Sunshine and Wind

I’ve been wanting to make a record like this for a long time.

I’ve been working on writing and composing in the ambient space for a few years now, with mixed results. Listening back on the La Sudar stuff I’ve put out over the years in anticipation of this new record, I’ve found some of it fun, some of it interesting, some of it bloated, and some of it unlistenable. It’s been educational. When working on a piece, the urge to tinker, to add, to dress up the music can be overwhelming. But when I’m able to let that go, and get out of the way of the music, it can lead to some spectacular results.

The best thing, however, about getting into ambient music, and starting to think about what I might want my ambient music to sound like, was being able to browse active ambient, drone, and experimental artists releasing music around the world right now on sites like Bandcamp. Bandcamp makes finding new sounds really easy through its tags; it has expected ones like ‘drone’ and ‘ambient’ but also more intriguing ones like ‘plant music’ and ‘musique concrete’ that allowed me to scratch very specific itches I hadn’t been aware of.

While I’d always loved jammy, spacy music (bands like Pink Floyd, Spiritualized, The Velvet Underground, and Phish have all been favorites since college or before) I didn’t start specifically seeking out ambient music until I bought a synth back in 2015 or so and started to become intrigued by the idea of writing in that space. The first stuff to really blow me away was a series of pieces called The Disintegration Loops by William Basinski. I found it transcendent in a literal way, almost more of a painting than music, a true four dimensional work of art. It made me want to put out a true looping project one day, but I could never seem to find the right music to loop.

Then one day a few months ago, I was listening to an LP of Debussy Preludes (Books I and II) when it began to skip. A lightbulb went off in my head. I grabbed my phone and held it up to the speaker and hit record. When it had cycled a few times I hit stop. The audio file I’d captured was maybe three seconds of actual music, and the sound of the skip. But I slowed it down, sped it up, reversed it, reverbed it, distorted it, stretched it and turned it inside out, and before I knew it I had more loops than I knew what to do with. I’m still working on it. There will probably be a Volume 2, unless I get sidetracked by this new snippet I have from when my Chopin record skipped last week.

So this was a fun record to make. I hope you enjoy listening to it. I’d been wanting to do a homage to Basinski’s loops for years, so this feels like an actual accomplishment. It releases on Bandcamp Tuesday June 22, just in time for your Summer vibes. If you want to know more about it just hit me up at info@sunshineandwind.com.