility tool and mono the composite sound. The reason I have come to do this is because layering multiple synths on top of each other playing the same thing can create far too much width in the mix, and give little room for anything else. So, I’ll have a Utility tool there to make the multi-synth line mono, an EQ tool to EQ the overall combination of the sound (on top of the EQ tools on the individual tracks) and then if I want to give that sound more width, I’ll use delay and reverb to do that. If you don’t apply individual *and* group EQ, and don’t reduce the width of the layered sound, you’ll end up with an overwhelming wall of sound and a very muddy mix.
Some people have commented that this is their favourite track on the album, which for me is quite interesting as the purpose of the track was a light-relief interlude. However, I feel that it provides another good example of how, as the creator, you will never really know what will resonate most with people. The intentions, creative process, technicality, and even the time and effort behind a piece of work really have nothing to do with how it is received. And, although I’m not sure how much it is relevant to ‘Carmine’, one important message related to this is that you don’t need to suffer for your art for it to be worthy of other people’s enjoyment.
6. The Limits and the Lows
The working title for this track was Valentine, as I started working on it on Valentine’s Day. Absolutely nothing to do with the date, but I was at a point of deep depression and despair for various personal reasons. The main refrain just suddenly came to me as I was playing around on a Casiotone. In the end, the track took an A-B-A-B structure, and there is quite a contrast between the bleak “verse” and the music's more hopeful-sounding “chorus” which gives this track a kind of bipolar feeling that kind of mirrors the human experience. In some ways, I feel this is the sister track to the title track on the last album, but if I’m being perfectly honest, I feel that ‘Loss’ (the track) is a much more accomplished composition, but that’s because there was a far more extensive and sustained emotional charge behind it. The Limits and the Lows essentially came from a single-day experience, that feeling of getting to the end of the road and not knowing which way to turn. There is a kind of a contradictory buoyant drift to the track too, though, especially as it flows into the “awakening” sections. I achieved this through different elements fading in and out, panned left or right, and the loose bobbing glockenspiel and kalimba notes that float on the surface. Incidentally, the field recordings at the very start of the track are from me opening the window of my studio and just letting the microphone record the ambiance - and then layering different parts of that over each other. I did this because I wanted to convey a sense of being trapped and overwhelmed by your immediate surroundings.
7. The Following Contained (feat. Chocola B)
This was unashamedly inspired by Tricky, both Maxinquaye and the unofficial self-titled follow-up album released as Nearly God. I had been listening to both a lot prior to working on Never Any Gain. The guitar part I played unintentionally sounds like some of the riffs in the less heavy parts of Welcome to Sky Valley. There was a period in my life when I was pretty into Kyuss, so it was just a natural, unconscious influence, I think. To be honest, as I was in the process of making this tune, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to keep it as an instrumental, or put vocals on it — whether mine or someone else's. There were some subtleties in the sounds — for example, the decay of the synth chords that I really like — that I was concerned would be lost if there were vocals on top of them masking them out. Once the full instrumental was finished, I made the decision that the track definitely would be elevated by having a “Martina Topley-Bird”, so I asked Shoko to work on some vocals for this track too. She ended up giving me some suggestions and direction on the production of the vocals she recorded, which was cool, as it made me work a bit harder to raise the bar for the track as a whole. I experimented with some tremolo on the vocals for this one, most noticeably heard at the very end of the track, and used a tremolo plug-in from the NI guitar effects rack to do that. I think that gives the vocals an interesting quality. I’m pretty happy with how this track came out, and I feel it’s an unassuming highlight of the album.
