Low Poly - Candlelight EP
Dome of Doom Records
April 26th, 2024
Digital EP

Candlelight is a continuation of the themes of my first EP Contact Sparks & my 2024 ID mixtape "I need a fire." While "I need a fire." has more narrative elements & spends more time answering the interpersonal questions I was dealing with while writing Contact Sparks, "Candlelight" is a cheeky & warm re-synthesis of "I need a fire." that eschews large-scale narrative & concepts in favor of focused songwriting & distilled ideas. For me, 2023 was specifically about making beats as opposed to writing songs, which is my ethos with a lot of these tunes: "How do I express human experiences as directly as possible?" I spent a lot of time thinking about how I write music, & honed in on the fundamentals. Sonically, I focused on big reese basses, frantic drums, catchy vocals, harmonic distortions & a layer of boom-bap dust to build the foundation. There's plenty of detail & nuance, but none of that is getting in the way of the jungle, dubstep or drum & bass cores.

A lot of this EP came together inside-the-box with Ableton, which is how I've always worked. As an ethos "low poly" to me has always meant doing the most with the least. A lot of these songs wouldn't be here without my Arturia MicroFreak, most of the stuttery melodics & low end freak-outs trace directly back to that synth. There's also a lot of granular reprocessing of sounds & delay-based synthesis, which is where a lot of the warbly high-end synth work gets its character from.

I mixed everything myself with final masters being done by Bob Macc. I made an effort to lay out a lot of the sound palette in advance. I've been doing sound design sessions every few weeks & spending more time building recurring & versatile instruments & effect racks in Ableton.

In the past I've cited mainly IDM artists like Flying Lotus as key touchstones, but these tunes probably owe more to LuckyMe old guard like Hudson Mohawke & Cashmere Cat, with equal parts to their earlier projects & the radio hits they later produced. I'm fairly certain I think about Glasgow the same way a lot of my bass music peers think about London. I’m heavily inspired by artists from the UK like Alix Perez & the 1985 label roster. I love the way 100 gecs writes songs because they almost feel like short vignettes, everything they do has such a strong sense of atmosphere. I really wanted to incorporate that kind of writing style in this project. Finally I'd be remiss if I didn't mention other Dome of Doom projects like Bleep Bloop's ‘One Liners’ & Saka's ‘Penumbra’ EP as music that is a core inspiration to what I do.

I'm especially excited about the visual aesthetic of this project and era. My friend Chris Alden (@cosmicosmo) & I drove two hours into the Mojave desert to shoot a ton of photo & video content at a wind farm nestled between some mountains. The muted browns & blues, sun peeking through the grass, clouds, mountains, & monolithic turbines pressed against the sky in the landscape of the desert feels very visually congruent to the way this music sounds to me.

EP Tracklist:
Automatic
The Noise
L-Gauge
The Phosphorus Scene
The Money Song

Tour Dates:
Lightning In A Bottle Festival - May 22-27th