Having found an audience and received some positive feedback from people about “The Lanthanide Series”, we decided to immediately start working on a new album, which was given the very clever working title of “Kalte 2”. We were both really excited by what we had done with our first release and it seemed like a good idea to maintain that excitement by getting back to work, not only to make some more music but also to develop our processes even further.
Around this time we also started talking about the idea of doing some live shows as Kalte, which added a new element of excitement to what we were doing, along with some new challenges and technical obstacles that we’d have to overcome. Figuring things out in a closed environment without anybody else around is totally fun, but playing in front of other people is a completely different experience that requires a very different mindset. For the most part in the studio you can easily focus on minutiae and detail and you usually have time to get everything exactly the way that you want it, but in a live setting you’re forced to think about the broader strokes of what you’re doing, and you have to exist in the moment to respond to any concerns or issues that may arise. Live performance can be like tightrope walking at times, but it’s a lot of fun to do and we were both really eager to find a way to play out as Kalte.
Among other considerations, one of the challenges we needed to figure out was how to map our what we would be doing live. During the recording of “The Lanthanide Sessions” we used index cards as a system to map out how sounds mingled and meshed with each other and where different actions would occur. The index cards would be laid on a white board and moved around to correspond to changes in the music. It worked well for us when we were in the studio, but playing live didn’t really allow us the opportunity to spread out in the same way. We needed to come up with a way to track the same information in a much more compact and concise way, which led us to develop a progressive mapping system, as seen in the photo at the top of this post. It may not seem like much from a visual standpoint, but in terms of the way that we worked it was a hugely significant leap in our development that allowed us to focus more steadily on what we were doing and easily recreate situations and events. We wouldn’t be amiss in saying that the progressive mapping system was a turning point for us not only in a live setting, but also within the studio.
So armed with our new mapping system, we started work on Kalte 2. In keeping with how we did “The Lanthanide Series” we came together with a stack of new sounds to use, and we started to group them in patterns that we thought worked best with each other, making sure to document the process in our maps. And when grouping was done we started to mix and tweak and process everything into the shape that we wanted it to be, and after a couple of months we had a new set of songs that we could recreate in a live setting when we were ready to do so.
All we had to do was come up with some names, release the new music, and book some gigs…
For the entire month of October while we celebrate #10yearsofKalte, if you buy a copy of “The Lanthanide Series” through Bandcamp you can send us your email at info@kaltemusic.com and we’ll send you a free copy of our latest release, “Covalencies“!