8. Kelsey Kerridge
Kelsey Kerridge is a sports centre in Cambridge that was built in the early 1970s on the grounds of a demolished Victorian-era prison. It’s still there today with the same name, albeit having been fully refurbished a few times over the years. In the early-to-mid 90s, some raves were held in the main hall there
I wanted to make a dance tune with the Kelsey Kerridge name that represented the legacy of those raves (which I am not even going to half-pretend that I was old enough to attend), but which also served as part of a long-running joke that Chris and I have of naming tracks after local Cambridge landmarks — Greeen Linez tunes ‘Grafton Centre’ and ‘Peas Hill’ being two examples. Well, I say a joke, but there are countless songs that are named after places in London, New York, Los Angeles, etc., so why not places in Cambridge? My 2016 track ‘Burleigh Street’ was named after the road that was home to the famous record shop Jays, which closed in 2002 after playing a pivotal role for many DJs and music lovers since the 70s. The other reason why I chose the name is that I wanted an idea that represented something that has been there for a long time with a function and/or purpose that hasn’t changed or evolved over the years. I felt that it worked as a pars-pro-toto analogy for the concept of the album as a whole, especially as its secondary use in the 90s (which, for many people of a certain generation, is the only reason it will be remembered) never continued.
This track went through many different incarnations. The first version had a ravey hardcore continuum break in it to make reference to the music played at the early-90s events held at the location, but it just wasn’t working for some reason. I think when I was a bit younger, if a track simply wasn’t working, after wasting a lot of time trying to push square pegs through round holes, I’d get frustrated, ditch it completely, and move on — or even feel like I’m destined to failure and take an extended break from working on any music at all. But in the last few years, I have changed my approach, and if I have realised something isn’t working, I salvage what I like from it, maybe often the initial idea, and then rework it from ground zero in a different direction. This happened with this track; I liked the melodic elements that I had, but I just didn't like the treatment of them in terms of rhythm and structure. So I scrapped the original drums and bass parts completely and started working on them from scratch, taking it in more of an electro feel. The voice samples come from an 80s ITV documentary about the telecommunication system where they were interviewing people in the street to gauge public understanding about the engineering behind the telephone network. I chose this as a sample source not only as a prologue for the subject matter of the next track Cameraphone, but also as a reference to an important milestone in the history of technology at a simpler time, a world away from the abject horror of the modern digital world. The track perhaps doesn’t go as hard as I had originally envisioned, but I like the awkward, disjointed nature of the play between the different elements.
9. Cameraphone
This track is a love letter to my first visit to Japan in 2001 on a tour playing percussion for a musical theatre production and going into a phone shop in Asakusa and being completely blown away by the technology on display. These phones were one example of “Galápagos” technology, a term coined from a Darwinian analogy to talk about isolated Japan-only versions of globally available products that had their own unique functionality and so often wouldn’t work outside of Japan. I remember asking questions about these phones, thinking that I was somewhat an expert on mobile phones, having worked for several months prior to my trip to Japan in the BT Cellnet shop in Lions Yard Cambridge. The staff in the shop just repeatedly told me over and over again that they were only compatible with Japanese networks and didn’t understand why I assumed I could put a SIM card into them and use them in the UK. It was only until smartphones were introduced in Japan that SIM cards became a part of the technology. But, this track is also about pre-2007 technology as a whole, before the iPhone, social media, and everything else that followed. There is also a really eerie video, taken a year after my visit, of Shakira seeing one of these Japanese camera phones for the first time, which really resonates with my own experience of visiting Japan for the first time.
The sound of ‘Cameraphone’ is a reference to that effect you get when the game centre or pachinko parlour doors open as you walk past in a busy shōtengai (or shopping arcade), like the one in Asakusa that phone shop was in. As I wanted this track to be about an experience unique to Japan, I came to the decision to use traditional Japanese tonality for the track. Everything in the track is solely in the Miyako-bushi pentatonic scale, a tonality used a lot in koto and shamisen traditional Japanese folk music, including the famous traditional song ‘Sakura’. So I played/programmed all the keyboard parts, the bassline, even auto-tuned the vocal sample to be in that pentatonic scale. To give a sense of the period of time the track is supposed to capture, I crafted the beat and rhythm in a style that is intended to evoke millennium-era UK garage.
