[vimeo 198639634 w=500 h=281]
Software of Seagulls - You and Your People
You and Your People is a song about how surrounding yourself with people you agree with gives you the illusion of being right, and how it’s not that easy to just dump things that you used to believe, or to dismiss the values of your family and your upbringing. The video plays with the Rorschach inkblot test, which demonstrates how easy it is to see what we want to see, in the absence of any specific information.
I have been making electronic music lately using mostly hardware and external devices. Previously I’d been making music for many years now with the linear, visual world of DAWs as my primary compositional space. I’ve found that getting out of the box and using my hands & ears more has given me a different perspective, and the music I’m making (at least to me) feels fresh. I’ve also been trying to work quickly, trust my instincts, and avoid over-thinking and over-producing. I’m leaving a lot of rough edges.
This track was made with that M.O. - using hardware synths, drum machines, and iOS apps, which are great for spontaneous gestural control. The big glissy synth is played on a custom ThumbJam patch and processed through an old 80s rackmount Ibanez Harmonics/Delay unit. The cool thing about that fx unit is that it uses the same feedback circuit for delay and pitch shifting, so the pitch shift can be applied over and over again to create stacks of intervals. I often set it to an octave up, which results in some really high shimmery sounds. I used StepPolyArp routed through Sunrizer synth to create the arpeggios. There’s also a 90s Korg Electribe EM-1 doing some of the synth sequences.
The vocals were recorded pretty quickly and are real rough - I even sung some words wrong, but they’re still there… as is. I don’t normally do vocals, so that too is new adventure. The harmonies were created by first pitch-shifting and then pitch-correcting to conform to the scale. I created vocal doubles by duplicating the raw vocal a few times and giving each a slightly different pitch shift (plus or minus 10 cents or so) and then pitch correcting with varying response times, so the pitch tracking is a little different on each. I did the same kinds of things with the harmony track.
Most of these tracks I’ve been making lately have been audio-only, but this one inspired visuals, so I tried to carry the same sort of methodology into the creation of the video. i.e., it was made super quickly and intuitively. Most of the content was generated in Apple Motion, and thanks to the “record animation” feature, I could basically attack the project in the same way I was doing the music - very spontaneous and hands-on. Normally I’m a type-in-the-numbers kinda guy with Motion, so again, this has been pretty freeing and fun. I exported assets created in Motion then jumbled it together in Final Cut to do editing and layer effects.