Once we had decided to work together following a string of shows at the AMBiENT PiNG, we had to come up with a way to actually do it.
Making electronic music isn’t really like bringing your guitar over to your friend’s house and jamming some riffs over a sick beat. There are a lot of system issues related to getting software to talk, you always have to engage in the debate of Mac versus PC, and there’s always the hassle of finding file formats that can cross between Digital Audio Workstations. For those of you who are interested, Deane was an early adopter of Ableton Live, while Rik was a big fan of Reason and Acid. It should also be noted that Rik has only recently switched over to Ableton within the last couple of years.
Anyway, there was clearly a lot of stuff that needed to be done before we could actually do anything musically. But while we were working out the technical side of things, we were also talking a lot, trying to figure out some parameters for what we should sound like. We didn’t want to sound like a blend of our individual projects, we wanted to do something new and different that we hadn’t done before.
And while we were having this discussion, we found ourselves moving away from the idea of styles of music and instead turned our attention more towards the idea of creating musical spaces for discovery, aural landscapes where the listener would find themselves surrounded by sounds. We wanted to make musical environments where you could look around and explore and potentially get lost for a while, spaces with big expansive sounds paired with minute details that could be blended together seamlessly. And the more that we talked about this idea of creating a space, the more that we started thinking and describing our music in terms of the visual rather than the aural, the more excited we got about what we were doing.
It wasn’t long after that when we started to talk about our new project in more cinematic terms, describing sounds as being “Kubrickian”, “Expansive”, “Xenomorphic”, and “Glacial”, and that led us to come up with a project vocabulary. Developing a vocabulary that we could use to describe our plans was a big step for us, and as abstract as the words in our vocabulary were, they were still words that were able to gave shape to our previously amorphous ideas. Even now we still use that early vocabulary to describe sounds and ideas (although admittedly we’ve added a few more words along the way) and it’s become a key part of our work flow. It’s an easy way for us to share ideas, and a familiar starting point to define the scope of what we’re doing.
Along with a shared vocabulary, we also found ourselves drawing from science while we were figuring out what we wanted to do. The inventions of Nikola Tesla, the Periodic Table, Geological Formation, and many other ideas proved a fertile ground for musical inspiration, and we soon found ourselves making connections and forming theories that would further our plans.
And as time went by, this creation of a vocabulary and this scientific influence went a long way towards bringing us into a completely new head space about how we should work. By thinking of music in non-musical ways, we found ourselves unencumbered by our individual past musical influences, and we were free to focus on something that was completely new and different for us both. It was really amazing to find ourselves in a new creative space that we had created, and that’s when we knew that we were really onto something.
Now if only we had some music to show for all of this thinking we had been doing…
Join us again tomorrow and we’ll tell you a little bit about our first forays into making sounds.
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“!