The track ends very abruptly, and this was on purpose. Initially, before I had finished the album and properly sequenced the tracks, I was thinking that it would go straight into some fast-paced crashing drum break, but then I decided that I wanted a sudden, unexpected descent to a slower, more muted sound — like a power cut and you are reduced to candlelight, or a sense of a big fall — a transition so jarring that it induces a disorientated feeling of being instantaneously transported back to where you started for the album’s final destination.
10. Chakka (feat. Chocola B)
The restrained, serenading nature of this epilogue feels like the quiet, sunny morning after a heavy typhoon. But, without the satisfactory passing of a storm preceding it, we get no sense of arrival. From the start of the album until this point, there is no perception of a journey from A to B. At first, ‘Chakka’ has the feel of a spiritless toned-down reprieve of the first track, it doesn't provide a conclusion to a linear movement or give any sense of advancement or progression — accordingly, by design, leaving the listener with a strong impression of there being never any gain.
As the track continues, I think you start to feel other emotional undulations that surge and recede in waves. And by the very end of the track - and therefore the album - at the point of the closing morse-code-like clave pattern, there does feel like there is some kind of positive forward-thinking message conveyed across the void.
Musically, I think this track sounds quite trip hop in its essence, but perhaps in a way that sits between trip hop and towards the Domino/Leaf Label/Moor Music sound at the end of the 90s crossing into the early years of the 00s. I think there is also a Sketch Show influence somewhere in there, too. The track was born from the dark dream pop meets British folk guitar motif that you can hear starting in the finished version at the 20-second mark. The next thing I came up with was the main synth AB melodic pattern - I liked the way it quite simply alternated between the two like a verse-chorus over the guitar line, giving a tide-like fluctuation to the track. Once I introduced the loose jazzy drums, the rest of the track — the marimba parts, the piano, the other atmospherics — came together quite quickly and organically. Then I sent pretty much a finished instrumental to Shoko and discussed the lyrics and vocal treatment with her.
I hadn’t expected her to go with a spoken-word/rap style for this, but I really liked what she did, and was super excited when I first heard it. I originally wrote the lyrics in English, and they were about being tied to the past and as much as we want to move forward we can’t escape who we are. I did a quick and rough translation of them into Japanese and shared them with Shoko, and asked her to use that as a loose base. She made a lot of changes, and the different perspective that the song brings as an outcome is something I was really happy about. The opening lines talk about “drowning in shadows” (陰に溺れ - kage ni obore) and “longing for progress but stuck in the past” (進歩を切望し、過去に囚われ - shinpo wo setsubou shi, kako ni toraware) but the Chakka of the title comes from the mantra-like key refrain: yami no naka hibana ga chakka (闇の中火花が着火) literally meaning “a spark ignites in the darkness”, and the rest of the chorus becomes about the resilience of that flame and how it enlightens lessons learnt and we should embrace that. Definitely a lasting and more reassuring statement that, as much as possible, I’d like everyone to hold onto.
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Thanks for reading this far. I hope that you found something useful for your own creativity in some way. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below, and if there is anything I can expand on, I would be more than happy to.
As promised, here is a run through some albums that I have been listening to over the past few months. I plan to do this with every newsletter, but as this is the first one, I have included a few more that span a little further back than just the most recent ones I have been enjoying.
