Track By Track: Sailor & I on The Invention Of Loneliness

Black Swan

I made this song the morning after I bought a classic analoge synth, my Juno 106. I had a chord change that was so meditative, I couldn't stop working on more and more layers. I realised that I’d done 80% of the song and it was not even lunch time.

I took a break, wrote the lyrics, recorded it and added the beat. The crazy vocal monster loop that comes in in the middle of the track was a part of my vocals that I pitched down like crazy, and arranged in away that would build the track together with the drums.

Chameleon

First thing I had for this song was a synth pad loop I made with the Korg DW8000. Then I recorded the piano, which kind of created the form for the song. I knew I wanted to put in some brass and turn the minor chord change into a major chord change on the choruses, open up the track with something pretty hefty. When you work with only a piano as the bass and without a lot of chord instruments it's easy to transform the harmonics that way and it can give a very strong emotional effect.

Fire On The Moon

I was working on something else and came out with the drum beat. I added upright bass by recording my friend Palle Sollinger. For the noise sounds I've used my neighbour's Moog Rouge. Once the song was at this stage I tried to record vocals from a song I had written a few years before, it fitted very well. Added a choir to make it a little bit bigger and kind of icey. Once the track was pretty much recorded I asked my friends from Undercatt (Italian DJs) to give me some additional drum fills and stuff like that.

Free Your Mind From Me

This one was recorded when I was about to send all the files off to Chris Allen who mixed the entire LP. I didn't want to make another 4/4 track, so it was exciting to try something different. The strings were recorded with Anna Rodell. We didn't record them for this particular track, we just put up a microphone in my living room and recorded a lot of long notes, which I then sampled and chopped up in a different way for a few songs on the album.

Flickering Lights

It all started with the piano part, two different chord changes that became part one and part two. Drums were recorded some months later as it was something I wanted to play around with. I wanted to see what would happened if I could mix classical music, house and electronica. I think it's the only song on the album without my vocals.

Next To You

The strings and the beat kind of made this song for me. I was playing around with some strings I had recorded with Anna and came up with the intro of the track and felt that this needs to be part of the album. So next step was making the chord changes. I began with an old Italian organ I had bought some time ago and looped up a little thing I’d recorded.

Paramount

One of the first electronic productions I ever did. I was trying to learn how to make a proper beat, like something that is groovy, smooth and still kind of heavy in a way that would make it impossible for you to sit still. I began playing around with bass sound on the Juno 106, I wanted to try and put it on syncopes in two different octaves to give it a nice touch of natural chorus. The piano was something I recorded as an idea, just to see how the track would work with that kind of piano groove.

Rivers

This song is the slowest on the record, only 86bpm, most of the other songs are between 118-123bpm. I got the idea by playing the piano and dubbed it with a synth and put a very slow attack on it and quite long release. That created the piano sound. It's basically one chord change that goes through the entire track.What really stands out on this track is probably the outro. It was something that kind of just happened and once I had recorded it I couldn't get it into the tempo properly. It's a strange melody line that goes in and out of the tempo in an odd way but I loved the dreaminess about it.

Supervisions

When I got the melody idea for this chorus I felt like I had made a kind of African Daft Punk track. I wanted to make it sound more like the song "Seven Nation Army" by The White Stripes, so it would sound like a mix of electric dance music and punk. Before I tried to explore that I stumbled upon a vocal sample from an African choir. I had been sent a folder called Malawi Masters, with music from different tribes of Malawi. I took a little clip from there and put it into my track and really liked how it sounded; it was more exciting than my initial idea with mixing electronic dance music and punk. I'm still interested to try that, but will do it for another project later on.

You should also check out The Beating Heart project. It's an NPO that is raising monies to different help African countries (Malawi was the first project) to help them with things like building food gardens for schools. Check them out and donate here.

Black Stars

I came up with this song when I had bought my Korg DW8000. Started with the string pad, then added the bass with piano and upright bass. Noise was done with DSI Pro 1 and strings that I looped up and pitched with atomization, so they sometimes would clash and make sounds that just wouldn’t appear if you just played them naturally. I never felt that this song needed lyrics, instead I wanted the choirs, the noise synth and the strings to be the thing that drove the song forward: it should work with or without a beat.