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This track was an exploration of the building blocks of living expression. Linking the basic emotional expression of the human voice delivering simple chord structures, to the early expression of living morphologies.
Kathrin did sing lyrics during the recording session, but I found the layered vocal chords so powerful that I decided to strip everything away. The sound of the voice itself, and Kathrin’s intonation within that constraint, carried more meaning for me than any words would.
This approach also seemed to fit with the idea for the music being part of the story of early multicellular life, where simple forms were being explored, and the beginnings of experimentation with structures that could compete for nutrients in a water environment more than 500 million years ago before land life had begun. The link was about simple, beautiful living form and structure.
Vincent Houze did an amazing job of making this early life, and the ebb and flow of the ocean, dance to the music. If you watch carefully, every movement and change in visual structure is linked to tonal changes and rhythms in the music. Of course, it’s not biologically accurate, it’s Vincent’s interpretation of the story, as it’s not supposed to be a science lecture. As with all of the Emergence content, it’s primarily designed to point us towards the beauty of natural processes and systems, and their links to how we feel. The feeling conveyed also makes me think of the fragility of these systems, in light of the bleaching of many reefs in recent times, by rising sea temperatures.
I decided to complement this basic idea with plenty of detailing and partially randomised complexity around the percussion. I wanted to try and make the track rhythmically organic, to fit in with the theme of the wider visual story at that point. So I made the drums fairly lose, and used a lot of spectral effects to warp and mush the drum sounds into strange glitchy renders, which I spent a lot of time auditioning and re-arranging to try and get the right balance between form and disaster. As for the main tremolo chord sequence, that came from the simplest of simple operator and guitar rig arrangement – sometimes the simple things can still do the trick!
Max
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