Greg Foat & Gigi Masin - Dolphin (Strut)
Greg Foat is *the* g.o.a.t. An incredibly prolific modern-day UK jazz keyboardist that just keeps on putting out sublime record after sublime record, often in collaboration with other highly talented artists. I was already a massive fan — hanging on every new release — and then, out of the blue, I see that he has recorded an album in collaboration with another legend in his own right, Italian composer and ambient musician Gigi Masin, to be released on Strut. I mean, how was this not going to be amazing? And, yet, in an act of remarkable rarity, it even exceeded expectations. The whole album is simply gorgeous - no way else to put that. Surprisingly, a lot of the album was recorded remotely, with the drums, bass, flute, and clarinet on that feature on some of the tracks recorded afterwards. There are many tracks that have Masin’s signature sunrise-over-the-ocean ambient sound that simply transports you away from reality in a hyper-meditative state. Two examples of this being opener ‘Lee’, which also has a bit of a Vangelis Blade Runner vibes in some of the pads and pitch glides that sail over the horizon, and ‘Sabena’, a beautiful tribute to Gigi’s wife who sadly passed away during 2022, and title track ‘Dolphin’ with its beautiful flute melody that on first listen reminded me of the closing section of Issac Hayes’s ‘Ike’s Mood’. However, as celestial an album it would be if all 10 tracks were in this vein, what really makes this an incredible piece of work are tracks like ‘Love’s Theme’, with its goosebump-inducing opening bars reminiscent of Alberto Iglesias’s stirring soundtrack for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and ecstatic-yet-devastating ‘Viento Calido’ with perhaps the greatest ever two-note synth line that endlessly weeps over an intimate jazz-quartet performance.
Jonny Nash - Point of Entry (Melody As Truth)
A connection with this release and the above one is that guitarist and Melody As Truth founder Jonny Nash (not to be confused with Johnny “I Can See Clearly Now” Nash) is a member of Gaussian Curve with Gigi Masin. Point of Entry is Nash’s 6th solo album, and his first in four years. I’ve always liked Jonny Nash’s music - and my wife Megumi is probably even more of a fan - but this album for me really stands out as a body of work that makes a proper statement, albeit a very quiet and introspective one. Nash’s blend of folk and ambient really sit together sublimely on every track on the album to create a solid eleven tracks of sheer beauty. Tracks like (my personal favourite) ‘All I Ever Needed’, which Nash also sings on, drag you into an immersive emotional state where you don’t know whether to beam glowingly or break down in a flood of tears. I listened to this album on repeat for a full weekend when I first heard it, and then continued to listen throughout the following week. Listening to this album while walking around Tokyo - with the cinematic juxtaposition of the bustling city and weaving through crowds of people and the poignant serenity of the music - reminded me of when I first visited the city in 2001, and I had a mini-disc of music from a local Cambridge solo guitarist Rob Jackson. Stylistically, texturally, and in terms of the overall atmosphere created, there are a lot of similarities with this album, particularly the delay-pedal guitar tracks, and there was a strange moment when I was listening to this album on the Sobu Line home, at the point where it runs right next to the highway between Sendagaya and Yoyogi when I remembered I had been on a coach listening to Rob Jackson observing a packed Sobu train running in parallel motion at the exact same location 22 years prior. Incidentally, Nash lived in Tokyo in the early 2000s, so perhaps it was a moment of transcendental interconnectivity. Anyway, that’s the level of contemplative and ethereal artistry that Point of Entry achieves, and I highly recommend it.
Foshe & Indira Elias - Foshira (Foshe Records)
I found Foshe through algorithmic prompts when I was “recommended” their album Nice to Meetcha with Horatio Numa during an isolated period of the pandemic. I was really into it immediately because it kind of sounded like a cross between early Tortoise, a looser live version of Moodyman/Theo Parrish et al., and modern soul-n-dub hybrid artists like Lord Echo or even Khruangbin. All their albums are recorded live and improvised - which just proves a testament to their excellent musicianship. This album, Foshira, with singer Indira Elias, recorded live in 2019, but just released this year, also fuses a lot of the influences that I heard on my introduction to their music - but now with an added psychedelic Massive Attack meets Mazzy Star factor and also some 4-to-the-floor kick drums that featured on some of their more housier releases. Opening tune ‘Hey Ind’ is a real hazy and hallucinatory journey, that travels from very loose proggy vibes into a proper introspective-feel-good dancefloor stomp over its 9:21 voyage. The whole album flows into each other seamlessly (I wonder if the whole thing was recorded in one single take…sounds like it…) so it can be listened in one go in a very organic way, with tracks a little difficult to differentiate unless you are paying close attention (a good thing) - but for the record, I also really like ‘If The Water Is Cold, Jump Right In’. This is a great release that proves absolutely perfect trippy escapism from this hell hole that is Earth 2023.
