Parallax
I’ve always wanted to make an ambient album. I’ve felt like I sat at the feet of artists like The Orb, Biosphere, Cinematic Orchestra etc….for years, and thoroughly enjoyed their masterclasses in minimalism and restraint, and how to be as economical as possible with as few elements, and I understood and loved the “less is more” approach.
Doing it however, proved more challenging than I thought it would be. It takes a huge amount of effort for me to keep things simple.
A typical Carbinax piece ends up as around 20 mixer tracks, but with the amount of resampling and bouncing that goes on, the tracks could have been 2x or 3x that amount prior to any consolidation. I would routinely get a bass part right, and then bounce it to audio as the synth was using too much CPU. I’d delete the synth and work with the audio, which was then chopped up every way it could be, and treated with saturation, EQ, filters, bounced again and again until it got to a place where that part felt complete.
One of the main things that typifies what I’ve made for the last 20 years, are the beats, and I had to strip those back to a very bare skeletal chassis, and this was the hardest thing of all.
One of my favourite artists is Henri Matisse. He could draw a perfect portrait from a very young age, but over the years, had learned to strip back all the detail until he was left with only the lines that were absolutely necessary for someone to know that what they were looking at, was a face.
It was more about the potency of what remained, than the abundance of everything else that was taken away.
I wanted to apply this approach, and understood that music is not just about the notes, but is also about the space in between the notes.
With melody, I’ve worked this way for years. With the main lead, I never wanted to play an overcomplicated ostentatious equivalent of a speed lead guitar solo. I always favoured the quiet sublime simplicity of a voice like Liz Frazer of The Cocteau Twins, to someone like Mariah carey and her “why sing 1 note when you can sing 53” approach. I’ve always preferred to place maybe 10 powerful emotive notes, rather than lose the melody in a flurry of unnecessaty disguise.
Parallax was an experiment. For years people had asked me if I would do something ambient, and it just never felt like the right time. I always had one or two slower tracks on an album, and tended to have one at the end of an album as a way of saying “oh, and I also do this”, but Parallax happened at the right time for me. It felt like it all came together, and I needed the catharsis. The meaning is basically “a different viewpoint”. It felt like a parallel path alongside what I normally do.
Listen To Parallax