Sculpture Projects
Restless EP, track by track
There’s already a general interview with Sculpture Projects on this site, but here we sat down with artist/producer David Gauntlett to go through the Restless EP, track by track.
A kind of beginning
“This started life being built around extracts from an emotional interview with a woman about a relationship – it was Björk, in fact, but I’m not saying this is any kind of Björk track, and it wasn’t meant to be, I just liked what she was saying and how she said it.
This was basically the first full proper track I ever made, produced mainly between March and May 2020. Some kind of serendipity or happy accidents from the first part of the Covid lockdown meant that I got some really good-sounding drums and drum programming. Two years later, I don’t really know how I did it. By the later tracks, October and Proximity effect, I was choosing to have less ‘obvious’ drums, and less drums in general, but you can’t really fault the drums on this.
I returned to it in May 2022 and put in a new vocal of my own. I’d got the rights to the recording of the Björk interview but it didn’t seem quite ethical to use her voice on a track without her actual consent, so I took the opportunity to make it more my own.
It includes various sound effects including a good roll of thunder, an announcement of a train heading for New York — where else — as well as other train noises.
I didn’t necessarily want this EP to be chronological – in the order I produced them, I mean – but this seemed like a good opener.”
Frozen Berlin
“Later in 2020 I made some other things, but they weren’t necessarily very good. Then between December 2020 and July 2021 I made Frozen Berlin. This one seems the most musical and beautiful, and I had started to make intelligent choices, like it’s all in D minor and has more conscious separation of sounds across the spectrum, including a nicely defined bass.
I solved the problem of wanting meaningful words on the track, without having me singing, by generating speech using an online text-to-speech tool. I like to think that it has humanity because of the words, even though it’s a kind of robot.
Frozen Berlin also includes a lot of field recordings from Berlin including the U-Bahn, and ice in the Spree river, thanks to the kind users of Freesound.org, an online repository of sounds.”
Proximity effect
“This is the most recent track, made between December 2021 and March 2022, another example of throwing in most of the kitchen sink and being deliberately relentless, combined with some anxious thoughts and questions, slightly but not entirely resolved.
By this point I’m using more music hardware, including physical effects boxes – the Erica Synths Zen Delay is making a lot of the whooshy and distorted sounds here – and the Roland TR-8S drum machine, which here and on October is making interesting hi-hat and clap patterns.
It’s in A minor and 129 bpm, because I liked Emika’s relentless remix of Tympanum by Robert Ames, and when I was reading about that track some website told me that it was in A minor and 129 bpm, and I don’t normally see that kind of information and I am sort of guessing. But then, having got a clear pointer, my next track was in A minor and 129 bpm.
Remarkably — only because I am terrible at throwing things away — I realized that this 5-minute track had an unnecessarily drawn-out beginning, and chopped it off just days before release, leaving us with a 3-and-a-half minute track that hopefully doesn’t outstay its welcome.”
October
“Before that one, in August and September 2021, I had started to make this rather autumnal track, and then in October 2021 my dad suddenly died, and I associate these sounds with walking up the lane near my parents’ house and reviewing my music whilst also feeling all the sadness.
In my speech at his funeral, I recalled how he had told me, when I was about maybe 12, that he didn’t really like organized religion, but that you could feel God, or something like that, standing under a tree. And because of that, I said, I think that’s why I like the idea of God — if there is anything like God — not as an old bloke with a beard, but as a kind of warm ambient hum, like a mist, or something in the trees. So there’s a reference to a hum or a mist or something in the trees, in here.
And this was the point at which I decided that life’s too short not to use my own voice in my tracks, even though nobody wants to hear me singing, but I can speak. So then we ended up with my voice in this one, and in Proximity effect which came after, and then added into A kind of beginning, so then you can’t get away from me, for better or worse.
Munich-based ambient artist Panic Girl was very nice and said, ‘I love how the voice guides the listener through the tracks’, and I hadn’t thought of it like that, like I’m guiding you through the experience, but I’m happy if it works like that. I’m self-conscious that almost nobody has speaking, rather than singing, over their music — nobody does that, and there’s probably a reason why nobody does that. But for some reason I think it kinda works. I’m happy to be different, as long as it’s not just, you know, terrible.”
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