Sometimes a small moment will leave the darkest mark. With landtitles, those snippets get etched into my brain. Two recent releases, complete jazz box set on Home Normal and geographic beings, phosphorous mountains on Whitelabrecs, build intricate, fluid realms from these tiny sonic slivers. Old machines glean melodic detritus from the magic hour on the former, a restrained glitchmountain painted with resonant tones and sharp harmonics where the latter is spacious even when constrained. Even so, this music is gentle and shielding, like a soft chenille blanket as armor against the cold. It feels like there is history in each fragment, all of it interconnected and trying to tell a story.
complete jazz box set is available HERE and geographic beings, phosphorous mountains is available HERE. landtitles can be found on IG HERE.
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What are some of your earliest memories of sound and music? Was there a lot of music in the house growing up?
There wasn’t a lot of music in my house, really, growing up. Oldies station on Saturdays in the garage while my dad worked on cars was a constant. Also, lots of sanding and grinding metal. We had some Shell gas compilation tape called Solid Gold, I think. Which was just like 70s radio hits. Good stuff for a seven-year-old.
You’ve been working as landtitles since 2015, but you’ve been composing ambient works for quite a bit longer. What made you interested in ambient music specifically?
Coming mostly from the punk scene, I think I was really just looking for something new; most electronic for me at the time was too busy and rhythmic. So I naturally gravitated toward more ambient based sounds, Tim Heckers haunt me haunt me do it again I think was the first record I got into, but I have no idea how I even came across that.
So I want to talk about a couple of your recent records, starting with the wonderfully-named complete jazz box set. The title promises something this album deliberately isn’t, which is so great. I remember seeing the announcement for this, having familiarity with your work and, of course, Home Normal, and being quite perplexed before hearing it. I’m curious where the title actually came from, and how early you knew you wanted to sort of undercut expectations with it?
As I was working on titles, a lot of them were sort of tongue-in-cheek and/or whimsical. Trying to keep the titles light and spontaneous. Somehow complete jazz box set got into the mix, and after a few talks with Ian (Home Normal), he suggested that, and it just seemed to fit.
You worked within a set of limitations on this album by using old computers and hardware with outdated software. What made you decide to set those limitations? And how did it challenge you in unexpected ways?
Using some old software wasn’t really intended to be a limitation, but more of a way to explore new sounds and get out of the DAW a bit. There has been some renewed interest in old max/msp programs, and it has piqued my interest. The MacBook I used can’t connect to the internet, and there isn’t a soundcard, so all software and sample transfer was done with a USB drive, back and forth, so a bit tedious also; offline rendering of processes could take a day and then just be 60 seconds of silence. But I could also get some really great sounds I wouldn’t know how to achieve elsewhere. The magic of a headphone out jack!!
I appreciate the description of the record talking about how the various glitches and ‘half-hidden melodies’ are central to the emotional language here, and how those various imperfections make it feel more intimate. But when you’re writing and recording, and a piece of gear does something unexpected, how do you decide whether it’s a mistake to fix or a discovery to keep?
I think most of my process at this point isn’t just keeping mistakes, it’s just more about knowing which ones are the ones to keep. I think a lot of times I’ll just stick to the old adage “if it sounds good, it is good,” although sometimes I’m not so sure. Other times a mistake might be really good and not really work and could actually change the whole track. Which I guess is also a bit of the process as well.
By working with old gear, there’s always the possibility of something going haywire and losing something you’ve been writing or working on, or something kind of crapping out in the middle of recording. Is that part of the magic? Are there any things you’ve lost that you haven’t been able to recreate that you still think about?
Crashes and lost files do happen, but this is more when I’m creating sounds, not so much when composing tracks. So far I’ve been pretty lucky with not really losing any projects. I’m using a newer computer to arrange and mix (2013), ha!
Twenty different pieces is a lot of small environments to hold together as a single album. Did you know when you set out to make this record that it would be a lot of smaller tracks like this? And what was sequencing the record like? I’ve got to imagine that was a whole thing in and of itself!
I think pretty close to the beginning it felt like it was gonna be more shorter tracks. It was a lot of fun making this record; it came together pretty quick. I tried a couple longer pieces, but it didn’t feel right, and I was kinda thinking some sort of rap-inspired glitch mixtape, if you will, in the back of my mind. Sequencing was actually not so bad with this, oddly enough. I never really understood the importance of it (shout out to Ned Milligan, really put this into focus for me). Just kept moving around tracks till it felt right, though with 20 tracks maybe the sequencing felt a bit less important than an album with 8 songs; maybe I’m totally wrong on that.
Your process often starts from some simple acoustic or digital phrase that you then start looping, editing, resampling, manipulating, etc. At what point in the process does a specific phrase go from being just a fragment to an actual piece?
Usually my process is to put a bunch of these processes together in some sort of collage state, often too many, then start the process of deleting and moving things around, trying to find the sweet spot.
You also put out an album on Whitelabrecs recently, geographic beings, phosphorous mountains. First, what’s the story behind the name? It’s great.
Ah, thank you. A lot of my titles kinda come together from just thinking and walking around. Those were two ideas I had and thought they would work well together. I keep an ongoing list in my notes app. Then I can edit those or combine them to create something new.
With that one, you had over 40 initial sketches that you then edited down to the final 11 tracks. What was the process like? What tells you that one of those sketches belongs in the finished record versus staying just a sketch forever?
I will build up a master playlist in iTunes and just start making notes on things I like or don’t, then I will make a “seconds” playlist and put any rejects into those. At some point the list gets shorter, and then I will go through the seconds playlist, and usually there are some ideas or songs in there that might be worth developing further, and I will move them back to the master list. It’s really a lot of back and forth and editing.
That record came out of regular visits to a park near where you live in Victoria, and the field recordings and photographs taken there directly shaped the album. Does a place need to become that familiar to you before it can be material for creating something? Or can some place new work just as well?
I think for that record, it was a bit singular in trying to create an audio document of a place in recorded form. So I wanted to use this space alone. Also, I love natural spaces that exist inside of an urban area. So I wanted to try to tie the two ideas together. It’s probably a common idea for people living in urban environments, trying to connect more with nature. Threading those two dichotomies together.. I’m very lucky where I live; it doesn’t go unnoticed.
You initially planned to use wind instruments more prominently on this one, but then it drifted into something more repetition-based as you worked on it. When those kinds of things happen, when working on a project, do you tend to just embrace that drift and follow it, or do you ever find yourself fighting it?
Most of the sounds were still wind- or reed-based, and as I went, things started to develop; sounds started to get cut up and put into samplers, and I think that’s when new ideas and sounds started to emerge. With that though, it really seems like I was trying to hold onto the initial idea. I think that might happen a lot with my work, where I have an idea to start something with, but along the way I might regress to old techniques or ideas, so in the end I guess it becomes a balancing act.
What’s coming up next for landtitles?
Working on more than a few records, ha, two are close though to being done, one is a companion piece to geographic beings and the other is um something else, pretty different for me. And a few collaborations I’m so happy to be working on which I can’t really talk about yet.
And lastly, to close as always… What are some of your favourite sounds in the world?
The sound inside of a forest, where it’s not silent but it’s quiet. The ocean. I didn’t grow up near the ocean, but living on the coast is- it can be so soft and so wild and chaotic. Also, my wife and I befriended some crows this summer, so learning their clicking sounds and squawks 🙂 has been wonderful.
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
