Download mp3: Nullarbor
In late 2005 Mum donated a gift in the form of Aajinta’s album “Harmonic Spheres”. A combo of cello (Michelle John), didgeridoo + clarinet (Jason Day), and harmonic-throat singing (Dean Frenkel), it’s an album of sonorous, ambient and dreamy music. It has been the soundtrack to many early morning work sessions at the Pinktank due to it’s relaxing clarity.
One track in particular keep nagging me: the beautifully vast ‘It Pays To Buy Good Tea’. The song is a slow builder of major key warmth and drone - not at all suggestive of speedy excitement. But, I kept hearing something in the music that wasn’t there. In my head I was hearing a fast and flurrying rhythm, pounding with rave-synths and rising dub-harmonics. These ‘ghost elements’ kept bugging me to bring them to life somehow.
It all began when I was doing a live DJ mixing session using ‘It Pays To Buy Good Tea’ as an arc-layer (while other beat-song were playing). I had rigged up the song (via Energy XT) to play through an transverb octaver and then a heap of glitch, reverb and delay. So as the song peaked out, trails of sonic glistening would whisp off behind it. Luckily, I got a good recording of this effect, and exported the whole sound into Renoise for further experimentation.
I played around with some of the ideas I had in my head, finding a fast beat and bass line that suited the energy and pace I could personally infer from the original track. I decided to go for a dirty earthy approach to the sound - so everything is intermingled just a little with tube distortion and not at all bright like most sheeny electronica of this pace. It then took a while just doing minor edits on an off for the last year or so to give the final song its current build and variety.
Aajinta’s dreamy melody coupled with the driving earthy rhythm+bass evoke certain memories that mangle with some sort of personal fantasy. It reminds me of the vast emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain but instead of dry heat there is a squall ripping across the landscape, flying along at incredible speed and dumping heavy rain and bolts of lightening. This is what the energy suggests to me, so goodness knows what it might suggest to you.
A note on the mastering: I’ve tried to keep this as delicate and expressive as possible. Some listeners will find this to be too weak and deep compared to run of the mill audio that people are flooded with these days. The volume control on your system was designed for this purpose! Pump it up and let the whole thing speak properly.
