This was probably the fastest track I ever wrote and finished.
My aim was to create something easy to listen to but which still had a hard hitting emotional texture. From an initially soft, ethereal timbre, I wanted to build to an explosion at the end perfectly capturing my summer that year. The track ebbing and flowing from nothing to everything to fading away peacefully at the end.
An autobiographical track that tells of one summer in Brighton
I was actually in two minds as to whether to put this out publicly. To me, touching Bjork’s music is as sacrilegious as messing with tracks from artists like Burial, untouchable. However, after so many style changes and headaches I had to draw a line under the track else I endlessly rewrote again and again, thus pretty much forcing me to put it out.
My initial inspiration for the track was born when for some reason I watched a bunch of documentaries set around the 16th Century which all heavily featured choirs in their soundtrack. With this in mind, the track originally had many more choral elements than can be found in the final version and the track as a whole was much more laid back, never really flying off the handle.
However, as I was mixing, I began stripping the choir out of the verses and choruses and actually preferred the space it created. With all this new space, I instead started heading in a new direction, adding some dark, heavily distorted synths. Eventually, it must be said, I then toned this down to create a hybrid of both the laid back and synth heavy elements as this tied in more closely with the theme of the track I had once I started to work in the Bjork vocals.
Vocally, I did not actually intend to use Bjork at all when the track was first formulating. As with all my reworks, everything except the vocals is entirely my own creation and it was only when I came to think about what vocals I might put on top that I thought of the possibility of Bjork’s voice. Imagine my delight when one of my favourite songs of hers had an a cappella online. I honestly could not think of any other vocals that would have worked in the way I intended. After a very long time changing pitch and timings the vocals fit perfectly into the track and I started to build what I already had around them.
The only really discernible percussion elements I used are the sole finger snaps and an 808 kick playing on the offbeat throughout the chorus. Everything else was designed from synths or heartbeats or just random sounds I found and then manipulated heavily. When the style shifts around the 1:50 mark I really wanted to transform the track into a warped and sinister world, which I tried to capture through not easily placed sound design.
I hope I didn’t do Bjork a disservice, as I am truly in awe of her!
The vocal style was the most important thing that I took from this track. This was one of the first times I worked with entirely sampled vocals for the main vocals and went on to shape how I use vocals to this day.
Repetition in vocals is something I have always loved. Not just in terms of melody, but in terms of exactly repeating a phrase over and over again. As in normal speech, repeating the same phrase changes its meaning drastically over time into something alien to its intended meaning. In this case the phrase is ‘You and Me’ which is said again, and again, and again, and again.
This track was very important in the evolution of the JKS? sound. After moving through many genres, this was the first time I felt as though I was heading towards something I could relate to on an artistic level. I’ve always liked subtleness, melancholy and the understated in music and this was the first time I felt I was positively approaching it.
I came across the original track one night and instantly knew I had to do something with it. In the end I used the original as more of an inspiration than actual musical foundation to work with and the only remaining aspect of the original is the two note movement found in the verse’s bass.
As a homage to my older work that led me to this new style, I incorporated some vocals I was working on years before ‘What’s left if you take my heart away?’ that can be heard at 0:31 for the first time.
I went through a period in my first year of Uni when I really got into dub and 140bpm type of stuff. I dabbled with loads and loads of tracks as an exercise in just trying to get my production up on this style.
Originally, the track sounded completely different to this and was much more complex. I ended up using this track to test myself in seeing if I could do a track that was quite stripped down and not having too much going on, which is something I tend to do a lot.
The vocals, in a similar way to ‘You and Me’ repeat the phrase ‘There is only one for me’ loads of times, which is something that seems to be a recurring theme in my tracks. My aim was to try and make the vocals sound more melancholic as opposed to the ‘sexy’ nature of what they actually say…
I was having a quiet few days and was looking for some a capellas to inspire me and, in my hours of searching, stumbled across a remix competition. I listened to the original track and thought it was great but the vocals were what really captured me. The scandinavian accent, the vocal range and lyrical content captivated me instantly and I knew I had to do something with it.
The writing process was very fast as it was such an amazing vocal to work with and the backing of which I completely rewrote seemingly fell into place under the vocal line that I quite heavily pitched and edited.
I must say, the build from the middle to the end is one of my favourite things I have done for a while but sadly might be overlooked if just dabbling through the start of tracks.
The track and subsequent ending came to mean a great deal to me at the time and still to this day and will always be a profound expression of my emotions at the time.