Loraine James - Gentle Confrontation (Hyperdub)
When I first listened to this album, the immediate thought that came to me was - this is an artist who has most definitely found her own distinctive voice. Gentle Confrontation is unquestionably from Loraine James, an outstanding artist at the very forefront of the UK electronic scene right now. This, her third album for Hyperdub, reflects on her past and present at the same time, and musically there is a very fluctuating dichotomy that feels both very unsettling yet very honest at the same time. There are many instances of very raw emotions laid bare to be punctured and tattered by the distorted brutalist production seemingly inspired in part by Gescom, Team Doyobi, Push Button Objects, et al. The result is like reading diary entries written on torn pages found in the debris of a demolished house. However, there are also other more “Gentle” soulful sounds on the album that work in antithesis to the “Confrontation” but yet sit very naturally alongside. ‘I DM U’, with its relatable emo-electronic and jazzy post-rock vibes, stands out like a beacon on more solid ground than the more volatile scattery-stuttery rhythms and textures of the tracks around it. There are also some more avant-RnB numbers like ‘Let U Go ft. keiyaA’, ‘Speechless ft. George Riley’, and ‘Disjointed (Feeling Like a Kid Again)’, which, although still too prickly timbre-wise to truly hug you in a warm embrace, certainly move towards that gesture. James presents a lot of very intricate human emotions on this album, some we can feel an immediate affinity with, some, naturally, harder to define — and all as interchangeable and unpredictable as the real human experience. These temperamental sentiments are expressed in production that feels concurrently both nostalgic and cutting-edge, like a two-coloured moving sand art display shaken about in an erratic nature across the 16 tracks of this excellent LP.
Memotone - How Was Your Life? (Impatience)
We have been very lucky to have released music with Will Yates aka Memotone on Diskotopia - as well as having a hand in the release of the phenomenal O.G.Jigg release The Land Dictates The Lay Of The Stone (the 12” of which is still available from Pianola Records for Japan-based readers…). Will is an incredibly talented multi-instrumental musician, artist, and producer, and everything he releases is pure liquid gold. This album that came out on Impatience last May captures the West-country British heritage folk that he has been exploring to various degrees over the last few years and filters it through a fourth-world John Hassell filter over a constantly shape-shifting altered-state moorland of Reich-eque minimalism, druid funk, and lovers baroque. There are moments that sound like Adrian-Sherwoord-produced ‘shroom session collabs between Steve Vai and Pat Methany, and others where you wonder if Manchester label YOUTH commissioned a remix album of a Benjamin Britten composition that Tony Allen somehow played drums on. The album constantly pushes the envelope stylistically past the safe zone of the usual concepts of genre while maintaining an exceptionally high level of musicality. This is a truly excellent record of effortless risk-taking that still feels calm, and the experimental polymorphic nature flows comfortably and organically. Beautiful, modern, pastoral care.
