“New Cities” - Process and Thoughts
I’m so excited to finally be releasing this album: “New Cities”. Kinda unrelated but I really like the phrase “releasing music.” It’s relatable both as the creator of music and as its consumer. To release it means to stop restricting the music to my insecurities and beliefs, where it now exists for everybody besides myself to interpret in their own ways. In the end it’s all just vibrations in the air, all just complicated airflow that affects pools of liquid in our earlobes. And if it’s really loud, our bones rattle a bit too. What contraptions we use to categorize that airflow with descriptors like “quality”, “style”, “genre”, and others mean something towards general discourse in a language about how we consume music, but it does not change the airflow itself.
“New Cities” is a re-formation of my “Cities EP” project, released on September 29, 2023. How time flies! Although I felt like a rock stuck in the mud at the time; I was sad without many job prospects, the structure of grad school was long gone, I had tumultuous relations with some of my work team/friends, I got politely broken up with somebody (cool lady, turns out she’s lesbian), and the usual ills that all of us have regarding living in this day and age. Inspired by Bjork calling Utopia her “Tinder album”, this was my “Instagram album”, composed almost entirely of samples from Instagram reels with the violin/viola being my expressive which put it all together. I wanted it to feel frenetic and funny, where the strong drums and digitized sound palette created a high similar to the dopamine generation of swiping through short-form videos. I think it achieves that, while also being charmingly rough around the edges.
I like “Cities EP”. As with any other project I do, it is a personal time capsule of where I was and how I was thinking for a period of time. Also, I felt that there was something unfinished with that project. It’s short and maybe gratingly sweet, and the mix felt distracting from the content of the mix. I am also learning to let an idea simmer and sit instead of instantly moving onto the next thing. Turns out songs can be longer than 1.5 minutes! Thus, “New Cities” is in part an exercise in taking these older ideas and stretching them into choruses, breakdowns, and changes, mostly around the same sounds from “Cities EP”. But being in a better place now, these sounds are different than when I first used them on “Cities EP”. Part of the magic of sampling is its unique nterpretation by the artist, and as I grow I become a different user of that same sample. Younger versions of me couldn’t know what I was to do with them, and myself now wouldn’t be here without those earlier decisions.
Furthermore, “New Cities” is not all that influenced by anything in particular. Autumn mentioned that “Pearl” sounds like a Charli XCX song, which I can’t un-hear now. And that’s certainly not a bad thing. But I’ve gotten much better, and continue to get better, at listening to music and interpreting that energy into my own stuff. By that I mean I can listen to something by Jeff Parker, by Ethel Cain, by Mk.gee, by Cocteau Twins, or any other music you like, and not trying to sound like them. Instead, I’m better now at hearing music, liking what they’re doing, and channeling the energy I’m feeling into my own ideas. And of course sometimes I just absolutely rip off people too - “Filter” is a good example of that. Similarly, this whole paragraph is basically stealing from Four Tet, who articulates my thoughts really nicely: https://youtu.be/wvOZBvaG5W0?feature=shared&t=259
With other projects always on my mind, I only seriously started working on “New Cities” in the fall of 2024 having “started” it around this time last year. Instead of just Instagram Reels, I started using more specific creator’s samples, primarily two people: Pluko and Yaego. Both have a habit of using/making absolutely delicious sounds. And making a lot of “New Cities” was, in retrospect, pretty formulaic:
* Find drums I liked and loop it
* Add a yummy texture to it
* Add a baseline
* Record some viola/violin riffs and harmonies
* Reverse engineer/deconstruct that beat in different ways to form a “song”
Easy stuff. But, like with “I’ve Been Elsewhere”, how each song came together was incredibly varied. “People That Drink Weed”, which I’m still not satisfied with, has gone through variation after variation with its structure, samples, and recorded instruments. “Djibfex” was started and completed in two hours, and I haven’t touched it since. “Pearl” grew linearly over a couple months, as though I was completing a sculpture versus “Bandwidth” being more of a reworked oil painting. Speaking of reworked, this album cover is a picture I took on my phone of Asa’s original framed art on the wall. I’ll probably touch it up a bit after it comes out just because the photo’s a bit flat but the vision is definitely there.
I now regard this as my “pop album”, both seriously and in being a tongue-in-cheek. The songs are meant to be catchy and cool, but more than anything this is just kinda what I arrived at. It isn’t meant to be anything more than just how I’m feeling now. I can roughly do a lot of this stuff live which rocks, and more than ever before I feel confident in all the different tools and skills I have musically. Furthermore, I just needed to get this shit out of my head! Having a project lurking around for too long stops me from doing more creative things. So even though there’s a lot I can fine-tune here and there, it’s far better that it becomes yours than I hold onto it pretending it can be that much more. I’m thrilled to add this to my catalogue of things, and hope you enjoy it.
- Jackson
