“There’s beauty in the mass effect of people at night moving from A to B.”
I often write songs in a visual or narrative way. Certain songs will be created around an image of something or an experience. A City, a Spirit and a Fall from Grace is a reference to nights out that I, or other people, may have had in the past. The idea was to present a series of emotions over the course of a night out – from the drifting feeling a night can inspire through to the crashing nihilism that prevails it.
Me I’m Not Myself is a song set at night. I call it a dark driving song. I started writing the song with the idea that it was the soundtrack to be played while driving away at night in some imaginary movie where the lead character was on a search for something ‘out there’ in the night. I used to feel this way but I realise these days that this search ‘out there’ in the night is an adolescent desire, and yet it is while enjoyable, it is also increasingly futile. As well as it being a song to drive to it is also about this struggle with the day-to-day meaningless of existence. The last line of the song, “All I Want To Do Is Just Waste Away”, is a reaction to this crisis of meaning - an answer I feel I’ve resolved many times while driving at night listening to a cool song.
"The night is just something that helps to create a blanket for this disconnecting, or the act of dissociating."
In terms of my experience directly with the night, it has always held an ethereal quality for me. I think this theme comes out on the EP. I always love stepping away from social occasions and being by myself in the middle of the night. I love walking through the city after a graveyard shift and seeing the night fade away and see the waste from humanities efforts to party, to dance. Dissociate is about my connection with disconnecting.
I Dream of Electric People is also very much influenced by my experiences with the night. I do a lot of night time photography. Industrial areas, ports at night, and the hustle of people going somewhere, are all images and aesthetics I love and recall when I think of this song.
"This song was a sort of homage to Blade Runner, in both the song title and in aesthetic."
The airy choirs call plays on my consistent theme of the night being something beautiful or ethereal, and the song blooms from the initial fizzing noise into a hopeful collection of sounds. It’s kind of like being down on life and then seeing cities or masses of people from afar in a time lapse, or from the top of a building. There’s beauty in the mass effect of people at night moving from A to B.
Historically, I’ve loved many musical artists and sounds. From Ariel Pink to Tom Waits through Joy Division and Sam Cooke…all of this is influence. I might write a couple songs that sound similar, and possibly draw upon similar influences, but this can also change dramatically for other songs. For example, MINM and A New Start are quite traditionally-written/sounding songs, and draw from bands such as The Cure, Radiohead and Joy Division. Then there is Dissociating and Gospel of Trial and Error that are slightly more alternative and draw from my love of bands like NEU!, Ariel Pink, the many side projects of Animal Collective, and even Tom Waits.