Minako Yoshida - Twilight Zone (RCA)
This year in March I was asked to DJ at a trendy food court area in the newly opened Tokyo Midtown Yaesu upscale shopping mall. In the last few years the concepts of Showa-retro and Heisei-retro have become very popular, especially with younger generations. It’s basically a certain kind of nostalgia for the 80s and 90s, and started with young people visiting old kissa cafes and onsen resorts that still remain untouched since that period. Not to get all James Murphy “I was there” - but, “I was there”. This was what I was most fascinated about in Japan when I first moved here in 2005 — the remnants of the Bubble-era still alive and well if you knew where to look and listen. It’s what Megumi and I spent a lot of our free time doing for over 10 years before our son was born. But, following a phase of young people with film cameras taking photos of their ice cream floats against the backdrop of 1970s interior design and getting lots of likes on Instagram for it, the corporate world muscled in to commodify this nostalgia, repackage it, and sell it back to the kids. This food court — although not quite as extreme as other recent openings across the city — borrows a lot of its style from Japan of the past, trying to convey a traditional yokocho vibe, with multiple small yatai-like restaurants, some in a classic izakaya format, others selling kakigori. (I walked past the Japan Center in London this summer, and was surprised to see this kind of classic yokocho style and “retro ramen” being pushed there too!) For the opening of this food court they wanted to really push in on the nostalgia, and so, I was booked to play a city pop set. I hadn’t really listened to city pop for 10 years, let alone DJ it, so I was excited to revisit, but also a bit nervous because, although I was a huge fan, particularly around the release of our Greeen Linez album Things That Fade that was very much influenced by the city pop sound, it has become a massive thing worldwide with reissues, dedicated DJs, YouTube mixes and more. It has also seen a revival in Japan with young people who weren’t even born during that time lapping it up as a escapism drug from the poor-outlook of present day adulthood. So, I felt that my knowledge of the genre was probably worse than the average person on the street by now. And, to be perfectly honest, because a lot of city pop is so saccharine, it’s very easy to get hooked on its “sugar content” — but it’s like getting drunk on Pimm’s or Southern Comfort, tastes so sweet and you get a very pleasant buzz, but if you drink too much and it comes back up the other way, you never want to touch it again. Anyhow, I went back through a lot of the music that I owned and it was definitely an interesting experience to listen again to a lot of albums in a new light after a long period of time. I also wanted to dig deeper beyond my own collection and find things I had missed, that weren’t so easily accessible in 2009-2013, before the reissues, digitalization, and complete catalogues being available on the streaming services. And in doing this, I actually found a lot of stuff that I hadn’t listened to properly before that I really liked. One such album was Minako Yoshida’s Twilight Zone. I had heard some of her other songs here and there from albums like Monochrome and Light’n Up but I had never heard this album before. Yoshida was encouraged to pursue a career in music by her high school friend Haruomi Hosono, who incidentally produced her first album Tobira no Fuyu after she had collaborated with various members of Happy End around the time of the release of their seminal album Kazemachi Roman. Twilight Zone was produced by another Japanese pop legend, Tatsuro Yamashita. The album has quite a Todd Rungren/Carole King vibe to it — fairly different from the kind of cheesy 80s city pop sound that I had been addicted to over a decade ago, hence why I probably never arrived at this record before — but there is also a definite jazz and soul foundation to many of the tracks, and in particular I got a strong sense of influence from the 70s albums of musicians like Donald Byrd, Freddie Hubbard, and Eddie Henderson. The stand out song on this record for me is ‘恋は流星 (Koi Ha Ryusei)’ - which I hadn’t realised that Hosono had played guitar on and Hiroshi Sato organ. There’s something really magical about this track and how it builds into the rapturous refrain from the slow ballad-esque start. Actually, this was the single from the record, and it's difficult to find the album version online as what tends to come up in a search is the much funkier ‘恋は流星 Shooting Star For Love Part II’, which I believe was the single A-side — or maybe because it is more immediately accessible as it starts straight away in an uptempo disco style — and seems to be the go-to version, albeit very much inferior in my opinion. Anyway, this is a really great album, and if you haven’t heard it, take a listen.
