System of Confined Spaces | Horse Machines
Filed under music.
I mentioned this project in passing when I announced the last Horse Machines album. It's now been available for a few days (same deal: Apple Music, Spotify (1), etc) so I thought I'd share a bit of backstory with you.
This is my pandemic album. Which, I know, is awfully cliché at this point, but there's no other way to define it. Shortly after we entered lockdown I began experimenting with soundscapes. I'd sit at the computer (usually after dinner while Cynthia and Anaïs did their girls-only tv hour), fire up Logic and improvise. I wasn't looking to create anything specific or even go anywhere...every piece became a kind of momentary escape, each one built around an initial layer of drones, evolving through modulations, echo chambers or both. A mix of live and procedural, with both aspects playing off one another.
It's usually the sort of material that stays on my hard drive and ends up eventually fuelling other ideas...but this time I started exporting each individual piece to a playlist. And the playlist grew into...something. Work that could, perhaps, stand on its own.
These are not "songs", so it's very different from the previous Horse Machines releases. It's abstract/ambient mood music, heavily leaning towards the darker side of the spectrum. Some of it is deliberately distorted and noisy (it's not your speakers or headphones acting up) and all are meant as passages, without any real destination.
You know... the way it feels during lockdown?
In fact, this all happened in a kind of bubble: I was under the very real impression that I'd spent a couple of months on this project...only to realize, after the fact, that it came together within three weeks, from start to finish (including the drawings that were also part of the process). Three weeks in April 2020. Certainly, an accurate representation of the emotional state of the period—or the perception of time.
A word on the naming and ordering of the songs: they're all numbered chronologically. So SCS01 was the first recorded piece, then SCS02 and so on. But I paced the album by mood and flow, not by name—which means it opens with SCS07 and closes with SCS02; and SCS01 is the third song. Confusing? Yup. But it fits the premise, I think.
One last thing: I've added PDF download links on the Horse Machines webpage, for this and the previous release. Nothing extensive but the booklets do include all the additional artwork (and lyrics for Abandon).
Later
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Update: removed due to personal ethical reasons
