It always takes us a long time until we are able to publish a piece of new music. Why can’t we go faster? What happens in all that time between the first idea until the finnished product? This is an inside view about the making of Introspectiva and the stories behind the song.
The starting point of a new track can be a sample, a melody, a drumloop or an idea from a collaboration partner. In case of Introspectiva we have been hooked about 10 months ago by a $outh$ide synth line in a track they called Intro$pectiva https://soundcloud.com/southsidesohigh/1-intro-pectiva. So we ran into the second collab with the young and talented rap duo from Chile by asking for stems. We are working on a lot of beats at the same time using Ableton live. All data is stored on a cloudserver so we both can work independently on the projects. The editing and arrangement process is always taking turns between us. While most of the lofi producers are working on their own, we create as a duo. Producing together with a friend is a lot more fun and the music that evolves is more than just the sum of the individual parts. You may listen to the finnished track here: https://abr.fanlink.to/introspectiva
The creative process goes beyond music and it often happens that things are falling into place naturally when you live a while with a piece of music you are creating. Visually we felt the chilled latin american electro vibe of the track and the title Introspectiva goes well with chemograms. Chemograms are abstract paintings from the darkroom.made out of light, chemical liquids, and foto paper. Leni Berlin came along with them. You instantly start to read those pictures that are litarally evolving out of nothing: looks like a view from a hill to the sea, reminds of the paintings by Mark Rothko and so on. We decided to choose one of them for the cover artwork. A choice that was shaped by personal experiences, culture and another important ingridient: “The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched, they must be felt with the heart“. This quote comes from the astonishing blind and deaf 19th century author Helen Keller – a bit pathetic but hey, it’s true.
The last chapter of our eclectic journey was the making of audiovisual content to feed the internet. Our ideas stemmed from photography, inside views, the sea, chemical liquids, painting with light, reading abstract pictures and discovered Edward Weston on YouTube. He is one of the 20th centuries masters of photography with an approach of creating fotos as an inner conversation with nature. His photos are outstanding statements and they are revealing a lot about his inner personality: „to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.“ (Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”). OK, enough of that, let’s leave the lecture hall. We asked our friend Dan McRae aka The Hidden to cut a video from the beautiful documentaries about Edward Weston and whatever comes into his mind additionally. He felt inspired by the music and our ideas and he had a 4 hours creative sprint. Out came a very special piece of audiovisual art in the best manner of hiphop’s sampling culture. Thank you, Dan.
So, mission completed. That was the end of the creative journey to Introspectiva. We hope you like the souveniers we brought: https://abr.fanlink.to/introspectiva.
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