Knopha - Kwong (Mood Hut)
This EP felt like a bit of a departure from the usual Mood Hut output (which I also love), so I think immediately piqued my interest because of that fact; and on first listen of the pre-order single, I was immediately drawn in. Chinese artist Noah Li, only has a handful of releases under his name, most notably being 2018’s Nothing Nil. Knopha opens with ‘Fizz’, a track that flickers and flutters in a way that sounds like a Matthew Herbert remix of Deadbeat — there’s elements of micro-house, ambient, dub techno and glitchtronica all blended together smoothly in a lush flora audio-painting. ‘The Light’ is a twitchy downbeat take on jazzy drum and bass, and Fishdoll’s strong-yet-sultry vocals and Li’s palatial pads give it a rather Goldie ‘Timeless’ quality, just with brushed snares and intricate pot-and-pan splices replacing the Apache and Funky Mule breaks. ‘Mizu Le Goût’ feels like a more emotronica take on early Hessle Audio output and bubbles along in a pleasant way. The twin ‘Corundum’ tracks - the first featuring Voision Xi - are an interesting presentation. Matthew Herbert seems to be back in the mix here - like he’s reworking Kylie Minogue’s Fever album (which let’s be honest, is a masterpiece - while we are on the subject) but there is also a UK vs US garage soundclash happening at the same time, like Mood II Swing and MJ Cole fighting over the iPod at Todd Edwards’s house — with the instrumental part two more of a dancefloor oriented dub of part one. Rhythms are definitely Knopha’s forte, but only make up one part of his artillery, with very adept melodies and textural renditions taking this EP to new heights outside and above the crowds of other contemporary electronic releases.
DJ Trystero - Castillo (Incienso)
This came out in April, and I was listening to it every evening on my night walks for a good few weeks. There’s something very cathartic that clears and focuses the mind in amongst the polychromatic energy of this record. Mr Trystero is a Tokyo-based DJ, producer, and record label owner (the enigmatic but very excellent vinyl label City-2 St. Giga) that has also performed under various different names over the years and continues to shapeshift through monikers. As DJ Trystero, he has released on Trilogy Tapes and Cav Empt. On Castillo, released on Anthony Naples’s Incienso label, Trystero presents a lawless yet intimate listening experience that shifts in obtuse angles across ambient, breakbeat, electro, techno and house in an experimental and self-assembly nature. Across the nine tracks, there’s a kind of carefully crafted precision that only a seasoned producer could pull off. At the same time, Trystero leaves a deliberate grungey roughness throughout where you can still see some nails that are supposed to hold the genres-references together in place sticking out and the paint work comes off powdery on your finger tips as you lean into the grooves. It’s hard to pick out stand out tracks, as for me I think listening to the album in full is far more worthwhile and satisfying experience — truly appreciating Castillo as a complete work of art in itself — than separating individual parts of the jigsaw to reassemble in a DJ set. Highly recommended, and just writing about it here makes me want to listen to it in full again.
Lukid - Tilt (Glum)
I couldn’t believe it has been 11 years since Lonely at the Top, the last Lukid full-length, an album that properly excited and inspired me on its release. Track two ‘Manchester’ with its opening “マンチェスターからです” voice sample made it into good number of my DJ sets in 2012. Luke Blair has been keeping busy though, with ten releases as one-half of Rezzett and three EPs as Refreshers also under his belt in the interim. On this welcome return, Tilt gives us a woozy‘n’wheezing ten tracks of hazy textural collage and crumbled fragments of rave memories. There are angular raw expressions of isolation and deserted overgrown urban areas presented across the tracks, especially in the more soundscape numbers like the emotive opener ‘End Melody’ and neoclassical string workout ‘The Great Schlep’. ‘Haringey Leisure’ sounds like coded temporal-transgression transmissions from a parallel universe reaching the car radio of a burnt out Vauxhall Nova in the middle of an abandoned housing estate in the form of twisted bleep-techno & hardcore hybrid binary patterns. ‘Daisy Cutter’ sounds like a circus procession of ice cream vans being directed by a ballet choreographer, before we realize we were just hallucinating, and the ghosts leave us in the medieval square of an uninhabited European town filled with the clock tower bell chime reverberating painfully through our mind. As an album this is a desolate psychoactive experience of a listen, but one that paints an accurate picture of the bleak reality of the present day. Sometimes we have to face our demons.
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Many thanks for reading. I’ll be back soon talking with some really interesting creatives. Please subscribe/sign up for newsletters and spread the word. Comments are open below :)
Matt