Back to the impressionist electronica we go! And it’s one of my favourite pieces.1
Obsession was written in April 2021, and one of the first things I noticed on reopening this project was that all the brass and woodwind tracks had been bounced down to a single track, and about 30 backing vocal tracks had been bounced to just three. In music production, a track is one channel of audio (most often a single sound, like a kick drum) and a bounce is the process of rendering an audio file. When you’re done with a project, you bounce out a WAV or MP3 file. You can also do this internally to the project, as I had in this case. Often, this is done to make life more manageable; in this case, I think it was to make things easier for my CPU.
Bouncing several tracks down to one is often a useful part of the creative process — suddenly, making big changes seems much less daunting. When things are simplified, new possibilities emerge. It also forces you to move forward, because you can’t mess around with the original tracks anymore. You’ve committed, as we say.2
Opening up this project last week, I immediately noticed things I’d consider changing in the backing vocals: a slight messiness, a few breaths and ess sounds that jumped out at me, and perhaps the relative volume of some delay and reverb effects. But I could have removed those breaths at the time, could have aligned the vocals a little more closely — I must have chosen not to. Obsession is, after all, a brooding, sometimes manic kind of disordered attention. A slight sense of disorder in the arrangement makes sense as an aesthetic choice.3 “Honour thy error as a hidden intention,” Eno’s Oblique Strategies say.
Indeed, the lyrics to this song were almost entirely improvised, with backing vocals recorded along with the earlier improvisations.4 Lately, I’ve preferred to write lyrics entirely separately from the music, as it forces me to work harder at them. But working via improvisation usually does a better job of capturing a vibe, and fits the idea of impressionism. In fact, the idea that the song was kind of a portrait of obsession emerged through the improvisation, as it became clear that this was a song about ruminative preoccupation.5
One reason I’ve been calling this kind of music impressionist is because of the movement in the mix: elements are constantly shifting, moving to the fore and then the distance. It’s not about defined edges or seeing things clearly, but swirling sounds and freeform arrangements. It’s about creating…an impression.
In the end, this tune is probably less terrifying than All Vibrating but it’s still claustrophobic and overwhelming at times. At a couple of points, the sounds build and build and build to an almost oppressive degree. To my mind, the ideal way to experience this music is with headphones on because I want the listener, especially during the climactic builds, to be drowning in sound. Music is often (perhaps especially nowadays) used to enhance other experiences — cooking, socializing, dancing — but this kind of arrangement says FUCK THAT! If you feel like you can’t think straight when listening to the loudest moments, wonderful.6
All the music I’ve shared so far I finished ages ago, and Obsession is no exception. But on prepping things for release this week, I decided the song was dragging a little more than I wanted around the 5:40 mark. After trying a few things, I settled on removing everything but the vocals before slowly reintroducing the other parts. The upshot is that no one but me has heard this version before today. I guess sometimes we choose to honour our previous commitments, and sometimes we bounce anew!
My friend Pete, an incredible musician who plays in the bands Haken and Nova Collective, and releases solo work as Nested Shapes, thinks Obsession is my most beautiful song. And Pete doesn’t fuck around.
Of course, I usually save a version before making big changes to a project, but only in the rarest case will I summon the effort to go back and edit the original sounds.
By contrast, a typical pop mix will more or less have the elements maintain a certain balance throughout. There will be changes — say, the drums hitting harder in a chorus — but it’s extremely unlikely that a synth will go from being a background element to entirely swallowing up all the other sounds, and messiness in individual sounds is rarely present.
For this reason, I’m not sharing the lyrics in this post. But there are some nice moments if you pay attention. ;-)
This made mixing the vocals an interesting creative challenge because they’re almost more like another instrument than straightforwardly communicative language. I still can’t decide how loud and clear they should be, but sometimes one has to commit. ;-)
My friend Vina once said that I made a lot more sense to her after she heard my music. I asked what she meant and she said, “Because it sounds like having a conversation with you. There are all these layers and ideas swooping around and going off on little tangents but ultimately always circling back to the main idea.” It’s still one of the nicest things anyone’s said about my music.