Genre / Soma
2020’s been a fascinating year for me. In many ways it feels I’ve been taking the final steps in transitioning away from dance music and exploring a broad, varied and expressive landscape. I’ve been diving much deeper into sound design than ever before and creating pieces that belong to certain moments in time.
‘Genre’ came about at the beginning of 2020 when I was road-testing some new synths. I’ve always had a fascination with synth-driven music, but when I delve back into the ‘80s to resuscitate that relationship I’m often left disappointed by what I hear. The idea of ‘Genre’ was to dip into a Future-Retro to create a modern remake of an imaginary anthem from that era.
‘Soma’ is more of an ambient piece with some cavernous 80s drum machines. It came later in the year as a by-product of work I was doing on the Spruce Street Installation, but using a similar sound palette to ‘Genre’. I think they sit together quite nicely on that Future-Retro spectrum.