Track By Track: Couros on his Jupiter EP

Breathe A•gain

I think this started by severely pissing off my neighbours. I was experimenting with some synths and came across this way to make a really aggressive horn sound which I instantly fell in love with. What followed was about three hours of trying out loads of chord ideas and melodies. As the time went on the volume went up and eventually I received a message from next door that sounded a lot like Quentin Tarantino’s “I'm shutting you down” speech.

About a week later I was with this great songwriter friend of mine. I played him that horn sound and instantly he wanted to work on it. Most of that song was written a few hours after that - it felt very natural, nothing about it was forced. Its kind of about when you’re with someone you maybe shouldn’t be, but enjoying what it is for now.

I think Jamie Lidell and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs were the first two Electronic artists I'd gotten into. They are both brilliant musicians and you can hear how natural that is in their records. Sadly there's so much music at the moment thats really polite and clinical - everything human about it is being perfected and I just find it so boring. "Breathe A•gain" has no tuning or correction. In addition to that it had to have a really large/upfront sound. It became my reference for the entire EP.

1312

A difficult choice for the EP. I challenged myself to come up with a mood, instead of a song that would fit amongst the other tracks. Started by going through some samples from NASA missions, put them together with sounds of rocket launches and the rest of the music came fairly quickly. After I made this Jupiter shot to my mind as the EP title; at first for the space reference which seemed a little lazy but after thinking about it for a while I realised that it could be a great metaphor for what I was wanting to achieve sonically.

Nev•er Break ft. Alyss

This was one of the first things I played to PMR. Back then it was an instrumental with a sample. For ages I knew it had more potential and soon after I heard Alyss’s first EP I knew I wanted to write the song with her. She’s got so much soul to her voice, it's amazing. We had it all written and recorded in a couple of days. Cannot say enough good things about her. It became a continuation of what "Breathe A•gain" was about lyrically which sat really well for me.

Cir•cles

I made "Cir•cles" the day after "Never Break" was finished. I’d overslept and had 4 hours until I had to be somewhere, so the intention at first was to just experiment with sounds on my laptop. Landed on this warm synth fairly quickly and ran with it. The EP was only really lacking something a little more upbeat so I put in a slightly faster tempo. Soon after, I had a basis for the whole track. One week later I added the vocal sample and it was finished. The sample in there - “won't be too much for me” - seemed like a great message to end the EP on.