Introduction:
Hello, and welcome to Sekai Sessions. This is your host Resonata, and this is the first in a new series from the Sekai family where we interview your favourite electronic music artists and indie artists, discussing their tracks and breaking down everything from the emotions behind the songs to the production technique.
I’m very excited to bring this new series in and introduce you to our first guest: Aerocity.
Aerocity: Hey, this is Reece, I go by Aerocity. I like blending real world instruments with, sort of a heavy electronic music influence. I grew up playing piano, guitar and violin mostly so I’m trying to find a place for those wherever I can.
As far as the piano goes I actually stumbled across this sampling company called Spitfire a while back, and they’ve got this really cool section with a bunch of really, very unique instruments called Labs, and, they’re like 3 bucks a piece and it all goes to UNICEF I believe. But they’ve got a particular Kontakt library for piano called “The Spitfire Soft Piano”, and I thought $3 for a library on Kontakt it’s, an absolute steal, and, I think that was the only piano sound I actually used on Escapism.
It was played live though MIDI and I recorded on Ableton but I was trigerring thos Spitfire samples, and it’s got just this gorgeous, really detailed real world sound. And that’s something that I struggled for a long time to find with sampled pianos, was, a really organic, real…honest sound to it. And that’s something I love about Spitfire, they kept all that noise in, and it’s a very full-bodied, full of character piano instrument.
I think the drums were all hand-placed from the Native Instruments Battery Glitch Kit. It’s got a really unique sound to it, lot of really cool micro-samples, and, I’d spent a couple of months trying to figure out how I could place these in songs and I really enjoyed it. It’s really sporadic and random and, it kind of provides a cool, like, emotional contrast to the soft undertones of the rest of the instrumental.
I’ve got to mention I did use a snare from the Steelan sample pack that is just a gorgeous snare sound, hugely tense, and you know like I mentioned, the emotional contrast, I felt like the tension with that snare along with the sporadic, sort of randomly placed glitch samples from Battery really enhanced that because by itself, the “Love Lost” instrumental, the drums, is a very calm, slow, just kind of boring song, and what I was feeling at the time was that heavy emotional contrast and I wanted to kinda empathyze that, and the drums were where I found that.
As far as the outro goes, I innitialy layed down a piano line with a heavy delay, and it was just kind of improvised like most of the rest of the song, that’s pretty much how everything I write comes together, just pure improvisation and fitting little bits and pieces together one at a time. And then from that I took little bits of the guitar and some of the ambient sense and just chopped them up and you know, reversed them and re-arranged them into little bit and pieces, and tried from there to piece together a new melody that would kind of bring the song to a close.
Sekai – Sekai Selects – Resonata – Aerocity