yadayn

New release! Two 19th-century German melodies to mark (not celebrate) Brexit, released on the Belgian tape label Gazer Tapes.

This text was originally written for the release of Adem, but I decided not to publish it at the time. Two years after its release, here it is finally:

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How does one go about making an album? How does one remember the various stray ideas called into life by hands, fingernails and guitar strings across the great divide of time? How does one string them together into a cohesive whole: a composition, an improvised recording, an epic multi-piece suite? How to create music?

In the few years I’ve been recording music and the much longer time I’ve been playing various instruments – I think I wrote my first “song” on a vibraphone when I was about thirteen years old – it has become clear to me that there is no single answer to these questions. Every album I have recorded until now has come about in different ways. Vloed was a collection of songs I had been playing live for quite a few years, and relatively early on formed a narrative centred around its title track, building towards catharsis and then an “In Paradisum” of sorts in the form of “Sluimer.” Pendel consisted about half of songs that I’d started developing after the core set of Vloed had been established, and was for the other half an experimentation with electronic methods and half-improvised instant composition. It was self-recorded in impromptu fashion whenever I found the time or when inspiration hit me throughout the course of a year, and its main reason for actually developing into an album was a deadline set by Eilean Records. Naam was a pretty random affair, consisting of improvisations I played in the course of about two weeks (with one older impro added) and was something of a reaction to the high amount of pondering, second guessing, and discussion that had gone into the recording and construction process of Pendel.

The idea for composing a new album started to appear when I was still living in Brussels in 2015, shortly before the release of Naam and my little tour in Switzerland on the occasion of its release. A few melodies and some rhythms around which I had started to improvise sparked the idea for a suite of music that would be heavily influenced by flamenco and would sound earthier and warmer than my earlier albums. When I listen to the very early demos from that period, it is quite clear that I was aiming to go in an altogether very different direction than what I ended up with. On one of those recordings, there is a short, slightly annoyed exchange of words between me and the girlfriend I was living with at the time (she asking me something inaudible, me: “shht, I’m recording”), somehow heartbreaking in how it tears through the detached veneer of the music.  

Directions always change when following the calls of creation and composition, but in hindsight that short exchange of words also signals a greater change of course, a warning that my life would take a few unexpected and rather disruptive turns. Perhaps in that sense life and composing music are similarly confused walks in the woods along unmarked trails while you’re not even able to clearly see the stars through the dense foliage. We usually just follow the path that seems most sensible to go down, even though we might have doubts that this track may not be the ideal one. How to know? You can only guess or phantasize about the alternatives. Or you can follow the lure of a stranger who crosses your path and smiles sweetly, gesturing to take another road than the one you had in mind.

Adem is about following the lead of that stranger’s many guises, about abandoning the quiet warmth of well-built certainties and embracing the bittersweet and often deceitful possibilities of mirages in the clouds. The details don’t matter, the impression does: for about a year I was “going with” the waves of  various “flows”, making choices that might not have been the best, but which led me where I ended up. Sometimes that was an enclosure in the forest where the air was fresh, the grass dewy, and the eyes were those of a beloved; other times it led me nowhere at all. But after about a year I emerged, found a peaceful place to rest, and then I recorded this album. Some material dated from before the period this album is dedicated to, but only took its final form while I was recording, nicely bookending the process: notably “Hoor”, an earlier form of which was actually planned for Pendel, and “Voel”, the first part of which had been around for a long time as well, but only acquired its second part just before I started recording. The album’s centerpiece “Tijd” is intimately linked to this year and developed in a host of directions before finally settling for its present form shortly before I started recording. The main melody of “Adem” was forgotten for a period of time, until I rediscovered it on one of those early Brussels demos and was essential in finally making the album work as a whole. “Zee” was written almost in its entirety after the ordeal in a moment of bliss by the Belgian seacoast – where I also took the picture of the seashells in the album’s artwork and made the field recording on “Ruimte” (not me eating crisps, as some friends have suggested, but me walking on those very same seashells), and where I also took the photograph that graces this blogpost.

I don’t believe the form my music takes is fundamentally influenced by the things I go through or the way I feel, and I am fully aware that the layer of meaning I ascribe to my music is no more than that. It is a layer that is meaningful to me but it is not by necessity directly related to the events that transpired while I composed or improvised this music. Yet, in many ways, this album feels linked to these events, in both abstract and direct ways. Adem is not a chronological narrative of what happened, it is a meditation on how time, place, and human relations interact. It’s only music; sometimes pretty, sometimes a little bit harsh or sad, but it’s always meaningful.

First track of my band Zura Zaj’s upcoming debut album on homerecords.be, out on May 8th.

http://eileanrec.bandcamp.com/album/pendel

https://yadayn.bandcamp.com

While the collection of tracks on my debut album “Vloed” was deliberately recorded as a fully thought out album, “Pendel” came about completely different. Only a few months after the release of “Vloed” Mathias Van Eecloo of Eilean Records contacted me, asking me if I would like to release an album on his label. At the time I had no plan to record new stuff, but I agreed anyway. In the end I just started recording a bunch of songs both finished and unfinished, hunted for samples in old recordings, and composed some entirely new material. Despite songs originating from different contexts both chronologically and geographically, the album does feel specifically linked to the time (mid-2014-mid-2015) and place (Brussels) I was in at the time of recording. It is a less cathartic experience than “Vloed”, simply because it does not contain an epic centrepiece like that album’s title track, but perhaps because of this it feels more balanced to me.  

