#36 Feat. New Releases in Bass / Club

Basic Shapes are sound design studies where I use Serum - a software wavetable synthesizer - as the sole source for all the audio elements of this EP. The tracks are constructed with a minimal number of the synth instances, aiming to achieve maximum efficiency with the fewest elements. While the audio possibilities in the digital realm seem endless to the modern producer, this set of rules provided me with a restrictive yet creative framework that was fun and oddly liberating to work within. Created and released in 2014 by Xfer, Serum has retrospectively shaped the sound of a decade, offering users unprecedented visual feedback on complex synthesis and wavetable manipulations. Its success resides probably in its rather simple and intuitive interface to the point it has elevated the overall understanding of audio synthesis for a whole generation of artists and became the new industry standard for the following contenders. In unintentionally celebrating 10 years of a great design that has reached the masses, here is my contribution: Basic Shapes. —TÉNÈBRE

Tenebre

#46 Feat. New Releases in Bass / Club

This project originated after discovering stacks of old family photographs, loosely bagged and fused together in the damp and soggy shed that once stood in my maternal grandparents back yard in the peak district. Many of the images were inadvertently stripped, through the long process of soaking and separating them from their albums and wallets; those that didnt completely perish (and many that did) took on abstract new shapes unrelated to those exposed onto the original film. These images (and the tracks they accompany) have since taken on a greater weight and meaning to me in their embodiment of times, places and faces no longer around. They represent cloudy memories, branches of a family tree cut down and consigned to the past. —Earl Grey

Earl Grey, Aroma Nice