Your music conjures such a sense of place.
It's important for me to have the surroundings in the sound somehow.
It seems like you draw a lot of inspiration from settings and try to bring that into your music. I'm thinking specifically of “The Bell Tower,” and how that feels like a little vignette. I know you were inspired by holy sites for previous albums. It’s a recurrent theme in your work.
It is. It's not how I want every piece of music, or my work, to become, but it's happened. When I love art and music, it's when I feel it's completely taken me over; that “zoom-out” feeling. I want to create a spacious depth in sound because that's what gives me that perspective, when that dimension is there.
It's not like, “I need inspiration. I'm going to go to some burial mounds and write about them.” It's more that you get transported by the sense of being immersed in a place.
Yeah, exactly.
You have a unique combination of analog and digital elements in your recordings and compositions.
It's not that planned, any of the instruments. It's what sounded good at the time. In my childhood, I had these wrecked up pianos that I tried to tune myself. But coming into these Conservatory spaces where there are these grand pianos everywhere, I couldn't help myself but try and learn to play piano. But then I also wanted to [layer] the melodies so it didn't sound completely like a piano. I got into how to create overtones in each note from the piano and layer them with different types of instruments to create these overtones that were recognizable for the ear as a string, but that also sometimes bended into a sound that became a little bit unfamiliar. That balance has always been a big joy for me to find. The [Boss] DD-7 [Digital Delay] has this Reverse delay on it. If you have it on a classical guitar with the DI or with the electrical input, and have the DD-7 just tweaked a little bit so it's mostly the guitar that comes through – together with the piano – there was something that happened up in the overtones that made these small bends. It gave me so much inspiration to write melodies like that for the right hand, for the guitar. Then I'm writing the bass lines and the bass parts and rolls for my left hand and layering it like that so that some melodies were for the guitar and some of the melodies were for the bass. But they're all composed on piano, and I pulled out the pianos to give space for these instruments. That layering was central. The sound was magic for me, and I just had to write more and more pieces so I could experience those sounds from different intervals. That was the foundation of the instrumentation for me. I got into experimentation with my voice, and I composed for the drums. I wanted these big rock pieces to come in, so it had a natural movement into a more prog rock vibe.
You think so much about where things are going to sit – overtones and undertones and layering. What is your approach to mixing?