For the handful of people who might be interested, here are some liner notes on the individual songs.

In (In)

When Mathias asked me to record an album for Eilean, he was especially interested in more compositions along the lines of  “Vloed”s opening track “Eb”. “In” probably comes closest: a loop taken from an old recording (on a 12-string guitar) twisted beyond recognition and augmented by a droney bass and some other loops taken from old recordings.

 Veld (Field) 

Mussorgsky’s “Pictures of an exhibition” is a wonderfully varied work which always returns to the same base theme, a construction which I thought fitted quite well with the eclectic musical mood swings I was aiming at with this record, so I included this interpretation of “Bydlo”. A few years ago I had a momentary craze for covers, which resulted in this as well as interpretations of (among others) Johannes Brahms’s “Tragic Ouverture” and “I Want It That Way” by the Backstreet Boys. “Veld” changed quite a lot throughout versions: it used to be slower, contained (badly) sung vocals and it has had a number of different titles. The audio sample of Halldór Laxness’ poem is a very recent addition (I am grateful to Bára Sigfúsdóttir for providing me with a rough translation), but one which I find works very well with the track. His book “Independent People” was a devastating read for me. Highly recommended.  

 Barst (Crack (as in, a “crack” in the wall))

In an earlier tracklist of this album, there was a constant alternating of electronic and acoustic compositions, as a nod to the pendulum in the title. This concept got somewhat changed around, especially in the later half of the album, but the album does start out with this pattern in the first five songs. I believe it works exceptionally well with “Barst” which echoes the reversed lines at the end of “Veld” and ends with triplets that are echoed again in “Spiegel”. This track was built around short bits of accidental sounds, to which I then added the ukulele part.

 Spiegel (Mirror)

In another initial version of the album, “Spiegel” was the title track. “Spiegel” means “mirror”, a title taken from the fact that the composition is structured as a palindrome. I have a great fascination with palindromes, and initially even tried to record this album as a palindrome of sorts with this song as the midpoint. Obviously, that was way too difficult to achieve, but the song itself still has a central place on the album.

 Ruis (White Noise)

Another track built around samples taken from earlier recordings, to which a simple ukulele part was added. I got the ukulele as a birthday gift from my girlfriend not long before I started recording this album, probably the best present I ever got!

 Deur (Door)

This is a companion piece to “Bries”, and was built mostly by reusing elements from that track. The initial droney harmonium sound is actually the melodica of “Bries” heavily pitched down and layered, and the guitar is part of its ukulele pitched down. The drums are accidentally recorded sounds. Despite being built around samples from “Bries” I think it sounds quite different melodically. I love the way samples can really take on a life of their own in different contexts but still refer to each other in a sort of intertextual logic.

 Pendel (Pendulum)

“Pendel” is a very special composition, the key that finally made the album work as a whole for me. I had constructed a much longer, quite epic song (+10 mins) in the same tuning as this song but was not really happy with it. At some point I started improvising around some of its chords and suddenly I fell on the main theme of “Pendel”. Following this, I was quickly able to finish it with bits and pieces of that earlier song. The recording was done on that same day on a warm spring night on my balcony in the clear light of a full moon. You can actually hear the wind and distant traffic of the city. One of those moments when suddenly everything feels right. I could have recorded a more polished version of the song (this one is still partly improvised), but in the end decided not to, as an ode to that moment of bliss and inspiration.

 Bries (Breeze)

One of those rare songs which seem to compose themselves. I layered a short organ note into the thick opening drone, improvised the ukulele part (I actually can’t remember how to play one part of it!) and then on a whim added the melodica, which I then duplicated in echo.

 Raam (Window)

This is an older song which didn’t make the cut for “Vloed”. It’s the only song I composed while studying in Cairo which I still play often (there’s a few songs with vocals from that period as well, but sadly enough my singing voice is useless). The window of the title is the window of my bedroom, out of which I would stare endlessly instead of doing my homework. I wrote a short story about the feelings I associate with this window and won a writing contest with it some time ago. The story can be read here.

 Kerk (Church) 

When composing this, I was listening to a lot of John Zorn, which perhaps explains the melodic leanings. The second part with the voice sample actually originates from another song, but it works much better in this context. The voice sample is an Arabic preach ending in the Islamic proclamation of faith (shahada) which I found on a cassette tape in Cairo (it was supposed to contain Arabic pop).

 Rust (Rest, Tranquility)

Two of my absolute favourite albums are “Spirit Of Eden” and “Laughing Stock” by Talk Talk, and I tried to create a similar atmosphere around silences here. The keyboard parts were again improvised, live I play different lines on guitar.

 Wind (Wind)

I took clarinet classes for a few years but did not really get to any level of proficiency (playing a wind instrument is hard work!). I did record a few very basic things, from which I sometimes reuse parts (see also several songs on my electronic “Snow-Fi” ep under the Gluem moniker). The initial drone of “Wind” is built around one clarinet note heavily layered and downpitched, which ends up being joined by some samples and then again a ukulele part which serves as a bridge to the last song.

 Uit (Out)