Available to listen to and buy at Bandcamp
Release date: 30 June 2024
Format: digital download. Artwork and typography by Landschaft.
Aubade. A 'poem or song evoking or greeting the dawn'. Evolved from Old French/Spanish, in turn from Latin and before that from proto-Indo-European [the inferred parent language from which others wide and various were spawned, so say philologists]. Rich and fertile ground for poets. Both Philip Larkin and Edith Sitwell explored it's mysteries; the former full of regret and foreboding; the latter an awkward cascade of descent into the day. But it is to John Donne we must turn for the full poetic force of the Aubade form. His extended metaphore 'conceits', his metaphysical centredness that is his implicit metaphore in his "The Sunne Rising".
So to my musical exploration of the Aubade form. It leans more towards Larkinesque gloominess, but in it's occasional modulations strives and breaks through into the light. The metaphore here is conveyed in the art imagery, the sun rising over an old much decayed building. The future resplendent in sunrise gold fighting the monochrome past - it's extended 'conceit' = music translated from the terms set by poetry and history.
Aubade was produced on a 10 core Mac Studio with 64Gb of RAM. The instrumentation is 36 layers through four separate insert effects busses [mainly for gain and EQ balancing]. Instrumentation was
Native Instruments Playbox - four different instances
Native Instruments Absynth - three different instances
Native Instruments Duets
Spitfire Solo Cello sample library [via Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol/Kontakt
Spitfire Olafur Arnalds library via ditto
Emergence Audio Viola Textures library via ditto
Slate and Ash Landforms library via ditto
Slate and Ash Spectres library via ditto
Cinematic Instruments Colours
UVI Falcon
Various stock VSTs
The master output inserts were where the magic was added: Fabflter Q3 (EQ); Panorama 7 (spatialiser); Fabfilter Pro MB (multi-band compressor expander); True Balance (EQ analyser set to emulate other well produced albums), Fabfilter Ls (limiter/gain amplifier)
As is my usual practice, I layered instrumentation from foregroud solo voicing to background near silence atmospherics to produce a sonic soup that is orchestral in character.