After the last couple of weeks’ voyages into eucatastrophic catharsis,1 today’s track is all about the sound of drums and bass constantly spilling into themselves, perpetually on the brink of collapse but never quite getting there. A Shepard tone of breathing, muddled distortion.
The track — and it is a lot more tracky than my usual output, almost exercise-like — is named after my friend Greg’s sound design business because a dubby stab of his proved essential to unlocking the tune. That and he’s always been incredibly kind and encouraging to me. Thanks, Greg! Usually, when I turn to his sounds, I know exactly what I want. He specialises in moody, dystopian pads — brooding amalgamations of field recordings run through capricious vintage samplers. Think horror movie soundtracks or dubby drum and bass. A few years ago Greg sent me a collection of his sounds and, from time to time, here and there, when I know I need a moody backdrop to a composition, I figure his work is perfect.
But this case was different. I had the arrangement sketched out, more or less as it is now, but something about the middle section wasn’t quite right. I’d tried experimenting using a vocal synth to turn my sung vocals into bilious, janky screeches of synthesizer but the results didn’t feel quite right.2 Then, as I’m wondering where to go, I decide to scroll through some of Greg’s sounds, when I come across a dubby stab. It’s the sound that enters at 1.53. It’s not a showstopping sound. It’s more like a pillow. And it’s hardly in this tune at all. But it showed me that what the track needed was not to build further with new, ear-catching elements, but to sink into itself a little, to disintegrate, to see the collapsing chaos tamed with a little consistency. So Empty Vessel was christened.
Before that, it had the working title First FX Grid, because it was my first experiment using a powerful feature that comes with the Bitwig DAW called the FX Grid. I’m fairly new to Bitwig but, in brief, the Grid allows you to build your own modular instruments and effects chains. In this case, I used the main drum part to drive a wavetable oscillator which produced the main bassline, which was then processed in various ways. It was born from pure exploration and thus produced a weird, alien bassline that I’d probably have never written. This kind of free-form, exploratory software makes me want to make electronic music much more than most of the stuff that’s released every week, which often leads to creation by Lego.
My friend Sam’s phrase. More on this soon.
Though a few ghostly traces remain.