Condition of Stillness
This song explores the eerie quiet that follows an emotional instance. The moment in which everything freezes, not out of peace, but suppression. It encapsulates the internal numbing, the state of limbo your mind goes through when time seems to be stretched thin. The stillness is heavy, aware that something should be felt, but nothing presents.
Rather than offering comfort, this silence becomes its own pressure, reflecting dissociation and restraint. This piece embodies a calm that feels hollow, not healing.
Created in Ableton Live 12, this track is experimentally panned completely to each side, with no central instrument.
Presence in Absence
This song reflects the feeling of dissociation and anxiety, and evokes the idea of a presence defined by an imprinted, forgotten memory. The piece plays with the tension between what should be sensed and what actually is, creating an atmosphere in which silence feels crowded, and empty space feels inhabited. Rather than revealing the missing element, it showcases the impact it leaves behind.
This track goes for 1:04, an intentional number, designed to guide the listener through four rounds of box breathing.
Presence in Absence toys with sounds outside of the average human hearing, designed to be a piece with tension and pressure that is physically felt, as opposed to actively listened to.
Childhood as Ontology
This track explores the desire to view life with childlike curiosity and awe, in a world in which maturing and “growing up” carries heavy and serious undertones. Rather than treating childhood as a distant memory, it frames it as a living framework. The piece explores the tension between this wonder, and adult responsibility, revealing how innocence and imagination structures our inner world. It suggests that growing up should be less about leaving childhood behind, but more about navigating the echoes it leaves with us.
The main sounds in this piece are created through no-input feedback loops. This method was intentionally chosen, as it allowed for production ‘play time’ in a conceptually appropriate track.
The Body Forgets First
This track explores the dissociating effects of specific vices, and how night life and partying is used to temporarily escape reality and responsibility. It captures the state where you feel detached from the world, in a comforting yet confusing and self-destructive way. The track lingers in this dissociation, portraying sensation as fragmented and unreliable. It reflects how one can easily lose themselves in the chemicals, mindlessly moving before the mind catches back up.
This track utilises phase music, where instruments and sounds slide out of time with one another to make a disorienting, distorted, and confusing sound, just to realign and become one cohesive sound again.
Cyclic Decay
This track examines the patterns of self-destruction that repeat, eroding at a person’s core. It begins as a chaotic and harsh textural mess, which eases into a gentler middle, to circle back into the rough extremities. This captures the idea of self sabotaging habits, and how their impact ebbs and flows but will always return. It lingers in the collapse, with distortion swallowing clarity, the song fraying away. This track does not resolve, but instead, loops back to the beginning embodying the destructive repetition.
Erasure Fantasy
This piece drifts into the desire to disappear. Not dramatically, but quietly, dissolving into relief. The track demonstrates the fantasy of slipping out of your life, letting your identity melt into your surroundings. The atmosphere is soft and somber, slowly fading away into one humming drone. Sounds stretch thin and wash away from themselves, which reflects the longing for a retreat from the world and from the self. Nothing collapses, nothing is abrupt, just a simple fade leaving the imprint of its presence. A moment where disappearance feels peaceful.
This track was created with degradation as form, with each section gently combining over time into one continuous afterimage.
Coup de Grâce
This track embodies the final impact that ends a cycle rather than resolves it. It is not mercy, nor healing, but a bitter, irreversible consequence of emotional torment. The piece confronts the moment where exhaustion turns to surrender. The point of giving up. Instead of explosive drama, it captures a quiet sense of unfinished chapters. Coup de Grâce expresses the collapse after resistance, and the haunting, suspended finality that follows when something within has been silenced.
This piece uses carefully layered ambience, to build a wall of noise to lose yourself in. A simple piano melody guides through this eerily melancholy feeling, fading abruptly, conceding to the silence.
