Wild Light Decade #01: Aporias (Patreon)

Aporias. A song that held its own for a long time but in the end never escaped the cloud of ‘Kid A’ energy and found that 65 bite of urgency. It’s pretty good though.

It is possible that drawing any kind of line between Aporias and Sleepwalk City is a fabrication purely for the sake of ambient myth making. Hard to say. But regardless of how conscious or otherwise it was, with ten years of hindsight, it seems clear that Aporias was an important stepping-stone/prototype for the second half of Sleepwalk City. You can hear it in the beat programming of those Aporias rhythms, as well as in the relative space the programming overall allows when compared to songs like Crash Tactics or Go Complex from the previous album. Plus, it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Aporias soft sine wave keys and quirky major-minor shifts informed what eventually became Unmake the Wild Light.

You’d best get used to the recording studio quality of the live band as heard here btw. It was all captured in a small, eternally cold room in an old steel factory in industrial Sheffield. Down the road was Bramhall Lane football ground. Up the road, a pretty great falafel place. A few years previously, The Arctic Monkeys had recorded their first songs in a shed in the courtyard called 2fly (the same shed we made The Fall of Math and One Time For All Time). Meanwhile, somewhere along the corridor Bring Me the Horizon and While She Sleeps were busy becoming commercially successful and upstairs some Sheffield dubstep producers were probably smoking weed and definitely producing absolutely massive kick drums. Briefly, some kind of Scandinavian indie-folk project rehearsed next door. We were mainlining coffee, wearing each other’s black hoodies, and spending 4 or 5 long days a week tucked away in that room trying to figure out what it was we were doing.

Going through these archives, sharing these rough and raw demos (and there’ll be plenty that are a lot rougher and rawer than this), the plan is to show you the breath of experimenting, confusion and dead ends of our music. The scraps of songs that we picked apart to make the Frankenstein monsters that are the final tracks that made it onto the record, which by then were so carefully put together there was no clue that they were assemblages of other ideas at all. All of this was necessary to get to the end.

Another thing to note here at the beginning of the project. Some years later, after the success of No Man’s Sky, the team at Hello Games asked us to do another round of soundscapes for the game (they were eventually included in the 2016 ‘Pathfinder’ update). These extra soundscapes were made after our No Man’s Sky record had been released so don’t exist anywhere else properly recorded except within the game itself. We didn’t keep a clear record of what might have got thrown into the mix, but if you hear the odd melody or phrase that sounds familiar to you over the course of this project, then it is possible that you might have heard it before inside the game, as we did delve into some old material to pull out bits and pieces. We’ll let you know whenever we share something that we think might have been reappropriated for NMS. Aporias might be one of these tracks. We’re honestly not sure.

Here’s a picture from the Wild Light album sessions of Joe swearing at Simon’s guitar pedals. See ya next week!