Wild Light Decade #02: SQUARE SKY & Negative Empathy (Patreon)

SQUARE SKY is a very early sketch that, as far as hazy memory serves, didn’t make it very far along the album-writing process. You can tell that not a huge amount of development was done on it by the fact that a lot of the synth sounds seem a bit 'click-around-the-presets-until-something-sounds-ok', rather than the carefully-crafted lasers of beautifully sculpted noise that we’d normally be haphazardly building as we wrote.

Nowadays, and in no small part due to everything we learned from Wild Light, the sound design of the various song elements is just as important to the song as any melodic content. But SQUARE SKY reveals a time before we’d properly embraced this. The songwriting here, such as it is, focuses entirely on how patterns of melodies and chord progressions get tangled up and feed off each other. The sounds could really be more or less anything at this point.

The curious bass ascend you hear for the first time at 00:14 seconds ends on a high note, which is not the root note. This makes everything feel somehow off-kilter in a way somebody who knew more music theory would probably be able to explain. It feels wrong in a way that is totally permissible, cos who cares about rules in music, but only works if you feel like the song knows it is ‘wrong’ and so is doing it deliberately. Which doesn’t feel like the case here.

The weirdly timed bass synth notes that come in at 00:30 is pretty skronky though, huh. Nice. And when the beats come in you can hear the tell-tale swing which means that Paul must have gotten hold of his Maschine by this point and was physically unable to stop adding 54%-56% swing to everything he programmed on there.

All in all, there's some promise here but not really that much. Catchy, but doesn’t really know what it wants to do with itself. Rightly consigned to the memory hole. UNTIL NOW. Where it is shoved under a spotlight and coldly appraised by us, the expert songwriters of 2023, who definitely now know what we’re doing.

Here’s a photo of Joe and Dave Sanderson. Joe:

“This is producer extraordinaire Dave Sanderson teaching me to play the guitar better. Dave worked on Exploding, Silent Running, Wild Light, No Man’s Sky and replicr, 2019. Looking back, I realise he has to explain how to play the guitar better a lot.”

NEGATIVE EMPATHY

[NOTE: We wrote this post before realising you could only neatly embed one audio track per Patreon post. But there's a second track this week, 'Negative Empathy', which you can still find attached at the bottom of the post as an mp3.]

Here’s another sketch that totally undermines what we just so confidently explained about SQUARE SKY's lack of sound design, since Negative Empathy appears to be full of ‘custom’ sounds, albeit not particularly outstanding ones.

This is evidently the result of some weird sampling and loops, thrown under some obscenely heavy compression.

It’s also strangely… positive? Seems like it is from the same era of some of the tracks off of our Heavy Sky e.p.

The guitar work is cool, angular and, er… kind of utilitarian? It remains to be seen how well the evolution of our guitar tactics will be revealed over the course of this project, but it took us a lot of time and effort to push them somewhere new. Here it seems like, along with the analog roughness of all the samples and synths, what we were maybe looking for was a way to make dance music (or at least danceable-to music) while sounding like a live band.

It’s a shame it didn’t really go anywhere. With some richer production and a bit of focus it could have been a contender.

That’s it. See ya next week, friends!