Before The Flood
Before The Flood
Serialising the album The Drunken Fisherman (And Other Stories) by Schall und Stille (@stephan): The debut release inspired by early childhood memories, pirate radio broadcasts, war and climate change among other things. It’s a sonic journey between ambient, electronica, triphop, wave and pop; between Eno, Kraftwerk and Massive Attack. Extended instrumental pieces alternate with atmospheric pop songs, layered voices and lush sonic landscapes, sometimes sublime, sometimes sombre.
Track 3/7: Before The Flood
After having finished most of the other tracks, I felt that although I very much liked the new material, I really wanted to do something less dark, less angst-laden, less mature and more… well, carefree and childlike.
Which is quite an endeavour, because my childhood wasn’t exactly carefree, mainly due to the fact that I was bullied quite often at school.
But then I thought, hey, what if I try to let my mind travel back to a time before all that shit began, before I was enrolled in school? And I actually managed to conjure up three different instances of childhood wonder that predated school:
Part 1, “Romanesque Columns” was inspired by the trips my father used to take me on. My father was a restorer, and his work often brought him to ancient churches. Sometimes he would take me with him inside those old walls, and I can vividly remember the feeling.
Part 2, “Ariadne” is based on a memory of my parents and their friends taking me along on a picknick on a clearing in some forest. I must have been 4 or 5 and my parents’ friends had a huge St. Bernard dog named “Ariadne” who I was very fond of. The instrumental piece is basically that memory put to sound – the crickets, the sunlight, and that big dog that was my friend majestically roaming through the undergrowth.
Part 3, “Rain” is a memento of the rain in my home village, which was halfway between the big city and (to me, then, seemingly) endless meadows, woods and fields. How the water gathers in puddles, how it felt and how it smelled. I remember one particular downpour of rain which must have happened a few days or weeks before me starting school – and that’s what gave the whole song its title.
In keeping with my desire to do something less controlled, I decided to try improvise most of the tracks in one take. Overdubs would be ok, but no redos. There’s only one melodic structure consciously constructed on these tracks: The last part of “Ariadne”, which is a reprise (or rather: an anticipation) of the Chorus of “Ground Truth”.
The improvising was easy and came quite naturally to me.
The real work here was the sound design. All sounds on “Before The Flood” were specifically programmed for this purpose.
“Romanesque Columns” is mainly my try of a voice-like FM patch on the Opsix, with some Waldorf Blofeld thrown in for good measure. “Ariadne” heavily features a Yamaha TG77 providing my idea of crickets, shimmering summer light, undergrowth and a big dog, and “Rain” has me going crazy on the custom operator mode of the Opsix with lots of cyclic operator feedback and lots of delay.
All three parts have one common element: A bright, bell-like sound which I programmed on the minilogue xd, and which I thought to represent the little child wandering through these scenarios.
Support Schall und Stille
All proceeds from this album go to “Tara Tierhilfe e.V.“, an animal sanctuary near Cologne, Germany, which is home to more than 70 horses, goats, sheep, donkeys and pigs.
