♫ dep.fm: Danny Peck is dep

NEW Asheville underground music collective Swamping has released its first compilation & I have a new song on it.

The song is actually a completely re-engineered and re-imagined version of an old favorite of mine from Nothing to Undo : Nothing to Redo (here’s a link to that album) called SOS. Hats off to Swamping for putting the compilation together. Go check it out!

“SWAMPING is conceived of by Christian Church and Spooky Bubble of Alligator Indian, SWAMPING seeks to unite Asheville’s underground musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, and designers in the hopes of creating a stronger and more vibrant scene and community in Western North Carolina.”

My favorite song of 2011 was, for sure, Bon Iver’s Perth from his 2011 self-titled release. It’s a beautiful piece. I decided it would be a fun experiment to, for the New Year, deconstruct the song and rebuild it for piano and electronica.

I recorded the percussive elements by tapping on various parts of the piano and then cut those in to individual drum samples. Then I sequenced the patterns in a tracker called Renoise. After just listening back and forth between the album track and my version to get the structure of the song duplicated, I continued on with various synthesized layers to produce some texture and atmosphere.

Finally, I started working on the piano part. It’s worth mentioning that I’m not a pianist, but play well enough to be able to play songs I like and help me write my own new songs.

Once I had the piano part down, my brother (@revpictures) came over with the Canon 7D to help me video the song. I used a Tascam DP-008 digital 8-track to record the piano from two condenser mics located behind the piano, and then a Shure sm58 for the vocals. I had the laptop handy to play the pre-sequenced beats. Afterwards, I combined and mixed the recorded parts in Wavelab and final mixed them back in Renoise.

I edited the video footage together in iMovie and then sent back to my brother for final post processing. The project took around a week of sequencing, 3 days on the piano to get that part ready, then a day of shooting, editing, and final mixing.

You can download the mp3 here (You may have to right-click, and Save As).

Writer, reader, streetstyle photographer in Asheville, NC. A little bit obsessed with fitness (running, swimming, cycling, weight training); equally obsessed with cake-baking (sour cream apple is the current fave). Arts/music writer by profession, novelist in my spare time. Live music attendee, compulsive vacation planner, biscuit-provider to a border
collie mutt.

How many hours I spend listening to music is hard to say. Several. One of the cool parts of my job is that publicists email me downloads of new music from lesser-known bands, so I am constantly checking out new songs and videos. Because I do the bulk of my listening at work, I’ll check out some pretty experimental stuff that I might not want to listen to on a long car trip or while walking to work. I also listen to music while I’m running (a driving beat is important), when I’m writing (it has to tap emotion) and when I’m making breakfast on a Sunday morning (Bossa Nova, California country rock, neo-soul…)

I love how music evokes not just an emotional state, but a sense of place within the landscape of one’s own psyche. Music can make us feel better when we’re sad, but it can also take us back to an old pain (useful for working on prose). It can make us feel cooler than we really are (or possibly put us in touch with our cool potential).

I’m really intrigued by the way a song can tie us to a point in time. Like, every time I hear “Welcome to the Jungle,” it’s 1988 and I’m riding the bus to Syracuse to meet this guy who my parents definitely would not have liked. (Okay, I just looked up the video on YouTube
and… gah. I didn’t even like metal and *still* that song gets me.) Or “Summertime Rolls” by Jane’s Addicion. There’s a whole misspent summer tangled up in that song. To hear that song brings back so many tiny details. Colors, scents, sounds. And it’s not just rock/pop music. Ray Lynch’s “Deep Breakfast” does that, too. I used to feel embarrassed to like that album until I realized it was early electro-pop.

Want to be a part of dep’s people? Just email me to get started.

So I’m Andy Gowland, I’m a middle-aged, happily married, architectural technician living near Glastonbury in the UK. People pay me to design buildings, but I also dabble in graphic design, 3d modelling/rendering and digital art. I also consider myself an electronic musician, although I’ve had to put my studio in boxes so I can self-build an extension to my house. You can check out my deviantArt page and my soundcloud here or last.fm.

At the moment probably about eight hours of music a day, I’m doing a lot of jack hammering, breaking up concrete and the only thing that breaks the tedium of that is having headphones on under my ear defenders. Currently I have a playlist on my phone consisting of some Northcape tracks (well worth a listen, free downloads here) Dep’s Start Loving the Robots (I like the irony of listening to ‘I will not ever make a sound’ whilst jack hammering) a Hidden orchestra mix tape, Manuel Gottschings E2-E4, Younger brother – Vaccine and Array Volume 1.

I love that music can take me out of myself, it can enhance or change my mood. I love that I can make sounds and music that I find pleasing. I love listening to new music and find sites like the mahogany blog and last.fm invaluable for that (although last.fm is annoying me by only allowing subscribers to stream using their android app… curse you last.fm!!)

Aspire (work in progress) by Dawn of Reality