Sculpture Projects
Sculpture Projects – Everybody should be able to be whoever they want to be EP, track by track
Released in October 2024, the new EP from Sculpture Projects has the very long title, Everybody should be able to be whoever they want to be EP. Here, artist/producer David Gauntlett talks us through all four tracks.
Isolated/universe
“I wanted to try a song kind of song, with verses and a chorus. It’s incredibly short, by my standards, and for a long time was even shorter, at 1:50, before I added the spoken-word bridge, which brought it up to 2:20. I love the idea of something being so small, even though I worked on it for months. And I’m not sure if it’s any good, because I can never be confident about anything where I appear to be ‘singing’. But it’s personal and it’s short and I’m glad I did it.”
Everything or nothing (7" mix)
“A shorter version of the December 2023 single. We don’t really seem to have lost anything important in the edit (!) — for instance, it still has the thoughtful interlude featuring the distant passage of a train through some woods, on a misty autumn morning, before it gets going again — as well as quite a crisp pop sound, as well as some lovely strings. I don’t know how these things all go together. I mean, I think they *do* go together. It’s quite a success, on my own terms.”
Everybody
“This is a relatively simple construction, with my whispered vocal, ‘Everybody should be able to be whoever they want to be’, a message of reassurance to someone close to me. In the present climate it’s also a political message, even though it’s such an obvious statement — almost too ordinary to be a statement at all. But as a growing body of people want to negate the existence of individuals who don’t fall within their prescription of gender norms, it needs saying more than ever.
Tracks three and four are both built around an improvised track recorded live, and I only mention that because it’s so improbable for me, as someone who mostly makes tracks in the studio recorded in very little bits and assembled and mixed painstakingly later. Here the underlying recording is hi-hats played through my beloved Zen Delay unit, providing a constant wash of swoosh and tingle, alongside some quite sweet chords and melodic bits.”
Distant trees
“The improvised bedrock here is the cathedral-like ambiance generated by playing the Korg Modwave synthesizer through the Chase Bliss ‘Mood’ guitar pedal. My vocal performance here reverts to my spoken-word comfort zone; and after two short “verses’, there is then a list of things I like. Lists in songs are good, aren’t they? There’s a Wikipedia page which catalogues dozens of list songs.”
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