The places of Traces

When describing Traces as a reflective album, one of the many elements that influenced that mood was the idea of following the traces of your own past and the places you've been.

When you live or work in the same city for a long time, you gradually see it evolve. Places come and go, new buildings shoot up to the sky, old buildings get cleaned up and ruins come crumbling down. But even with all the changes that a city undergoes, you can still always pick out traces of the past, whether it's a poster stuck in an abandoned upstairs record shop window or a bit of graffiti that always seems to have escaped erasure.

And when you start looking closely, traces of history start to emerge – the imprint of old signs, remnants of old brickwork, a rusty street sign, old factory names still adoring buildings that now house flats and cafés, and bits of architectural detail high up at the tops of the buildings which have survived wars.

Once you start observing these things, you end up constantly noticing what used to be. A childhood cinema that’s now a clothes shop. A place where you bought your favourite albums that’s now an opticians or a place you enjoyed many meals that’s now long boarded up. 

It’s inevitable that you end up picking up your own traces of the places you’ve been and the memories of the people you were with. You walk past the office of your first job; now no longer in use, and think about the 20-year-old version of yourself that used to frequent there. The music you played at the time, the faces you knew and the life you had then, which has evolved along with the city in the intervening decades. It’s not that you wish to spend your time chasing ghosts but almost by default there’s a part of our brains that enjoy these reflections, triggered by our own invisible footprints and little fragments of personal history.

Traces is out now on Bandcamp.

Making Traces... choosing a title

Before looking at some of the ideas behind the music, let's start with the choice of album title.

Trace

Noun:

to follow the course, development, or history of…

to follow, make out, or determine the course or line of…

a surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the former existence…

Verb:

to go back in history, ancestry, or origin; date back in time…

to follow a course, trail, etc.; make one's way…

Traces was a title I’d had in mind for a while. Not only did it sound great as an album name, but it was the most appropriate word to represent the reflective and nostalgic mood I wanted to portray.

It is quite an enigmatic and mysterious word that can be interpreted and associated in a number of ways. It’s also perfectly suited to the theme of dreaming and the subconscious that I wanted to explore through the music.

It evokes the mood of looking back through one’s path in history; the places you’ve been, the things you’ve done – and that of others. Those memories of times, places and people are heavily burned into our subconscious and make their way into our dreams, from vivid encounters to distorted familiarities.

As my music is instrumental, I like to think of the titles as starting points for interpretation – they’re often the starting points for me, determining a certain mood or atmosphere.

Traces is available now via Bandcamp, as mp3 and CD & digital download bundle. 

Following the Traces...

Today is release day - and Traces is finally out there!

I’ve said previously that when you’re composing an album, it takes on a life of it’s own. It evolves and goes off in directions you hadn’t originally anticipated. New ideas come in, old ones go out. Happy accidents happen. So it should be no surprise when I say that Traces isn’t quite the album I originally set out to make.

My original plan was to make a downbeat and minimal album; stripped of the dense layers and rhythms that had dominated my previous albums, creating something that was a lot more sparse and abstract.

But gradually the music evolved along with the ideas. 

When I produced the first version, it simply didn’t hang together well as an album. So I kept working on ideas, and over time it became more rhythmic and layered – but a very different soundscape to my previous works had started to form. I began to view it almost like a film soundtrack – it had actually become the soundtrack to some of the books I was reading over the course of the year, and in turn many of the themes of those books inspired the music, as the followed a similar theme to what I wanted to explore.

Another starting point was to make an album mostly using classic 80s and 90s synths. There’s been a lot of focus on analogue synths of the 70s and early 80s in the last few years, and while I absolutely love those vintage synths and get the appeal, a lot of the albums that had an impact on me in the late 80s and early 90s, used Korg’s digital synths – so to get my hands on some of those actual sounds was a real pleasure. This, combined with a different kind of approach to the drums and percussion, has given Traces a distinctive soundscape, perhaps with a nostalgic edge for those synth-geeks among us.

When I started the project, one particular word I had in mind for the mood of the music, was “reflective”. Despite the numerous changes the album went though, this still remained the dominant theme, but not in a depressing way – I’d prefer to think of it as thought provoking, and there is an underlying optimism that crept into many of the tracks. 

Although the finished album is very different to my original idea there still remains several short, sparse tracks. These are almost like segues or interludes, and retain the mood of my original idea.

I’ve realised that Traces is perhaps the album I’ve been working towards for many years. It’s also the most personal album I have ever made, in its own way.

Next time, I'll go into detail about some of the songs on the album and inspiration behind them.

Traces is available now via Bandcamp, as mp3 and CD & digital download bundle. The first copies of Traces on CD will come with a second disc, Traces: Abandoned, which contains 9 demos and outtakes from the making of the album.

Traces: the cover design

With just a day to go before I unleash my new album, Traces - almost a year in the making - I thought I'd explain my thinking behind the cover design.

The basic concept of Traces is that of dreams and memories – and their convergence in our subconscious. A common dream theme is the sea, which has often been described by dream analysts as the transition between the conscious and subconscious. It has also been suggested that a dream of the sea, water, waves, etc is representative of our emotions.

I’ve certainly had dreams in such an environment, and it was also a recurring setting in some of the books I was reading whilst making the album. And who hasn't felt totally at ease and relaxed when staring out into the sea? All of this made me think more and more that the album artwork needed to be a sea view.

It’s the first photographic album cover I’ve done in a while – and long overdue. Initially I had planned an entirely black cover with just the ‘TRACES’ lettering, and similarly typographic artwork for the booklet, leaving it completely open to interpretation. But the more the music evolved, the less I felt a black cover would represent it. I wanted muted colours and something dreamy. Plus, as a synaesthete, it was important at least to me, to get the 'colours' right across both the cover and the music!

After looking through my own photographs, I settled on one particular shot, which had just the right composition. I worked on the colouring for a subtle effect, with hues that in my mind matched the music. Through the colouring, I wanted to give an ordinary scene, just that gentle hint of something extraordinary.

Many of the images I used in the rest of the artwork convey the reflective and nostalgic mood of the album, but in a slightly more detached way. I had been experimenting with a video for the title track using some old archive film footage that made a nice juxtaposition with the music. So I took stills of these as complimentary images.

Traces will be available from Bandcamp on CD and MP3 from 3rd March 2014.