PORT SLEEP

It's been about a year since I started the recording sessions for what later became my third LP, As Long as This Warmth Remains.

Recently, while working on something new, I dusted off the Ableton project for that album and came across a few songs that didn't make the cut. Some of them clearly never stood a chance, but others were perfectly good ideas sitting unused on my hard drive for no apparent reason. It felt like a waste to leave them there, which is how this journal came about.

We'll start things off with a series called Left Ashore, where I'll revisit some of these previously unreleased songs. The idea is to take them apart and unpack why they were left out.

At the end, you'll find all the stems to download. Feel free to do whatever you like with them. I couldn't finish these songs, but maybe you'll be able to give them a home.

Here's the first one:

Back then, the album's working title was Hope, and the project files followed suit: HP1, HP2, HP3 etc. This was the fourth song idea.

Track breakdown

I started with some field recordings from my neighbourhood and a few layers of drones that I made by running an electric guitar into Instruo Arbhar or by freezing the reverb tail in Chase Bliss Mood.

The underlying chord here is an Emaj7 with D# in the bass, so the whole thing is slightly dissonant and tense.

I wanted to amplify that atmosphere with some pads. I made a few simple patches on Elektron Analog Four and livened them up by running them into a guitar amp pedal (DSM & Humboldt Simplifier MKII) and then into Eurorack – specifically Whimsical Raps Cold Mac and Shakmat Aeolus Seeds. What I landed on was something that sounded glassy but still had a bit of a rough edge.

What's interesting about these pads is where they sit in the frequency spectrum. When I looked at the EQ while bouncing down the stems, it hit me just how deep these sounds go into the upper mids, or even the high end. It is very rare for me to fill those frequencies with melodic material. I usually prefer to have noise, textures, or other non-tonal sounds there.

This floating bed of soft sounds was really pleasant to listen to, but I felt it needed something more angular for contrast. Once again I played around with Aeolus Seeds, this time in random LFO mode, and came up with a few layers of broken guitar phrases:

To finish things off I recorded two async guitar loops and sliced out the transients in Digitakt so they'd sound more like bells than guitar.

Towards the end of the song there's also this metallic, lo-fi texture that I made with Chase Bliss Mood. Unfortunately, I can't remember what instrument I recorded. From the sound of it, it was probably an acoustic guitar, miked from the other end of the room, which was a technique I often used while recording As Long as This Warmth Remains.

What Didn’t Work

I left this song unfinished because a) it felt too dark compared to the rest of the album and b) I could never find a hook or melodic centre for it. After a few unsuccessful sessions it started to wear on me. I know this feeling very well and it almost always means that I'll abandon a song.

It wasn't a total waste, though: the A4 patches I made for it stayed on the machine, and the next time I switched it on, I used them to start Fog-Loom, the first single from the album.

Stems

You can download the stems for the song here. For convenience, they are grouped, and don't have the send FX. If you'd like all of the individual tracks, let me know and I'll send them over.

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown as much as I did and that you'll stick around. I've got plenty more to write about. If you want to have this journal delivered straight to your door step and never miss any of my posts you can subscribe to the newsletter below.

Take care,
Jakub